Someone very close to me recently asked a serious question: How did a poem like Mismatched come to be written, particularly when I have been happily married for over fifty years? Was it a reflection on escapism, or perhaps a satire on false yogis?

The question intrigued me. Rather than explain what prompted the poem, I felt it would be more meaningful to revisit it—not as its author, but simply as another reader, discovering what the poem itself might reveal.

Mismatched is a poem about incompatibility, separation, memory and the elusive nature of fulfilment. It presents what appears to be a simple story: incompatibility leads to conflict; the man walks away from the woman, believing perhaps that separation will free him from an unhappy relationship. Years later, however, he is old, exhausted, jaded and unfulfilled, sitting alone in a mountain cave and painting the very woman he once deserted.

The title initially appears straightforward. The couple is “mismatched”; their incompatibility makes them fight, and the relationship breaks down. Yet the ending subtly destabilizes this interpretation. If separation was the solution to their incompatibility, why does the woman continue to occupy the man’s consciousness years later? The deeper mismatch may therefore not have been merely between two individuals, but between what the man believed he wanted and what he ultimately discovered he needed.

The mountain cave is particularly significant. It is more than a setting for loneliness. Within the Indian cultural imagination, the cave evokes withdrawal, renunciation, meditation and the search for freedom from worldly entanglements. The man has apparently travelled as far as possible from the domestic conflict he abandoned. Yet the unresolved relationship has followed him into his solitude. Physical distance has not produced emotional detachment. He has escaped the presence of the woman without escaping her presence within himself.

The poem thus makes an important distinction between separation and freedom. One may leave a person, place or circumstance without becoming inwardly free of it. Geography cannot resolve what consciousness has left unresolved. Indeed, the image of the aged man painting his former companion suggests that his outward renunciation may have intensified his inward attachment.

The act of painting introduces another psychological complexity. He is no longer painting the woman as she objectively exists; he is painting his memory of her. During their life together, conflict may have caused him to perceive her primarily through incompatibility. In old age and absence, memory may reconstruct her differently. The woman herself need not have changed; the consciousness perceiving her has changed. Presence notices flaws that absence can sometimes transform into longing, tenderness or idealization.

There is also a subtle irony in the fact that the man now encounters the woman through paintings. A living person possesses autonomy: she disagrees, responds, demands, surprises and resists being reduced to another person’s expectations. A painted image does none of these things. The painter can determine its expression, mood, color and form. Thus, having failed to sustain a relationship with the complexity of a living individual, the man now repeatedly creates representations of her that cannot challenge him. The poem quietly raises the possibility that what he possesses in the cave is not the woman, but his own image of her.

This gives Mismatched a deeper insight into human relationships. Incompatibility does not necessarily arise merely because two individuals are different. The greater difficulty may lie in our inability to accommodate difference without converting it into division. Genuine relationship requires accepting that the other person will never correspond perfectly to the portrait we carry in our own mind.

Yet the poem refuses to tell us exactly what the old man feels. Is he remorseful? Still in love? Lonely? Guilty? Nostalgic? Confused about the choice he made? The text deliberately leaves these possibilities unresolved. Its description of him as exhausted, aged, unfulfilled, jaded and confused suggests that whatever he sought by leaving has not brought him peace.

This refusal to explain is one of the poem’s strengths. No teacher appears to interpret the man’s condition. There is no final revelation and no explicit moral. The poem simply leaves him sitting in his cave, painting the absent woman. The image becomes the argument.

Ultimately, Mismatched questions the assumption that leaving a difficult situation necessarily constitutes liberation. Staying can become bondage, certainly, but leaving can also become another form of bondage when the unresolved past continues to inhabit the mind. Freedom therefore depends less upon physical proximity or distance than upon the quality of one’s inner relationship with experience.

The final image is consequently poignant rather than merely tragic. The man succeeded in leaving the relationship, but perhaps never understood it. He abandoned the woman yet could not relinquish her image. He sought distance but apparently did not find fulfilment.

The paradox at the heart of the poem may therefore be expressed simply:

He left because he believed they were mismatched; only much later may he have discovered the mismatch within himself.

In that ambiguity lies the quiet power of Mismatched. It does not tell us whether the man should have stayed or left. It asks something more enduring: Can we ever escape externally what we have not first understood within ourselves?

The original poem written and published on Boloji.com on September 20, 2020, is reproduced below for readers to revisit the poem and discover their own interpretations.
 
 

Mismatched

Incompatibility
made them fight
he walked out
feeling deluded
deserting her
years ago

Exhausted, aged
unfulfilled, jaded
and confused,
now sitting in a
mountain cave, he
draws her paintings