Moon at Half Past Noon

This poem chronicles the journey of a woman who transforms from a victim of dowry-based violence into an architect of her own destiny within the urban landscape of Sangam Vihar. It uses her personal resurrection as a metaphor for the broader socio-economic shifts in India between 1990-2010. The “new sky” she builds under represents not just personal freedom, but also the nation’s contested transition into a liberalized era—a period of immense opportunity that nonetheless unfolded against a persistent backdrop of deep-seated patriarchy, inequality, and the gritty struggle for legitimacy on the urban periphery.

The smell of kerosene used to be a prayer,
A bitter scent hanging in the air.
A bed of coals, an intended pyre,
To extinguish a daughter’s unwanted fire.
They called it a kitchen accident, a tragic fate,
But I knew the price they’d set for my mate.
I left that silence, that gilded cage,
For the roaring dust of a Delhi stage.

And I built a life from the rubble and the stone,
Where the wild ridge grass had wildly grown.
With my own two hands, I mixed the cement,
Paying a different kind of rent.
Not of dowry gold, but of sweat and fear,
To claim a new kind of atmosphere.
Under the same sun, a different sky,
Where a woman like me wouldn’t have to die.

The city was changing, I heard on the radio,
A new kind of magic, a vibrant, bold glow.
“Open for business,” the headlines would scream,
While I clung to the side of a water tanker’s dream.
My neighbor, Farida, a widow like me,
Had a heart as vast as the Qutub’s sea.
We bought a sewing machine on a shaky loan,
Our fingers flying, making hopes we'd own.

Then the men came with a wire, not a katia thief,
A legal meter, spelling my relief.
I signed the paper with a trembling hand,
A part of the system, making my stand.
I voted that year, the ink a stain,
More beautiful than any bridal chain.
The current that flowed was the very same,
But the world felt different when it wasn't a crime.

I saw my reflection in a shop window's glass,
A woman of substance, who let the past pass.
The girl who escaped the kerosene night,
Now stood in the buzz of a new, earned light.
The air still hummed with the struggle and strive,
But it was our struggle,in Sangam Vihar we were alive.
Not just surviving, but starting to grow,
In the shadow of ruins from long, long ago.

The new mall opened in Saket, so they say,
Glass to the sun, pushing the old ways away...
The ghosts of my past are just a faint hum,
Drowned by my daughter's schoolbook thrum.
She reads of economies, of a world that turned,
Of a country that blazed while her mother burned…
And built from the ashes... on this rugged plot...
A life... that they... in the end... could not.