You wander seeking

new corners of the world and,

that soul of yours that you want

to deflower.

But your feet come to know

streets,

Your hands learn to dance

to the song

of your voice

stumbling over tongues

you don’t speak.

You make friends out

of thin air, and

devour yourself with them;

devour

the strangeness

of the stranger you are

for a minute, until

you unravel all your secrets.

Everything on display,

you grow old at a different café

everyday.

Slowly you unmask

your foreign self, and

feel the universal sun

seep

into your skin.

You inspect your map

and find that

you have left a trail

of homes

everywhere.

You wander seeking

new corners of the world

in you,

tracing changes

with a restless finger.

—

Ujwalla Bhandari, aged 21¾, is currently a postgraduate student of psychology at Delhi University, and has been long afflicted with a writing habit. She has loved to write for as long as she can remember, and has several journals that are stashed at the back of her closet. She was drawn to psychology as a place to begin addressing the endless questions in her own mind, and about the minds of others – so that she may start to better understand a sense of being. Both these loves for her – psychology and writing – intertwine.

She also wants to travel the world, to see the beauty in all of it. Her roots are in Delhi, where she was born and raised. Though she has lived in the same house forever, she has a wandering spirit, and dreams of being a writer-psychologist-gypsy some day.