Vijay Seshadri is an India-born American poet who often derives from the corridor of thought and idea, climbing the stairs, going down the lanes of memory and reflection assessing and re-assessing the things in a flux, the times to be read and the destiny which but lies in waiting. But India does not haunt him nostalgically so often. He is happy in America and can clutch along Americanness.

Starting with a quote from George Orwell in a substantiated version and in the follow-up to this, he talks about how things are clipped, barbered and scissored before putting them to words. No story is real story. Real life so fraught with humiliations can never be laid bare. How to say about the radioactive detailing? What to say about the dreams charred? The story of life, can it be written? Can true details be entered into? Facts are suppressed and curtailed before they are put before.

What I am, I know it well and none the else can know me better than I. But everything I cannot lay bare.

What have I done, you know it not. Once I accused the innocent. I am not the person you are looking for.

Without peeling off, things may not come to light and scrutiny. The outer appearance cannot be taken for. The things which seem to have shamed you can never put before. The words said to the devastated widow still twitch him. He is the same person who has prayed to the guilty. If this be the thing, how good is he, say you?

How to open the wounds of the heart? If these are opened, these will bleed definitely. The hurts and scars definitely cast an imprint of their own. But the shameful memories one may not like to.

Vijay Seshadri means to hint that biographies and autobiographies can never be a true account of life-story. Similar opinion Khushwant Singh too holds it. Do you think that I am right? I am not at all. What I have done, you will not believe me. Your poor hands cannot know me. Your poor eyes cannot know me. Let me weep in my room. 

For my guilt, what will you do? Let me suffer for that. Stories, generally people say it not, life-stories. Let us hear the poem, let us mark how the workings of emotion and feeling in this poem.

Orwell says somewhere that no one ever writes the real story of their life.
The real story of a life is the story of its humiliations.
If I wrote that story now—
radioactive to the end of time—
people, I swear, your eyes would fall out, you couldn’t peel
the gloves fast enough
from your hands scorched by the firestorms of that shame.
Your poor hands. Your poor eyes
to see me weeping in my room
or boring the tall blonde to death.
Once I accused the innocent.
Once I bowed and prayed to the guilty.
I still wince at what I once said to the devastated widow.
And one October afternoon, under a locust tree
whose blackened pods were falling and making
illuminating patterns on the pathway,
I was seized by joy,
and someone saw me there,
and that was the worst of all,
lacerating and unforgettable.