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Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minuteDriver Scan →Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errorsFree Scan →Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitchesFind Drivers →The headline “I describe love for you / As an Ali Sethi ghazal” belongs to a Scroll.in excerpt from Shruti Sonal’s poetry collection In Which Language Do I Remember You?, published by Writers Workshop India. The poems in the excerpt move between a daughter’s languages and memories of her mother, family bereavement, childhood, longing and love.
What the headline refers to
Scroll.in published the feature on January 17, 2024, as an excerpt from In Which Language Do I Remember You? by Shruti Sonal. “I describe love for you / As an Ali Sethi ghazal” is the feature’s headline, not the title of a separate book. The publisher credit on the page is Writers Workshop India.
The excerpt presents poems rather than a conventional account of language or grief. Its questions and images are grounded in the speaker’s particular family memories; they should not be taken as general claims about bilingual families or a definition of every ghazal.
Language as a way of remembering
The poem “In which language do I remember you?” asks how the speaker can remember her mother in English when that language separated their experiences. The language of the ancestors, meanwhile, comes back only in fragments. The poem ultimately chooses English as the language in which the speaker remembers her mother, while holding on to the difference between having one word for longing and finding many ways to long.
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That choice gives the poem its tension: language can mark distance and still become a medium for keeping someone present. The poem does not resolve the distance by claiming that one language is truer or more intimate than another.
Family, silence and loss
A mother’s self-image
“My mother did not consider herself beautiful” turns toward a mother’s experience of silence and self-image. Read alongside the opening poem, it keeps family memory close to the question of what can be said, inherited or left unspoken.
A funeral remembered through travel
In “Flights and Funerals,” the speaker connects her first flight with travelling to her grandfather’s funeral. Her father tries to reassure her, bringing a childhood journey and a family loss into the same recollection.
A childhood pond and the seasons
“Death of Lilies” recalls a childhood pond as a place where death and renewal alternate. When asked about seasons, the speaker gives an answer shaped by that memory rather than the textbook response her teacher expects. The contrast lets an intimate observation sit against a formal lesson without turning the poem into a general argument about school or nature.
Why love is compared to an Ali Sethi ghazal
In “Love is an Ali Sethi ghazal,” the speaker responds to the question “why don’t you ever write about love?” by describing love through a ghazal’s musical pacing: it begins slowly and saves its best parts for the middle. The poem calls it “both poetry and melody into one”. That line is Shruti Sonal’s, from the poem as excerpted by Scroll.in.
The comparison also suggests how meaning can gather through repeated listening: details become clearer as a song returns. The poem names Jaun Elia, Agha Shahid Ali and Shakespeare while looking back on writing about love and longing. It invokes Ali Sethi’s “Ranjish Hi Sahi” as an imagined message to someone after a long silence. These are the poem’s associations and metaphor, not a claim that every ghazal follows the same pattern.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What this excerpt says about the book
The poems reproduced in the feature suggest a collection concerned with language and intergenerational memory, a mother’s silence and self-image, bereavement, childhood, grief and love. The excerpt includes “In which language do I remember you?”, “My mother did not consider herself beautiful”, “Flights and Funerals”, “Death of Lilies” and “Love is an Ali Sethi ghazal.” These are the poems available in the excerpt, not a verified complete table of contents.
Scroll.in describes Sonal as a Delhi-based writer, poet and journalist. The page also reports that her poetry has appeared in Penguin India’s Ninety-Seven Poems, HarperCollins India’s The World That Belongs To Us and the Alipore Post’s Memories On A Plate; those credits are reported by Scroll.in here, rather than independently verified for this article.
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Readers looking for the collection can search for the exact title and author, In Which Language Do I Remember You? by Shruti Sonal. The excerpt establishes the title and publisher credit, but does not establish the book’s ISBN, format, publication date, current price, sales channels or availability.
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