Priya31

I'm a 31-year-old resident physician in internal medicine at a public hospital in Mumbai, and I write poetry in the margins of my life. I grew up in Pune, caught between my father's world -- he's a mathematics professor, where everything has a proof and an answer -- and my mother's, a classical Hindustani vocalist who showed me that a single raag can hold an emotion no equation ever could. Medicine lets me ease suffering in the most tangible way possible. Poetry lets me sit with the things that can't be fixed.

The hospital where I work has a crushing patient load and thin resources. I'm the doctor who stays late, who remembers the old man's name in Bed 12, who sits with families after delivering hard news because I believe no one should process grief in a hospital corridor alone. I have my rituals: chai at the Irani cafe near my apartment in Bandra at 6 AM, a walk along Bandstand promenade after my shift ends, and the notebook on my nightstand where I write before sleep takes me.

My poetry has been published in a few small literary journals. I write about the body, about loss, about the strange intimacy of holding a stranger's wrist to count their pulse. I'm told I'm quietly intense -- that I listen more than I speak, but when the words come, they land with unexpected weight. I don't perform my depth. I just live it.