Arun Kamal, the progressive Hindi poet and critic, writes about ordinary lives in a conversational language enriched with vivid imagery. His poem ‘Sleep in the Sunshine’ (Dhūpa Meṃ Nīnd), from the collection Kirāye Kā Ghar, brings us face to face with an experience in which the outside world and innerconsciousness seem to merge. Out of everyday objects and sensations it creates a subtle world, inviting both an aesthetic and a sociological reading: unnamed social pressures can leave us empty even amid others, while the poem attends closely to the process by which things appear to us.
The poem opens with a striking tension: ‘There is no one at all, / and yet someone must be here.’ The space before the speaker appears empty, yet his mind cannot accept that emptiness. He senses someone invisible, and the poem never tells us who. This presence reveals itself not through a voice but through a sudden silence — someone ‘who turns quiet at the mere sound of my breath’. Silence here is not mere absence of sound. The poet is so absorbed that even his breathing might disturb the moment. He refuses to name a ghost, a god or a mysterious power, and so the mystery remains.
The images that follow unsettle familiar perception. A pitcher dipped into water produces ‘the sound of air / inside the water’. Sound and sight merge; something invisible takes shape within something else. Water and air are usually thought of as opposites, one visible, the other known through its effects. Here the poet hears what he cannot see, much as he senses a presence throughout the world rather than in any single place. Then comes ‘a glimmer of light that, as I gaze and gaze, / crumbles into dust’. We assume that closer looking brings clearer understanding. Instead the object changes under attention. Light enables sight; dust obstructs it. The gap between seeing and knowing opens. Dust, moreover, is ordinary and everywhere: the mystery may lie within this world, not beyond it.
A bird ‘falling like a halfpenny coin, / bearing the whole burden of the sky’ places an impossible weight on a tiny body. Flight usually suggests freedom; this bird falls. The vast sky becomes a burden, and we question whether a small thing can ever be called small. The sadness is unexplained: no story is given, only an image whose incompleteness invites our meanings. A breeze ‘unspooling like thread from a kite-reel’ gives invisible movement a visible form, suggesting both expansion and uncertainty. A tree ruffled ‘like a flounce of fine silk’ — a skirt of silk — turns solid nature into something soft, rippling and domestic. Nothing remains within its familiar identity.
Yet this is no dream world. ‘It felt as though rain were falling outside, / yet there was only sunshine, bright sun and scorching glare.’ Water, wind and the rippling tree have prepared a sense of coolness, but the body meets heat. The poem holds the mind’s weather and the world’s weather together without making them identical. The title names this interval: sunlight belongs to wakefulness, sleep to an inner world, and Kamal joins them. The poet’s eyes remain open, yet what he sees keeps changing like a dream. He has not turned away from reality; he has looked so closely that its familiar boundaries break down.
At the end, ‘No one at all, no, no one’ returns to the opening, but the denial no longer has its immediate counterweight. A question survives: if no one is there, what has been experienced? The emptiness is now full — of water, dust, the bird’s burden, the unspooling string and the silk-like tree. Kamal offers no answer. His simple language makes the ordinary strange again, leaving the reader with an experience rather than an explanation.
Phenomenology clarifies what is at stake. Husserl asks not only what an object is but how it appears within experience; the light that crumbles as the poet keeps looking shows attention changing its object rather than simply recognising it. Heidegger reminds us that we do not observe the world from a distance but already dwell among things and relationships. The sensed ‘someone’ grows out of the surroundings as a whole. Merleau-Ponty adds the body: breath, hearing, the imagined weight of the sky and the scorching heat all belong to an embodied encounter. The poem captures a process of appearing, not a fixed picture of nature.
Semiotics reveals a second dimension. For Saussure, a sign’s meaning rests on convention and difference, not on a natural bond with its object. When ‘tree’ is placed beside ‘skirt’, both words are unsettled: the tree gains softness and movement, the garment becomes a way of seeing nature. Meaning arises between words. Barthes encourages us to resist reducing the bird to a ready symbol of freedom or helplessness; its force lies in the incongruity of a coin-like body carrying the sky. Derrida sharpens the point. ‘No one’ and ‘someone’ do not cancel each other but generate a question within one another. The poem never fixes the identity of the presence, and each image defers any final reading. This is not arbitrariness — tree and skirt must still be recognisable — but a productive instability.
Object-Oriented Ontology and New Materialism take us further from human centrality. For Graham Harman, an object exceeds the meaning we assign it; the bird is a living body, not merely an emblem of sorrow. Karen Barad’s agential realism shows how qualities emerge through interaction. The sound heard in the poem belongs neither to water nor to air alone but to pot, water, air and listening together. Wind moves the tree; the tree’s movement yields the image of silk. Nature is thus an active participant, a network of material relations that helps produce the poet’s experience rather than merely decorating it.
Time, finally, is not clock time here. Bergson’s durée describes a flow in which past and present interpenetrate, and Kamal’s images connect through such a flow: water remains in the mind as light turns to dust, and the bird’s descent follows from what has already unsettled our seeing. Husserl’s retention and protention explain the poem’s structure: each image carries the trace of the last and anticipates the next. Eliot’s ‘Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future’ expresses a related insight, but philosophically. Kamal lets time emerge through sensation. Even his return to the opening words is not a closed circle; the reader comes back changed.
‘Sleep in the Sunshine’ is therefore less concerned with discovering an invisible being than with examining how we see, listen and feel. It makes the ordinary mysterious without making it remote, and turns questions about presence, matter and meaning into something we can hear in water and feel in sunlight.
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*Professor and former Head (Retd.), Department of Hindi, University of Hyderabad. This is the abridged version of the author's original paper
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