Regret Poem By R Parthasarathy Repack Review

The final tercet is where the poem earns its title. “My regret is the furniture / of an English room.” Regret here is not an emotion; it is a physical space. It is solid, wooden, heavy—Victorian. Regret is the chair you sit in every day.

The regret, then, is that his authentic pain (Tamil) is rendered invisible by the very environment (London) that allows him to speak. regret poem by r parthasarathy

R. Parthasarathy’s poem (often identified as a component of the "Trial" section in his major work, Rough Passage The final tercet is where the poem earns its title

The second stanza is stark: “To return to the womb / is not possible. / Nor necessary.” This is the logical progression of regret. Nostalgia is the desire to return to a purified past (the womb, pre-colonial India, childhood). Regret, however, is the intelligence that knows return is impossible. Regret is the chair you sit in every day

I cannot return to that country, the language of its water, its leaves. I am lost in a translation.

In the vast, often overlooked landscape of Indian English poetry, the voice of R. Parthasarathy stands as a monolith of austerity and precision. While many of his contemporaries—Nissim Ezekiel, A.K. Ramanujan, and Dom Moraes—focused on the clash of cultures, mythology, and the immigrant’s dilemma, Parthasarathy carved a quieter, more dangerous niche: the archaeology of the self.

And then the masterstroke: “Anglo-Saxon angles. / Tamil tears in a London rain.”