Issue 4. October 2026. Palak Vashisht

As I wait for your first cry,
I carry in my hands the faint echoes
of children who came before you—
their names erased, their labor written
in dust, in cloth, in silence.

In the archives, they appear
as numbers, ages, rules,
“fit for work,” “too small,” “protected.”
But I have learned to read between the lines,
to hear their breath in the pages,
to see their small shoulders bent under heat.

You, my child, will be born
to a room of warmth and tenderness,
to a world that opens its hands to you.
You will be seen,
your laughter recorded,
your footsteps followed.

How shall I teach you, then,
that childhood is not one,
that while you dream in comfort,
others dream in broken hours,
their dawns never gentle,
their voices folded into looms?

Perhaps I will tell you that love
is not only what we give,
but what we recognize.
That the measure of privilege
is not to rise above others,
but to kneel beside them,
to listen to silences,
to imagine a different world.

And in that imagining,
you may learn what it means
to be humble,
to be human,
to carry within you
the spirit of many children—
those whose stories I chase in paper trails,
and you, whose story begins at my side.

Palak Vashisht

Palak is a historian of labor and childhood with a Ph.D. from Rutgers University, currently serving as a Research Associate and Managing Editor with the World Historical Gazetteer at the University of Pittsburgh's Institute for Spatial History Innovation. Her scholarly work examines children's lives in colonial South Asia, with particular attention to the intersections of age, labor, and governance. 

Editorial Note

We feature this moving poem for its aspiration, in the poet's words, to "extend individual love into a wider consciousness of human unity." The aspiration appears to resonate with Sri Aurobindo's vision of a "spiritual religion of humanity"-- " the growing realization that there is a secret Spirit, a divine Reality, in which we are all one, that humanity is its highest present vehicle on earth, that the human race and the human being are the means by which it will progressively reveal itself here."¹

1. Sri Aurobindo, The Ideal of Human Unity, Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, p. 378, https://ia801501.us.archive.org/28/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.99755/2015.99755.The-Ideal-Of-Human-Unity.pdf ↩︎