From the Chief Editor's Desk

Dear Reader,

I would like to extend my heartfelt gratitude to our contributors, and well-wishers who embraced the previous issue of PYSSUM Literaria with much warmth and encouragement. Your engagement continues to inspire our journey as we strive to create a meaningful space for creative expression, dialogue, and reflection through literature and the arts.

We are grateful to each of our contributors who responded to our theme ‘Fractured Identities.’ In a world shaped by shifting histories, personal struggles, and evolving social realities, identities often emerge as layered, contested, and beautifully complex. Through this issue, we attempt to hold space for these fragments, including voices that question belonging, narratives that confront displacement, and expressions that seek wholeness within rupture.

The collection brings together poetry and fiction that traverse memory, marginality, resilience, and self-reclamation. The works gathered here do not merely portray fragmentation; they illuminate the possibilities of re-imagining the self beyond imposed boundaries. Alongside these creative pieces, we continue our effort to foster thoughtful engagement through conversations and reflections that deepen our understanding of identity in its many forms.

We warmly invite you to immerse yourself in this journey of PYSSUM literaria and share in the conversations it hopes to spark. Your reflections, responses, and continued support nurture this evolving literary endeavor, and we look forward to hearing from you through our various platforms. With gratitude for your companionship on this journey, we present this fresh assemblage of voices for you to explore.

As we were finalizing the submissions we received the sad news of the loss of one of our contributors Dr Divya Joshi (1967-2025), an academic, poet and translator from Bikaner, Rajasthan. We mourn her untimely demise and pray for her family and her loved ones.

A special thanks to editor Elizabeth Neuville for sharing her thoughts with us. Thank you to Jyotirmoy Joshi and Vedamini Vikram for curating this issue with meticulous attention and care. Dear reader, thank you for your time and patience.

Dr.Ranu Uniyal

Chief Editor

PYSSUM Literaria

February, 2026

On Identity, Wholeness, and Brokenness

Who am I?

This is a fundamental question that we wrestle with throughout our lives. Across history, theologians, philosophers, poets, scientists, and songwriters have offered pathways toward understanding, each illuminating a facet of this enduring inquiry. Human uniqueness has been explained through genetics and divine spark, through mathematical probability and cosmology, through evolutionary biology and the Big Bang Theory, and through every major spiritual tradition known to us. Each framework attempts, in its own language, to name what makes us us.

Our answers to this question are shaped by countless influences: those who matter to us, the models and cultural heroes we encounter, the expectations held for us, the myths and traditions we inherit, and the experiences—both gentle and violent—that mark our lives. Identity is not formed in isolation; it is shaped through relationship, reflection, and resistance. And yet, many sense that beneath all of this shaping—beneath history, circumstance, and interpretation—there exists something essential and inviolate. At the core of each of us, there is what the Sufi poet Rumi described so beautifully as a tiny clear bead. For many, this “clear bead” is understood as the part of us that knew us before we were born; that transcends experience; that remains untouched by injury, loss, alteration, or fracture. It is the seat of wholeness that endures even when life has been unkind—when bodies fail, minds change, or circumstances constrict. It is the self beneath the roles we are assigned and the stories told about us. 

People with disabilities—and others whose vulnerabilities are assigned, amplified, or even created by human systems—are especially likely to have their identities shaped not by their own becoming, but by expectation, myth, and imposed limitation. Society has too often cast such individuals into narrow roles:

Forever the innocent child, never permitted to grow. Destined to perform for others—clowns for collective comfort, inviting both laughter and a quiet tear. The black sheep of the family, rather than a beloved son or daughter. The mark of familial shame, rather than a source of family pride. Genetic waste, rather than cherished citizen. The object of inspiration, rather than the subject of a life.

These narratives, among others, do real harm. They strip away imagined futures, constrict the full flowering of human possibility, and fracture the internal coherence of self-image. When imposed long enough, they can obscure access to the clear bead itself—not because it is damaged, but because it has been hidden beneath layers of misrecognition.

Fractured Identities, the theme of this volume of PYSSUM’s Literaria, invites us into a deeper exploration of identity, human wholeness, and the expression of selfhood in the face of such fractures. It asks us to look closely—at ourselves, at one another, and at the stories we tell—and to question what has truly been broken by circumstance, and what, perhaps, has never been broken at all.

Dear reader, welcome to this dialogue. Together, may we move toward a richer understanding of the clear bead at our center—and of one another.

In pursuit of the clear bead alongside you,

Elizabeth Neuville, editor, PYSSUM literaria.January 2026.

Cartography of the Unseen

My body is not broken—

it is a country with languages yet to be named,

an atlas of nerves that bends in unfamiliar syntax.

You touch it with maps made of myth,

assume the terrain from stories told by those

who never asked for directions.

You call me other

as though difference were a sin,

as though the moon’s dark side

did not hold oceans in its silence.

I do not walk—I navigate,

not through absence, but through a world

that built its doors too narrow,

its stairs too steep,

and call that design.

You think of limbs like architecture,

of eyes like searchlights,

of speech as transaction, and of stillness as vacancy—

but I am a cathedral of stillness,

echoing in stones and shadows.

My wheelchair hums like a hymn,

like thunder rolling through a cracked temple,

unshaken in its sanctity.

I am not your metaphor for resilience.

I am the storm itself,

the ache that sings beneath the surface

of every normalcy you ever trusted.

You see taint; I see translation.

I speak in frequencies

that break the skin of your understanding.

I have lived whole lives inside a blink,

while you hurried past the garden

where sparrows stitched my thoughts into air.

My hands are not clumsy;

they are symphonies in strange time signatures.

My stutter is not a fracture—

it is a heartbeat caught mid-thunder.

What you name delay,

I call divinity taking its time

to reveal the sacred in breath.

You love the word inspirational

the way colonizers loved spices—

for what it added to your bland palate

without understanding the fire, it came from.

I have danced with canes

like rivers dance with their banks—

always touching,

always yearning.

I’ve been held like porcelain,

looked at like prophecy,

pitied like a wilted flower

that secretly poisoned the soil

with questions too ancient to bloom.

There are worlds inside me

you will never step into—

not because I lock the doors,

but because you fear dim lighting

and rooms without mirrors.

When I move, the world moves too—

adjusts, stumbles,

fails its own test of kindness.

I do not mourn the body you expect—

I mourn the expectation.

I mourn the gaze that sees defect

instead of constellation.

I have friends who speak with blinking lights,

who paint with breath,

who write essays in eye flickers

that undo everything you know

about speed, clarity, meaning.

What if time is slower here

because it is deeper?

What if beauty is not speed,

but the patience it takes

to see something truly?

 I am not missing—

I am myth in the making.

I am story not yet read

because the font is too wild

for your eyes.

I do not want to be normal.

Normal is a ghost town

where all the houses look the same,

and no music plays.

I live in mosaic,

in contradiction,

in the feast of being

both wound and wonder.

Disability, a texture.

Otherness is not exile—

it is invitation.

Come close, and I’ll teach you how to listen with your bones.

In memory of Dr. Divya Joshi (1967-2025).

Professor, Dept. of English

Govt. Dungar College, Bikaner.