Absent People, Absent Places: Bombay, breath, and the beautiful burden of being present

Some books arrive quietly.

Others arrive like Bombay in the monsoon — sudden, cinematic, rain-slicked with memory and movement.

Saranya Subramanian’sAbsent People, Absent Placesfeels like the latter: a poetry collection that unfolds like an indie film set on the restless streets of Mumbai, edited with lyrical restraint yet pulsing with generational urgency.

Structured in three movements — absence, fighting absence, finding presence, and finally presence — the collection charts a journey that feels both psychological and geographical.

The early poems circle around the idea of being an “absent person,” a phrase that becomes diagnosis and metaphor, describing the strange sensation of inhabiting life yet standing slightly outside it.

Absence, in Subramanian’s world, is not merely melancholy.

It is displacement.

Her poems wander between Bombay,Delhi, San Francisco, Zurich, tracing the itineraries of a generation raised to believe the world was open to them, only to discover that belonging — like poetry — must be assembled slowly.

Yet despite its global sweep, the emotional anchor of this book is unmistakably Bombay.

Not the Bombay of nostalgia, but the Bombay of observation.

In poems like Prabhadevi Before Dawn, the city wakes in small, vivid gestures: milk shops unlocking, watchmen shifting in their chairs, stray dogs stretching into the humid morning.

Fittingly, Subramanian is the founder ofThe Bombay Poetry Crawl, an initiative that invites readers to walk the city through verse — transforming pavements into poems and neighbourhoods into narratives.

Reading her work feels exactly like that: a wandering, watchful walk through streets where language and life keep colliding.

Yet what moved me most while reading this book was something unexpectedly personal.

I am fifty-three.

Saranya Subramanian belongs to a much younger generation.

And yet, again and again while reading these poems, I found myself asking: how are we thinking the same thoughts?

The answer, perhaps, lies in inheritance.

Both of us were shaped — directly or indirectly — by an India that believed deeply in education, curiosity, and intellectual citizenship.

The India imagined by Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi, nurtured by minds like Rabindranath Tagore in Bengal, Savitribai Phule in Maharashtra, and Dr BR Ambedkar, whose fierce belief in knowledge as liberation reshaped the moral architecture of the republic.

There was also the cultural imagination of Pupul Jayakar, the poetic diplomacy of Sarojini Naidu, and the public service vision of Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, who helped build institutions like the All India Institute of Medical Sciences.

These were Indians who belonged to the world even when their bodies remained rooted here.

For generations that followed, education was not merely aspiration.

It was identity.

Subramanian’s poems carry that inheritance effortlessly.

They move between Tamil, Hindi, Urdu and English, between bhakti echoes and urban irony, between family memory and political unease.In one poem, her grandfather teaches her Tamil; language becomes lineage — a fragile bridge between past and present.

Elsewhere, in Overheard in Modi’s India, everyday conversation becomes a quiet lens through which nationalism, media, and memory intersect.

Yet Subramanian resists slogan and sermon.

She prefers observation.

And observation, in poetry, is often the most radical act of all.

What ultimately lingers after readingAbsent People, Absent Placesis not resolution but rhythm.

Presence, here, is not triumph.

It is calibration — the quiet moment when the mind slows long enough to notice light on a window, a temple bell in traffic, the sudden kindness of morning.

By the final poems, absence has not vanished.

It has simply learned how to breathe.

If Bombay is the book’s beating heart and the world its widening horizon, then Saranya Subramanian stands gracefully between the two — listening, learning, translating.

And when she writes, the city seems to pause for a moment and listen back.

The absent person has not disappeared.

She has simply stepped into the light.