The Mehfil folio, edited by writer Rajat Singh, brings together poetry, prose, and drama to celebrate a spirit of play and performance within the queer South Asian experience, both within the subcontinent and across the diaspora. The folio takes its inspiration from the Urdu mehfil, which was a salon or soirée where North Indian and Pakistani audiences came to enjoy stirring performances by poets, singers, and musicians. The folio is the second installment of the “I Want Sky” series, which seeks to make queer existence tangible and add to the queer archive.

Artwork by Jasjyot Hans Singh accompanies each of the pieces.

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“Editor’s Note: Mehfil”
By Rajat Singh

“About the Art: Mehfil”
By Jasjyot Singh Hans

“Sa is for Sunflowers”
By Shebati Sengupta

Drawing on the structure of a raga, Shebati Sengupta’s poem, “Sa is for Sunflowers,” begins in a pain that lilts and limps before ending in a breathless flourish. The speaker threads the twin strands of ease and difficulty, of joy and grief. The poem’s refrain, which once burdened the speaker’s parents as immigrants in America, shifts ever so slightly by the end, once the speaker comes to own the sunniness that’s her due as a queer person.

“Ghazal”
By Rahul Mehta

Rahul Mehta’s “Ghazal” spans oceans, generations, and languages to address a lost grandmother, with couplets that deepen the image of a rose blooming. With honesty and compassion, Mehta makes in their grandmother’s memory a home to inhabit the shame of rejecting their inheritance, and the shame of belonging to a country that rejects them.

“T4T”
By Aishvarya Arora

Sometimes a mehfil gathers words together, seats them in neat rows, and explores the energy emanating out this arrangement. Aishvarya Arora’s “T4T” calls attention to verbs made out of nouns like “girl” and “boy,” and lavishes its gaze on the work eros does on bodies.

“Seeing People See”
By Rajat Singh

An interview with Shayok Misha Chowdhury.

“Public Obscenities: An Excerpt”
By Shayok Misha Chowdhury

An enigmatic excerpt from Shayok Misha Chowdhury’s play Public Obscenities appears in the folio, along with an exclusive interview with the award-winning poet, playwright, and director. Chowdhury’s scenes, set in an ancestral home in Kolkata, gather together a cast of characters on stage who are beset with the responsibility to see one another across boundaries of linguistic and ethnic identity, as well as the borders between image and text, between life and death.

“When Asked What Example I Set For My Brothers’ Baby Girls”
By Ashna Ali

“When Asked What Example I Set For My Brothers’ Baby Girls,” a poem by Ashna Ali, offers a rejoinder to the demand that the speaker’s life model a narrow notion of beauty or success, honoring instead the quiet intimacy gained through self-possession.

“Ghazal for What’s Left in the Throat”
By Aman Rahman

Aman Rahman’s “Ghazal for What’s Left in the Throat” shatters the couplet’s formal structure by breaking each line into thirds, opening up space in the address to an unnamed lover to consider the residue of all that once lay between them.

“Ghost Story”
By Ananya Garg

Ananya Garg, in “Ghost Story,” takes a cue from parable and prophecy, welcoming readers to imagine the haunting, spectral presence of creatures that reside within queer bodies, and letting them imagine the infinite ways we sacrifice ourselves in order to survive.

“Rooms to Sleep in”
By Ramchandra Srinivas Siras, translated by Anish Gawande

Ramchandra Srinivas Siras’ poem “Rooms to Sleep in,” translated from Marathi by Anish Gawande, echoes with palpable weariness while looking toward the quiet pleasure that rest, even a kind of final rest, makes possible for the body.

“Likeness”
By Farzin Baarish

Farzin Baarish’s gorgeous and haunting story, “Likeness,” attempts a conversation with a deceased ancestor gone too soon—they invite us to experience the intimate embrace between the narrator, Farzin, and their father’s sister Noor, summoned to the present for a time, in a piece that culminates in a glittering evening spent dancing with drag queens in Brooklyn.

“बहार / Spring” & “Serenade”
By Rajiv Mohabir

Together with his poem “बहार / Spring,” Rajiv Mohabir’s poem “Serenade” brings the thumri, the lovesick song of lovers who spend the night apart, into English, rendering the speaker’s body—represented as fields lying unused, rubies and pearls to be enjoyed, and an inconsolable chakor bird—as a mehfil into which lover and reader are welcomed.

“towards a disco devotional”
By Misha Choudhry

We close the folio on a note of exuberance. Misha Choudhry’s rhythmic poem, “towards a disco devotional,” enacts—through the qawwali singers’ tradition of chanting a word over and over—a body swaying deliriously to music, a body that surrenders to a force contained inside that very word. In surrendering, the body trusts that flow, something closer to breath or water, can access the divine better than words themselves.