Jayant Kashyap
On Burning the Stamps
after Agha Shahid Ali
I stopped from posting all those letters
I had written to you—
removed all those stamps
burnt them one after the other;
the post office was a faraway country
a forgotten kingdom
with people rushing in, rushing out—
their hands, pockets full of
then emptied of the letters they wrote
some day or the other
to someone in another far-off country;
their letters with words, stamps
addressed to somewhere
pile up in a corner of the post office
every day; I’ve removed your name
from the pile
I had written once—
in my hand.
Statements from the Presidential Office
We will tell you things
in the standard manner of accusations; read
the previous government’s achievements like a long list
of blameable matters, like what they did right
was just what they did wrong.
We’ll do what needs to be done,
mislead you into believing
that the <party-in-power> can never be wrong,
only the other one always is; that their crimes
are almost always the mistakes of the citizens;
aggravate matters and little developments,
make forts out of them, so when the borders are broken,
there are safehouses to run hastily to,
while men, women, with bare feet, are left to run.
We’ll help tend to
such and a million other lies before one is
disclosed; make famished villages nothing more than
even more famished villages and
compare them to even worse cities of yore,
say splendid with a sneer, clap, bow and run
back, quick like a deer, but one that quietly knows guilt;
name cities that are devastated, unaccomplished
cities, name them utopian and hug the silence, and
We’ll hold hands with the poor
in photographs, in speeches that sound
gibberish like the nation’s promised future; never say
doomed, but say we’re in this together; say
harsh goodbyes and never keep promises.
On ‘Burning the Stamps’: This is a very old poem for me, very close to my heart. It is in ways a love letter and an image of loss. I wrote it in 2016, not long after having begun reading Agha Shahid Ali’s The Country without a Post Office for the first time; and the place he talks about is always in a tussle with the government (more so, more recently) and I’m seeing parallels here today – what with the crazy tariffs, etc., and countries deciding to not send post to the US anymore. ‘Burning the Stamps’ is about the difficulties one has in communicating what needs to be said or shared. At present, I think we’re in a position that suggests someone who doesn’t want to listen to us is making sure they’re in complete control.
On ‘Statements from the Presidential Office’: This one was written as early as 2021, in part as a parody of the current government in India, the UK and/or the US – the ‘great’ right wing establishments that are more interested in telling us what the others did wrong than what they themselves have done right so far. Governments that remind us every now and then that we were at fault for choosing a wrong set of people repeatedly (until now) and so it is their right to taunt us with names, spending years taunting rather than doing a single meaningful thing, to be honest. Notice the speeches, they are always very telling of what’s to come. To put it simply, ‘Statements from the Presidential Office’ draws parallels between governments, and finds and presents to the reader the uncanny (and unarguably clear) similarities in their false promises, among other things. In India, for example, the current government’s first session of five years (beginning is 2014) had more to do with naming cities and naming names than naming (actual!) progress. Of course, everybody knows the current US government’s footsteps too! —Jayant Kashyap
Jayant Kashyap’s third pamphlet, Notes on Burials, won the Poetry Business New Poets Prize in 2024. In 2025, he was awarded a Toto Award for Creative Writing (English).