Sweet songs of a sad tale

Geetu Vaid

Haunting and heart-achingly beautiful — are the words that come to mind time and again as one turns pages of this slim collection of poems by Pranav Sharma, published posthumously. The title, Hooked on Emotions, leaves little doubt about the drift of the verses, but the fact that Pranav was battling cancer at the time of writing most of these poems is what makes his words more poignant. 

Around 18 poems, a brief extract and a short story is what has been curated from the young man’s writings to put together this collection as a tribute. Matching brevity with pithiness, each of the poems give his perspective on the stark realities of  life besides giving a peep into pathos of seeing a life full of promise slipping out of one’s hands and a stoic detachment that comes with the surrender to a fatal disease. So, while there’s a poem presenting a boy’s brush with the “ways of the world” at one page, the next puts forth his stubborn resilience. 

In A Bad Dream he says ... 

“With Satan riding my fiendish mind,

And the angel in my broken chest 

I stepped on what I had as s child — chastity, frugality and abstinence.” 

In “The Time” he writes ...

“Now I’m the king of my own world,

The kingdom of me enslaving myself,

Because I’m the one, the last one standing,

With a hide of truth and 

arrogance.”

The yearning for eternal love and the pain of seeing the changing attitudes with changing circumstances is the undercurrent in another poem. One can sense the struggle of a young man keeping a brave face in front of his parents while losing the battle of life as he promises them that he would be “Watching you from a distance, without saying a word” especially when he knows ... 

“All I can do is look back and smile,

How I loved to run that extra mile” 

Moving on the tides of emotions the book ends with, 

“In life it’s up to us who we let go in our lives, 

What we let in, and how we use it to shape our destiny, 

That second chances are rare and that the living don’t enjoy the privilege of permanence”. 

These words and many more linger in one’s mind much after one has put the book down.