Mesh Toraskar
Bio
A wannabe storyteller from London. Sometimes words spill out of me and the only way to mop the spillage is to write them down.
"If you arrive here, remember, it wasn't you - it was me, in my longing, who found you."
Stories (31/0)
making space. Top Story - June 2024.
Since the only thing that might pull us back up is caring, it only makes sense that here, long after I’ve let my anger born of heartbreak and grief misplace, multiply, misdirect itself, let the enormity of my solitude turn into something I don’t know how to dispute with, something thick and heavy and suffocating, let the coldness thrash and fight under my skin, deeper still, in between the arches of my organs; here where the ground is always close and the fall is easy and I surrender to it often, lie without purpose for hours, it only makes sense that it is here, I decide to show up and surrender to the possibilities of the night. Show up to those who I deserted. Drawn to the sense of accomplishment, something I haven’t felt in a while, to memory of finished dish sending its aroma into the world and with it, wrapping the room with a strong sense of sweet nostalgia, I get up and decide to cook. I pick up my phone, type a message that reads “Dinner at mine @ 8PM, don’t bring anything” and before my courage deserts me again, drop it in our friends’ group chat, the way one would do when diffusing a bomb in the movies: one eye closed, snip at the wire, hoping for the best.
By Mesh Toraskar16 days ago in Feast
One day, you'll break free
It begins with 'Where are you from?', raised from the perimeter of the dinner table you’re sharing with students from your boarding halls, the last night of the freshers. A collective zeal is fresh in the air. “But where are you actually from?” This isn’t the last time you’ll be asked this. At dinner parties, over the phone, at various menial jobs, and by your professors at university. The askers are expectant with an urgency. They demand instant gratification. Their question knocks you off balance, those toes, inherited from your Indian dad, now tilting the other way. Not just because you don’t understand the question, but even if you did, you wouldn’t yet have an answer.
By Mesh Toraskar7 months ago in Humans
On Poetry and its Purpose. Top Story - December 2023.
Part 3 in my 'writing' series. Find Part 1, here and Part 2, here. In our popular culture of carefully curated spectacles that we consume from the side-lines, poems are not spectacles, neither can they be observed passively. Carefully curated, yes. Spectacles, no. A conversation could never be a spectacle. Poems demand an exchange of electrical currents through the daily, mundane, abused, and ill prized medium that is language. The force that is used for deception, as often as it used for revelation. Through the tactile material things - the baseball bat in your dad’s trunk, the oar floating away from a boat, the unused spoon in your kitchen drawer, or the space where once your grandfather’s favourite willow tree stood forty feet tall. The bat becomes a lost passion, the oar/your dreams, the spoon/an opportunity and the tree/now a drum soundtracking the memories you never had. The language that is an old vehicle, fuelled with familiarity, arriving at destinations further than it has travelled, always having more to mean than it has to say.
By Mesh Toraskar7 months ago in Writers
We Wasted Our Wednesday Dying Slowly
We are folding laundry, this man and I, our hands moving in tandem along the cotton sheets and shirts. Someone somewhere is losing their mother but here, it's so quiet, every crease in the fabric tells a story. This man and I, we take what will unravel anyway and fold it neatly, creating space. There is so much room in a life; there should be more of us in here. My voice, which is inches away but never here, are you content where you are? Are you you where you are? Something must come of this.
By Mesh Toraskar8 months ago in Poets
On unhurried creativity. Top Story - October 2023.
Preface: Every time we remember, I recently discovered, we create new neurons, new pathways that store information. Which was in stark contrast to my presumption that I simply returned to the permanent and reliable folds in my brain. Folds that were made when I fell off the bike for the first time or when I brushed my teeth the night of my first kiss, eulogising its sweetness. So that tied in comfortably with the reliability of memory. Was it mud or concrete that I fell on, did I run my fingers through her hair or held them awkwardly behind my back?
By Mesh Toraskar8 months ago in Writers
