Wani Nazir
Santosh Bakaya’s poetic mini-epic At Thirty Minutes Past One is an evocation of the dreamscape bathed in lost garden scents and memory whorls, and the rhythms of a haunted, healing world. At first, it is a silent reflection—“I started talking to myself and looked at the wall clock. It was thirty minutes past one.” By reframing her debut from the opening lines, Santosh transforms what has once been a simple memory—“It was thirty minutes past one”—into a metaphysical fall into the liminal: the time that wasn’t yet night and not quite morning; falling into despair but grasping hope; stuck in stasis susurrations of transformation.
This hour is the door where we cross—daylight thought sleeps here, with it pride also falling away. The speaker thinks unhappily of the roses in her garden: “distraught, he remembered the roses in his garden swaying / in the fragrant breeze.” Such a tactile and mournful image, memory buried in the landscape. Fallen petals shake the speaker and cause her first awkward plummet within. Resonating with Virginia Woolf’s, Mrs. Dalloway—where flowers are permeable vessels of thought and time, and memory bursting in.
A grasshopper hops in, and “resiliently clung to my hanky. / Up to some hanky panky, was it?” This jolt of humour lightens the gloomy weight of contemplating but its ridiculousness also highlights the fact that the world of this narrator is about to crumble. What a painfully absurd question—“What was the green, lanky fellow up to?”—recalling a Kafkaesque absurdity, where the everyday becomes uncanny, and insects are never just insects.
A thin sound-scrape is in from a cracker, a mistaken bird call, “word gone haywire.” Noise is uncertain, just like what the mind has done chaos. Bakaya often writes with echoes of the tapping thunder, bells, and broken lines echoing T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’; this is a shattered psychic landscape where everything has already happened before she even arrives to record the scene. “Any buyers for my story?” A slightly meta turn to the question she asks.
Rapidly thereafter, however, comes the pivot: “I crave for the dance of the autumn leaves. / The dance of resurrection.” In doing so, Bakaya both employs nature as metaphor and turns to it for salvation. A songster, a poppy, and “boisterous creek” signify rebirth. Its tone sweetens, as in the middle of Mary Oliver’s ‘The Journey’, where shedding the weight of old habits lets nature’s voice speak.
But memory never loses its hold. “The tectonic plates of my memory” shift beneath “lingering conversations,” “mock arguments,” and an “irresistible urge to complain.” Bakaya calls the aftershocks of our emotional topography like Proust’s madeleine; they are the tiny moles on the face of life that dot our human experience like emotional braille, evidence of larger points indenting the sum total of all we feel and how we evoke those feelings: colour in a much deeper tissue.
And we see the kitchen wall clock: “At thirty minutes past one?” Time loops. A peacock feather drifts, “anguish spilling from disembodied eyes…” Many symbols appear—the feather of a former greatness, the eyes of Eliot’s “eyes I dare not meet in dreams” (‘The Hollow Men’). It is the depth of an inner turmoil that, though so far away, feels tangibly near.
This moment of anguish marks a return to the weave of sight and sound: “gentle rhythm” weaves into “screeching”, a crow caws, two actors on a teeter-totter. This duality—rest and upheaval, childlike and propitious—emerges as a principle motif. The labyrinth of the seesaw echoes Yeats’ gyres, rotating a continuum in and out of itself, rocking balance to near fracture. There is a foreboding atmosphere.
And Bakaya, in turn, leads us through hauntings of the self—sunsets burning away on the horizon, peculiarities bearing weight and “nocturnal, insane ditties.” It is confessional, yet not self-pitying. Instead, she shows the readers the violent mutinous and bruised-sublime causalities of introspection—like Sylvia Plath or Anne Sexton.
Then the transformation begins. “The sky was a tender lilac. Enchanting.” Light pierces clouds. Only the tonal shift to me seems almost cinematic, like one of Wordsworth’s bursts of inspiration or Rilke’s ecstatic metaphysical utterances. The appearance of light introduces a tone to the poem, “soft, passionate, cheerful,” loving, somehow gay. Hope begins its slow bloom.
Mortality is there: “When I am gone, my words will still ricochet within the four walls.” The repetition—“This way. That way”—becomes a poetic heartbeat. The speaker knows that fractional autobiography, like memory or love, is always revenant, a ghost in exile. It is the quiet poet’s pact with immortality.
“Life is also just a hallucination,” Bakaya writes. But she concludes, “Let me hallucinate on.” Here, Bakaya also recalls Camus in his resistance against the absurd: to go on is not because life means something, but because meaning can be created through art, compassion, remembrance. “Let it beat for the destitute,” she pleads—a prayer to make the leap toward moral imagination.
And in the most charming shot of the book, let us pause and consider “that old banyan tree” looking at a happy cyclists—“Spry. Spiffy. Smart. Spunky.” The tree becomes witness, it becomes decades. It recalls Tagore and his reflections on time, pride, and the quiet company of nature.
But every memory has its antithesis. On a private page, “a very old woman flicking the pages of an album” pauses at a photograph of herself aged eight. Bakaya depicts this with unforgivable simplicity. It is a picture that hums with nostalgia and loss, as though some wormhole in time has ripped open.
Nature is once again the backdrop and even the protagonist. The next, an oriole sings good news. A golden orb rips “sinister clouds.” And well-kept lawn calls her to do the same. You see a living, hungry world full of “green smiles,” and “resurrection,” and a “sanguine warmth.” This is Bakaya invoking Rainer Maria Rilke, who said, “… beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror.” There is redemption and risk in the natural world.
The blood into the beauty is pierced. “Where is the silver? Where the gold? / I only see clouds dripping blood.” The poet averts our gaze toward bleeding in every sense: the literal and symbolic (a tear in the moral fabric where she reminds us of Wilfred Owen).
Perhaps the answer can be found within the creative act itself. “Two words clash… I furtively creep into a line I love.” To write is to survive. “Bingo! The nightmare is over!” she declares. The joy is palpable. And so, Bakaya self-inserts in a theme poetry seems to be now: reclaiming the ruin of our world.
She announces, “I am reborn,” transforming into a bird “chirpy and cheerful.” This is no decorative metaphor. It is the metamorphosis par excellence—one from within, where it matters most: personal, psychological and spiritual. This bird is not just Shelley’s skylark or Keats’s nightingale; it is the self, transformed in flight of poetic transformation.
She still reminds us that the world is broken. “Maybe to them, / The blood of the killed smells of adventure!” She has responded to the voyeurism of violence, the normalisation of tragedy. The lines sting—“Freaks all!”—a blunt moral reckoning. Despite all of the surreal, Bakaya remains grounded in her ethical compass.
Still, the sun rises. “I saluted the spunk of the sun. Hope had a golden colour.” There is also Bakaya’s combination of roughness and poetry in that single phrase “spunk of the sun.” Her sun isn’t gentle—it is bold. Hope is not weak—it is golden and smiling
The poet ends with a bit of irony: “Creativity is great but it definitely should not be in my stomach.” “The sun smiles, the girl smiles,” and poetry rekindles wilderness. Followed by liberation: “Her incarcerated soul was set / Free – Free – Free!” Nature is what no longer exists, it is otherwise an unnameable backdrop—now it speaks, nature speaks.
“I can take life by the horns… unfazed by horns and prickly thorns.” Bakaya’s voice swells in rhythm, then shivers as it hears the “snapping – snapping-snapping – ripping.” Life, like art, shatters and remoulds us.
In that final moment Bakaya manages to do what so few poets do: brush up against the edge of despair and lead us out again. It is not victorious hope; it is wavering, unsure, “a sliver”—but it is on the way, it is the beginning to wrap around. It is a hope that comes from witnessing in the flesh, and conquering to exist and dream on.
A postgraduate gold medalist in English Literature from the University of Kashmir in Srinagar, Wani Nazir, from Pulwama, India, is the author of the poetic collections, …and the silence whispered and The Chill in the Bones. Presently working as a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Education, Jammu and Kashmir, he has been writing both prose and poetry in English, Urdu, and his mother tongue, Kashmiri. Wani has poetry and prose in Kashur Qalam, The Significant League, Muse India, Setu, Langlit, Literary Herald, Cafe Dissensus, Learning and Creativity – Silhouette Magazine, The Dialogue Times, and elsewhere.
