# One Hundred Questions for Light

- Link: https://writersworkshopindia.com/2025/07/16/one-hundred-questions-for-light/
- Published: 2025-07-16T00:54:32+00:00
- Author: shuktara

5/5 - (2 votes)

**Author:** Mandira Mitra Chakraborty[⌊A sample cover of the book: black handloom sari with gold embossed nameplate and lettering for the title and author's name. The border of the sari lines the right hand margin of the cover.⌉](https://writersworkshopindia.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/One-Hundred-Questions-for-Light.jpg)
**
Pages:** 88 **Year of Publication:** 2025 **Price:** ₹350 **ISBN:** 978-81-985733-
1-5 (9788198573315)

_**About the Author**_
 Born in Ranchi on 29 January 1974, Mandira Mitra Chakraborty,
as early as she can remember, wanted to be an astronaut. Ensconced in a family of
wannabe poets whose unsold books lay in heaps in cupboards like wounded soldiers,
the least she could have done is fly from poetry.

Instead, this is her second volume of poems, following her debut collection, _Six
Ways of Raising Daughters_. She has also published a book of short stories titled
_Firefly Games_.

In addition to poems, she loves dogs and nature. She teaches now at Taki Government
College in Taki, West Bengal, but may board a spaceship anyday.

Life for her is elsewhere.

_**Teaser**_

_My Mother’s Maiden Name_

My old woman with Stage Five dementia
 Suddenly claimed her maiden name today. You
are half a “Ray”, she reminded me When I was bathing her, cloaked in a suit of flesh
She no longer acknowledges as her own, its Functions strange and unattended, like
a pried-open Pomegranate, vulnerable and stark in its physiology. “Remember,” she
urged me, she who wrote one letter Every year to her _mashi_ in Krishnanagar at 
Bijaya, In contrast to at least eleven to her in-laws, my paternal brood. She was
renamed, to match my father’s, to strengthen the bond, Her old name slipping away
quietly like A forgotten first lover, or the lone kitten she left behind, Who stopped
eating after she left home. Now she is only found in a vacant parking lot Of her
memories, where there are too many Empty spaces with no conjunctions. Speech comes,
if it comes at all, in phrases And in the manner in which lightning strikes On a
cold windy cloudless day without preamble. “Remember”, she says as if memory were
A green creeper that one holds on to before falling Into the deep chasm of life,
its paradoxes too Overwhelming for the human mind. For The life of me I cannot decide
where to keep this Foreknowledge or foresight granted to me by her plight, To live
and change and keep the sorrow of it out of sight.

Notes:
 mashi: maternal aunt Bijaya: the last day of Durga Puja, a time of greeting

_**Contents**_
 65 poems

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