In “Adalat” [Courtroom], the opening verse of his final collection of Assamese poems, Apurna Pustak [The Incomplete Book], published posthumously following his decision to leave the world, Alakesh Kalita writes:
All words remain unresolved…
Flecks of living vapour, dinosaur-skeletons
Candles and the jade-stone goddess
The newspaper sheaths wrapping my notebooks, where many old names lie tangled in scribbles,
The impure soul, decomposed manure, seed, and semen—
Come, for much time has slipped away in uproar, now the judgement shall come from phantom melodies.
But I will go away.
I have renounced my stand, withdrawn my case from the world.
Only afterwards, after much time has passed
Read my poems,
Like the inaudible whispers trailing a bed of flowers in fading light
Read my poems.
All words remain unresolved.Footnote 1
The thematic textures of Kalita’s last book not only double back on his earlier collection of poems with contemplations on self-alienation, schizophrenia, grief, pain, abjection, and the difficulties of being a poet whose art refuses to conform to the algorithms of capitalism, but also paradoxically complete a gesture of radical incompletion.Footnote 2 By refusing to live within the bounds of normativity, Kalita enacts a protracted, contentious decision to part with the material world, leaving behind fragments of his journey in poetry. As the title of the poem suggests, Kalita imagines himself in a courtroom where his decision to depart from the world will be judged. But he no longer wishes to stand trial and face the charges, hoping that prospective readers will do justice to his writing. The haunting refrain “All words remain unresolved” enacts a crip refrain of refusal and endurance, hinting that closure is neither possible nor wholly desirable.Footnote 3
This refrain can be read as a rhetorical stance of aposiopesis, where the sentence falters, remains suspended at the edge of utterance, and turns away from completion.Footnote 4 Aposiopesis is not merely a stylistic ornamentation in The Incomplete Book. It is an embodied, rhetorical act for Kalita, a personal testament with strong political undertones. His refusal to complete the sentence approximates the impossibility of neatly narrating chronic psychic pain, his struggles with schizophrenia, and the exhaustion of remaining cohesive, productive, and hopeful under neoliberal capitalism.
As a friend with visual impairment who continues to shoulder the responsibility of translating his poems, a promise I made to Kalita when he was alive, I approach this work from within a shared crip topography. I do not claim the authority to condemn or justify his decision to die. Through this research paper, I attempt to bear witness, as a friend, translator, and scholar of disability studies, to the ephemeral traces left behind by Kalita: a life shaped by care, vulnerability, and creative persistence. In doing so, I attempt to articulate a private form of justice, one that is often overlooked within dominant disability justice frameworks: the sustained ethical attentiveness to vulnerability, care, and loss.
1. Ephemera as crip worldmaking
José Esteban Muñoz’s concept of ephemera need not be seen as an outward theoretical lens applied to the traces left behind by Kalita. Rather, it emerges organically from his poetic landscape, where affectively charged sentences embody fleeting hesitations, feelings, and experiences that disclose a life resisting the norms of able-bodied subjectivity and the disciplinary demands of neoliberal capitalism.Footnote 5 Ephemera names the fleeting gestures, residues, and afterlives through which queer identities persevere, despite their failure to register as legitimate evidence within dominant regimes of visibility.Footnote 6 These traces, such as gossip, half-remembered performances, and covert acts of care, sustain relational worlds precisely because they elude institutional recognition.Footnote 7 Ephemerality is not completely liberating, but is shaped by conditions in which certain lives cannot be fully documented, stabilized, or recognized. However, it is a necessary marker for the persistence of minoritarian existence, going beyond the limits of what can be known, preserved, or made legible within institutional frameworks.
While Muñoz harnesses the subtle strength of ephemeral traces left by queer lives as quotidian micro-gestures that sustain them in a dominant heteronormative world order, Kalita similarly mobilizes fragile residues through poems, contemplations, and relational intimacies, quietly asserting his presence against regimes of visibility and normativity.Footnote 8 The invisible yet relentless pressure to be legible as a disabled identity, as long as it is neatly defined within categories comprehensible to medical, bureaucratic, and neoliberal frameworks, makes it difficult for people with disabilities to speak outside the dominant discourse through which disability is imagined.Footnote 9 Kalita’s conversations and poems negotiate with the tyranny of visibility, which demands that individuals with disabilities speak from within the narrow confines of able-bodied legibility, foreclosing the possibility of alternative subject positions.
Reading Muñoz’s notion of ephemera alongside McRuer’s theory of compulsory able-bodiedness complicates the ways people with disabilities engage with ephemeral performances of worldmaking. In order to find access and survive stigma in a world conceived for the able-bodied, people with disabilities often require what Berne calls “fierce creativity. Because the world continues to treat us as worthless, creating new worlds is a matter of survival for us. Dreaming is a matter of survival.”Footnote 10
For Kalita, life was unbearable without poetry. It was a practice of bearing witness to his own inexplicable experiences and psychic pain, and the tortuous struggles of others, without submitting to the normative demands of coherence, productivity, or legibility. Ephemera straddles the aesthetic and the political as “alternate modes of textuality and narrativity”; “strategies of self-enactment for the minoritarian subject” which resist containment within “solid” or “rigorous” traditional scholarship.Footnote 11 It is a form of “worldmaking” for a person in order to survive, opening possibilities that are unavailable within the dominant world order.Footnote 12
Excerpt from Alakesh Kalita’s notebook. Kalita Reference Kalitan.d. Although the physical diary contains a printed calendar for the year 2004, the entries themselves are not dated by the author. Digitally reproduced from the author’s private collection, with permission from the Kalita family.
Figure 1 Long description
A photograph of a vertically oriented diary page from a printed planner. A date heading appears at the top of the page. Most of the page is filled with handwritten English text in dark ink arranged in continuous paragraphs. The cursive handwriting covers nearly the entire writing area. No illustrations or decorative elements are present. The image documents a notebook entry preserved as part of Kalita’s personal archive.
McRuer argues that the obsessive standardization of bodies through the twin ideologies of able-bodiedness and heterosexuality under neoliberal capitalism is unable to hold ground because “queer/disabled existence” refuses to “be contained.”Footnote 13 In order to grant possibilities outside of the hegemony of normalcy:
crip theory would resist delimiting the kinds of bodies and abilities that are acceptable or that will bring about change. Ideally, crip theory might function—like the term “queer” itself—“oppositionally and relationally but not necessarily substantively, not as a positivity but as a positionality, not as a thing, but as a resistance to the norm.”Footnote 14
Muñoz and McRuer both subscribe to the meaningful possibilities of inhabiting subject positions that cannot be contained, stabilized, or made legible by the dominant grammar of existence. Yet these possibilities do not resolve the tensions of disabled embodiment. Read through McRuer, ephemerality remains in perpetual friction with normativity, revealing how certain forms of psychic pain and impairment exceed both social construction and representational frameworks. By embracing the non-teleological nature of psychic pain and espousing a relational ethics through poetry and thriving amidst invisible kinship networks against the visible politics of neoliberal identification, Kalita leaves behind ephemeral traces of endurance. These traces reconfigure disability justice as care, interdependence, and affective sensitivity towards a world that is “not yet here” but that we can begin to “imagine and inhabit” through the “performatively polyvalent” space of the poem.Footnote 15
I want to think through the residual traces left behind by Kalita as a form of counter-evidence to the ableist mandate of productivity, a fragile constellation of crip ephemera. The memories, conversations, text messages, and scribbled notes left behind by Kalita, coupled with the testimonies from his family, friends, and the poets and intellectuals of Assam with whom he forged literary intimacies, form a dense archive of serious introspection about the role of poetry in a world driven by the cogwheels of profit and loss. Although he traces the contours of his struggles with mental illness through poetry, Kalita’s poems move well beyond the bounds of illness, going towards broader ethical and aesthetic questions. His poems resist becoming about schizophrenia in any stable way.
Kalita pays attention to the narratives that remain even when the life from which they emerged is forgotten, holding their fragments as a form of quiet witnessing, the ephemera of a life lived.Footnote 16 Yet Kalita’s notion of poetry is not a collection of disembodied fragments free from lived experience. He writes:
I have been scribbling things akin to poetry my whole life. As if suddenly, at this confounding juncture, with dim perception, I see for the first time flashes of a miraculous truth—as if, poetry for every poet, is either a secretly entitled gift or an open democracy. As if the thorny beatings of my heart tick away like a clock for others; as if my first love, my agony, even my drops of blood are not purely mine. As if I remember everything with sharp clarity—the birthdays, the funeral rites, elections, Parag Kumar Das, Rohan, Uma and schizophrenia…as if one day you scribbled something on my diary in red ink; as if after a political murder, policemen relentlessly searched my hardened self for clues. As if I cling onto all these as a secret and personal nostalgia…I have not written an autobiography, but poetry. Yet amid the shifting coordinates of space, time and reality that shape the few poems I have written, the bewildering truth I have discovered is this: the narrator that has emerged is warmed by my own drops of blood.Footnote 17
Kalita suggests that although his writing does not fall within the strict confines of the autobiographical genre, his poetry is shaped by intensely personal experiences. His musings repeatedly turn to the subjunctive “as if,” espousing a grammar of glimpses and gestures, as memory flickers between clarity and dissolution. These are not the materials of a coherent autobiography. Muñoz reminds us that ephemera does not seek stability or proof; it gets overlooked “because it is needed to stand against the harsh lights of mainstream visibility and the political tyranny of the fact.”Footnote 18
The “drops of blood” that warm the narrator evoke a lingering transience of materiality rooted in the region and culture of Assam. Kalita’s invocation of Parag Kumar Das, alongside intimate markers such as first love, family rituals, and schizophrenia, anchors psychic pain firmly within an Assamese political landscape. Das was a journalist and human rights activist who was assassinated in Guwahati in 1996.Footnote 19 He remains a charged figure in Assam’s collective memory, emblematic of state violence, insurgency, and the precarity of dissenting lives.Footnote 20 Kalita’s poetry obliquely collapses the boundary between personal distress and regional histories of fear, surveillance, and loss. Psychic pain in Kalita’s writing moves beyond insularity and medicalization, gesturing towards the textures of a place marked by political mourning and unresolved violence.
Read through the disability justice framework, this gesture resists isolating mental illness from its sociopolitical context.Footnote 21 Kalita’s metaphor of being searched by the police after a political murder echoes the scrutiny imposed on vulnerable and dissident subjects alike, where interiority becomes suspect and must be explained. Kalita weaves an ephemeral record of his life and disability, along with the weight of Assam’s unfinished histories, circulating as affective residue rather than formal documentation.
Kalita’s refusal to write a traditional autobiography allows these memories to persist without being stabilized or resolved. Through poetry, Kalita seeks to offer a private, relational space of deep engagement and solidarity, which may not overtly look like a protest, manifesto, or policy demand, but quietly enacts the principles of disability justice by centring care, vulnerability, and interdependence as political gestures in themselves. Kalita treats poets as “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”Footnote 22
To understand the indispensable role of poetry in Kalita’s life, and the kind of poetry he composed to articulate serious existential concerns that speak to the discourse of disability justice and beyond, it is crucial to foreground the care networks that sustained him and made the writing of such poetry possible. This prepares the ground for understanding how care operates in the context of Assam, where survival often depends on informal networks of family, friendship, and shared attention rather than on state-supported welfare structures or comprehensive mental health services.Footnote 23
2. Crip solidarities
2.1. Auto/ethnography, kinship, and the ethics of witnessing
I want to briefly reflect on the possibilities as well as risks that auto/ethnography brings to the epistemic–ontological table of disability justice.Footnote 24 How it reshapes what we know about living with disabilities, how we come to know it, and what forms of being and relationality are rendered possible or vulnerable through such storytelling. To speak about disability justice is to disrupt capitalism’s false ideal of independence, making room for interdependence, mutual care, and embodied vulnerability.Footnote 25
In the disability justice framework articulated by Sins Invalid, there is a commitment to recognizing wholeness, interdependence, and cross-disability solidarity.Footnote 26 Kalita’s life and poetry cannot be reduced to a diagnostic label; it needs space to breathe through its “history and life experience.”Footnote 27 Kalita’s traces emerge from a specific ecology of local rootedness, sustained by family, friendship, and literary solidarity, yet they carry the potential to travel outward to a global readership.
Writing about Alakesh da informs my ongoing PhD on disability life-writing, just as my doctoral work shapes how I approach his life and writings.Footnote 28 I am learning to recognize the power imbalances inherent in representing another person’s life, especially when the writer/researcher is nondisabled and the subject depicted is in a dependent position due to disability or is deceased.Footnote 29 Writing such stories without sensitivity risks misrepresentation through ableist frameworks, believing one is giving voice while doing harm.Footnote 30
I do not disagree with the power hierarchy implicit in writing about Kalita, as he is no longer with me. However, entirely refusing to engage with a story altogether can also mean silencing it, foreclosing the very possibilities of witnessing that disability justice calls for.Footnote 31 Regarding the importance of finding a valuable readership, Kalita texted me on WhatsApp:
You see why I crave for an [unusual] reader?…[It is] never about prosperity dost. It is my ideology to not write only for my own pleasures, definitely partially my own satisfaction matters. But I look for something in each poem that would matter to someone else, be it the pleasure of a new figurative or a message as a whole, most often a possible ideology one or another can stand for. That is why casual and easy appreciations [do not] inspire me. Only one or two readers with deep excavations into them, [that is] what inspires me.Footnote 32
For honouring Kalita’s life and work, I look at narratives on disability and illness that may not fully mitigate the risks of writing through alterity but function as radical acts of grieving, memorializing, and bearing witness to social injustice.Footnote 33 My own position within this case study is not neutral, but it is self-reflexive. I write as a scholar-friend with my own invisible disability of retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative eye condition that was diagnosed in 2012. Like Kalita, I do not “appear” disabled in the way the gaze of the “normate” expects, and I often evade the intrusive stare that makes visibly disabled people hypervisible. Footnote 34 Yet this also makes it difficult to explain my access needs. Like Kalita, I inhabit a “bodymind” whose impairment is “not exactly ‘visible’ or ‘invisible,’ but intermittently apparent.”Footnote 35
My disability is rarely obvious in brightly lit environments but starkly felt in dim spaces where I stumble and appear clumsy. My own condition allows me to understand the social misconceptions surrounding visual impairment. For most people, “Blindness is often perceived by the sighted as an either/or condition: one sees or does not see.”Footnote 36 However, through my own disability, I have come to understand vision as a spectrum of differences, bringing its own affective and somatic perceptions that a medical diagnosis is unable to fully account for. This is exactly why “If disabled people were truly heard, an explosion of knowledge of the human body and psyche would take place.”Footnote 37
In the context of psychiatric disabilities, a prevailing misconception holds that subjects are incapable of rhetorically articulating their own subject positions.Footnote 38 Kalita’s rhetorical capacity and contribution to Assamese literature negate this ableist assumption. Our crip kinship emerged from overlapping yet non-identical experiences of being neither fully legible as disabled nor fully assimilable within the social folds of normativity; an instance of crip solidarity.Footnote 39
Through this solidarity, which I still experience as a visceral pull of memory and sensations, I read the traces left behind by Kalita, not to turn him into a provincial symbol of “the schizophrenic poet,” but through the notion of ethical singularity.Footnote 40 I resist the temptation of turning Kalita’s life into a universal allegory, insisting on his particularized embodiment. Remembering Kalita becomes an affective–political act of inhabiting what remains unresolved, holding him in relational crip time, “listening to the broken languages of our bodies, translating them, honouring their words.”Footnote 41
In writing about Kalita, I also confront the intricate and non-linear emotional terrain of bereavement that disrupts neat stages of grief and narrative closure.Footnote 42 Autoethnographic engagement with traumatic loss is disorderly, filled with loops, stalled meaning-making, and unpredictable affective eruptions.Footnote 43
There is guilt too; guilt for leaving planned projects unfinished; for not archiving his creativity and illness the way we imagined; and for writing after his death when he can no longer contest my interpretations. My old phone is filled with his WhatsApp messages. There are notes on his poetic inspiration; long exchanges of my translations filled with encouragement and critique; and tender discussions on mental illness. This essay does not aim to memorialize him by constructing a coherent story but to hold him ethically in unresolved, relational time.
2.2. Care networks and relational justice
To formulate a more inclusive model of disability justice means a refusal to relegate interdependence to a footnote, but instead requires looking deeply into the faultlines of the traditional social model, which, in seeking autonomy for people with disabilities, often sidelines caregiving.Footnote 44 Disability studies emphasizes autonomy, while care research examines formal and informal networks where caregiver and receiver establish reciprocal bonds that are complex and context-dependent.Footnote 45
The reluctance to find common ground between issues of disability justice and caregiving is understandable, given histories of institutionalization, paternalism, and coercive dependency that have systematically stripped disabled people of agency in the name of care.Footnote 46 Yet while attending to social discrimination, there is also the need to deal with the reality of impairment, acknowledging that pain in itself can sometimes be intolerable.Footnote 47 For people with certain forms of impairment, pain can be unbearable, “[impelling] one to self-injure or to consider or attempt suicide.”Footnote 48
Disability studies’ strong rejection of cure, framed as resistance to biomedical dominance, risks producing a new normative hierarchy, a “disabled normate,” that leaves little space for people who require medical intervention to speak about lived, subjective pain.Footnote 49 Kalita’s condition highlights those aspects of pain which do not come from social structures alone, but from the invisible and acute distress that emanates from within one’s corporeality, something that disability justice frameworks require us to deliberate upon. To witness Kalita’s story ethically is to remain beside his traces and to foreground the care networks that sustained him and made the articulation of invisible pain possible. It will show how care shifts from being an informal mode of assistance to an empathetic, radical act of disability justice.Footnote 50
The notion of care in India is complex, uneven, and does not correspond to dominant Western models of caregiving.Footnote 51 The management of disability within families unfolds through continuous interaction with a range of institutions, including medicine, the state, and civil society organizations.Footnote 52 Empirical studies of the interface between families and institutions such as hospitals reveal how familial logics shape and configure formal processes within the care sector, giving the care economy a pronounced character of informality.Footnote 53 This points to the messy and negotiated terrain of care work in Indian social life, where the idea of the “modern institution,” such as a comprehensive welfare system formally assuming caregiving responsibilities, remains largely absent.Footnote 54
Kalita’s family and friends became his greatest support, filling the void left by uneven medical infrastructures and the societal stigma that often renders people with psychiatric disabilities invisible within the narrow definition of productivity and success under neoliberal capitalism. His story shows how care requires the acknowledgement of mutual interdependence and the fragility of our bodies, and is tied to survivability.Footnote 55 It necessitates looking outside institutional apathy and social stigma towards constructing informal support systems attuned to the contingencies of the body and its fluctuating needs. The semi-structured interviews I conducted with Kalita’s grieving parents, his elder sister, two poet friends, and psychologist Preeta Basu foreground a relational dynamic of remembrance.
Alakesh Kalita was the youngest child of three children born to Mr Phani Kalita and Mrs Pramila Kalita. Mr and Mrs Kalita recount the health issues Kalita experienced shortly after his birth.Footnote 56 Kalita was unable to digest his mother’s milk after birth. Until the age of 5, he suffered recurring bouts of high fever almost every alternate month. His parents would stay awake with him, applying jolpoti. Footnote 57 When his temperature rose to 102 degrees, they administered antibiotics as instructed by the doctors. They now wonder if prolonged use of antibiotics affected him, yet at the time, they felt helpless. His condition improved only after his sulakoron, though he continued to stammer until Class 9.Footnote 58 His parents believe the medications contributed to the stammering and encouraged him to take up poetry recitation to improve his fluency. Kalita took to poetry recitation with diligence and gradually became adept at extempore speeches. A speech he gave on Parag Das, the human rights activist of Assam gunned down by militants (which is mentioned earlier), made him well known in school.
While looking back at their son’s past as a thoughtful and popular student of Assam Jatiya Bidyalay, they recall a vivid episode when Kalita tried to leave home. After performing poorly in a mathematics exam, he was devastated and frightened of facing his father. Kalita was running away to the zoo when he was spotted by a teacher who convinced him to come back. Spiritual and sensitive by temperament, Kalita was wounded by harsh remarks. He was deeply fond of nature and could spend hours observing the secret life of trees. This sensibility flows into his poetry.
During his higher secondary education, Kalita struggled. Coming from an Assamese-medium background, he was made to feel inadequate in a tuition class where snide remarks were made about his English-speaking skills. His batchmates were mostly from English-medium schools, who were condescending towards him. The tutor, too, did not try to create a conducive learning environment for Kalita. Kalita was also unhappy with the college he had enrolled in, disappointed that he could not secure a seat at the prestigious Cotton College of Guwahati, now Cotton University.
Kalita confessed to his father that he could no longer bear the college environment he was in or the tutor from his tuition class. His father did not try to impose his views upon him. He tried to listen to Kalita and understand his perspective. During this period of distress, Kalita wrote incessantly, trying to make sense of his inner turmoil. His father believes this may have been the starting point of his poetic journey.
They remember a day early in the morning, shortly before an environmental science exam, when Kalita was beside himself. He kept rambling about bringing a girl home and could not be consoled. Soon after, he ran out of the house. His father and elder brother followed him. His mother emphasizes the terrifying moments that ensued as she waited alone for her son to return. Too afraid to alert neighbours, and unable to leave the house. To their relief, Kalita had gone to someone they knew. This person was a driver whom Kalita trusted. Kalita kept telling him that he did not want to return home and pleaded to be taken to the hostel. But the driver’s words convinced him, and he was safely escorted back home.
What followed this episode, however, was a moment of rupture. Kalita, who was usually very careful about cleanliness, started bathing from a bucket used for other purposes. His elder brother, who was earlier sceptical about Kalita, realized that he required care.
Kalita’s elder sister Jyotsna rushed to his aid with her husband, and she realized that urgent medical help was necessary.Footnote 59 They were very close as kids: reading books together, sharing each other’s secrets, and being each other’s confidants. Jyotsna talks about the literary environment in her family, which allowed her and her siblings to read freely and express their thoughts. The substantial age gap between her and Kalita made her more like a maternal figure to him.
Kalita was initially diagnosed with “erotomania.” The strong medication that was prescribed made him feel very lethargic. So, another doctor was consulted, which led to the diagnosis of schizophrenia. Jyotsna remarks that in that diagnostic moment, the affective weight of the doctor’s words was overwhelming, and that the way she knew their lives was completely changed.
Shortly after his diagnosis, Jyotsna and her husband introduced Kalita to art, filling his room with paints and brushes. This gesture offered a healing touch as Kalita found inspiration on the canvas. The artwork used on the cover page of his poetry collection Parasmriti [Beyond Memory] was created by him during this period. Jyotsna also introduced him to the eminent Assamese poet Nilamani Phukan for guidance and inspiration.
Alakesh Kalita, cover illustration of Parasmriti, Reference Kalita2021. Source: Kalita Reference Kalita2021. Reproduced with permission from the publisher.
Figure 2 Long description
The image reproduces the cover of the poetry collection Parasmriti. The composition consists of irregular abstract colour fields in green, yellow, purple, black, orange, and pink. Near the centre is a light-coloured rectangular panel containing the Assamese title of the book and the author’s name. The artwork is non-representational and emphasizes colour, shape, and contrast rather than identifiable figures or objects.
Jyotsna started sensitizing her family. Her parents bought books on schizophrenia and started reading them. She strongly disapproved of anyone calling her brother unwell in front of him. She started taking her financial role seriously in order to support her brother, although she was herself in a precarious position, balancing care for her brother, sensitizing others, and surviving a difficult marriage. Her in-laws were classists who looked down upon her family. Eventually, she decided to opt for separation. Jyotsna continues to feel a sense of guilt and wonders whether her decision to move out of the family home to pursue her education and career contributed to Kalita’s feelings of isolation.
Kalita lost a year of education as he adjusted to medication that made him sleepy and aloof. After his first suicide attempt, which landed him in the ICU, Jyotsna took him to social psychologist Preeta Basu in Mumbai for counselling. Upon evaluation, Kalita was found to be articulate and intelligent and he did not appear to be a “textbook case” of schizophrenia. However, Basu cautioned Jyotsna about the medication’s “positive side effects.”Footnote 60 His sense of anhedonia was connected to this and would not go away as long as he remained on medication.
While typical symptoms of schizophrenia had reduced, depression, anxiety, and OCD showed up in the evaluation. Basu informed Jyotsna that the latest development at that time was an injectable treatment that needed to be administered four times a week. This reduced the psychological burden of having to see oneself as a patient through the daily ritual of medication. Jyotsna initially contemplated this scenario. However, in Guwahati, where Kalita lived, this facility was unavailable. His consulting psychiatrist there stated that it would not be possible to continue seeing Kalita if Jyotsna chose to proceed with the injections. As a result, the plan was dropped.
Whenever the suicidal tendency surfaced, Kalita would ask his family to be around for support.Footnote 61 His parents reflected upon his enchantment with the idea of being Uma’s life partner.Footnote 62 During Shivratri, he became agitated, finding the sound and sight of celebration unbearable.Footnote 63 His sister does not read this only as a symptom of schizophrenia but as a subjective insight that mattered to him.Footnote 64 In his reality, divine union was about keeping balance in the world intact.Footnote 65 This perception flows into his poetic landscape.
Since Kalita was spiritually inclined from an early age, his father tried to alleviate his distress by initiating him into Krishna bhakti. Footnote 66 This allowed Kalita to feel calm and content. Kalita also spent time with his father at the namghar, intently listening to the Bhagavata Purana and the Naam Ghosa. Footnote 67
Whenever he struggled to continue, Kalita’s mother encouraged him to record his feelings, invoking Sylvia Plath as an example of turning turmoil into lasting work. In the days preceding his death, as his mental state worsened, he was taken to his regular psychiatrist. Kalita found courage and hope in his treatment. Kalita informed him that his suicidal tendencies were becoming difficult to overcome. The doctor responded that Kalita was already on the best possible medication available and there were no more drugs left to prescribe.
Even though his parents still struggle to comprehend his suicide, they are trying to accept his decision. During my final meeting with Kalita, he remarked that whatever he had to say through his poems, he had already said. His work in the world was over. His parents told me he had said the same to them. They insist that psychiatric disability must be met with empathy, letting the child speak freely and loving him without judgement. Their views foreground a disability justice grounded not in public protest but in relational endurance.
Kalita found deep repose in the company of eminent and prolific Assamese poet Nilim Kumar, who witnessed in his writing a mode of thinking that distinguished his work from that of his contemporaries.Footnote 68 Poetry, for Kalita, was as essential as breathing, an indispensable medium through which he articulated turmoil, distress, and inner restlessness. Parasmriti, Kumar’s favourite among Kalita’s collections, still lies beside his bed.
Kumar notes that Kalita often wrote as if attempting to rediscover himself through memory, fearing that he might otherwise fade away. His poetry drew deeply from lived experience; moments of personal injury or emotional rupture were distilled and sedimented into verse, making poetry, for Kalita, a form of autobiographical truth, one that must nevertheless be approached with care.
Kalita was very fond of company and resisted the insularity of modern life. Kumar cautions against reading his eventual death solely through the symptomatic lens of schizophrenia. It would be misleading to polarise sociability and alienation. A person may appear socially embedded and still be suffering internally. The interior life of a person remains fundamentally opaque. Kalita’s work, influenced in part by Eastern European poetry, brings a melancholic undertone and a new linguistic register into Assamese poetry. To read, translate, and speak about his work, Kumar suggests, is one way of preserving an epistemology of disability that might otherwise be lost.
Young Assamese poet Dweep Raaz, whose poems have appeared in several reputed Assamese literary magazines and who is active in the regional literary scene, reminisces about his friendship with Kalita. Dweep Raaz, who works as a government school teacher, first encountered Kalita during the publication of his own poetry collection Neel Nakshatra [The Blue Constellation].Footnote 69 His poem “Raavan” had appeared in an Assamese magazine, following which Kalita contacted him using the phone number provided in the contact details. They later met at the bookfair and shared tea at a well-known local stall, bhontir dukan.
Dweep Raaz recalls having recited Kalita’s poetry for Akashbani and notes that Kalita may have been among the first young Assamese poets whose collection, Nisfol Utsob [Fruitless Festival], was released through the radio.Footnote 70 He also reflects that he was unaware of Kalita’s psychiatric diagnosis until much later. Based on their early interactions, he could never have imagined that Kalita was living with schizophrenia. At times, however, Kalita posed unsettling questions, once telling him that he wished to experience the act of dying, and on another occasion asking what it truly meant to attain God.
According to Dweep Raaz, Kalita’s poetry was deeply shaped by the social consciousness of his time, with the personal and the political remaining inseparable. He believes that poetry was what sustained Kalita, an all-consuming passion that kept him alive. Dweep Raaz also speaks of Kalita’s unfulfilled dream of opening a karmashala (workshop) for poets. Drawing a parallel with English novelist D. H. Lawrence, whose poetry was marginalized for departing from dominant formal conventions, he suggests that Kalita too was deprived of the recognition he deserved. He believes Kalita deserves posthumous acclaim because of his unparalleled craftsmanship and utmost dedication to Assamese poetry.
I had the opportunity to talk to social psychologist Preeta Basu, thanks to Kalita’s sister Jyotsna.Footnote 71 Basu remarks that by the time Kalita came to her for counselling, he had adjusted to his medications and made peace with his condition.Footnote 72 He had accepted his delusions and hallucinations instead of resisting them. Basu notes that the social stigma surrounding mental illness in India has begun to lift. She feels that more than schizophrenia, depression may have contributed to Kalita’s decision to end his life. We will never know the truth behind his decision, but we should try to respect it.
2.3. The poetics of Alakesh Kalita
Kay Ulanday Barrett writes in the context of disabled poets: “If we made more of our poetry and art spaces accessible, if we invested in caring for the poet more than their output or productivity, how would it change people’s experiences of poetry and of nature?”Footnote 73
Kalita’s work pleads for attending not only to poetry as an aesthetic object but also to the poet labouring quietly within the unseen registers of life. He does not claim ownership over his poems as expressions of isolated individuality. Instead, his poetry emerges through relationality, where meaning is co-produced with readers who encounter and carry it forward.Footnote 74 In this sense, his poems resist commodification; they yearn to exist as offerings rather than products. This ethos resonates with Tamiko Beyer’s reflection: “The only claim I have to these poems is the same claim that a riverbed has to the water that flows over its mud… They are only mine to give away.”Footnote 75
Kalita’s poetry exceeds diagnostic registers of mental illness. Rooted in the Assamese language and cultural memory, his poems use metaphor and spiritual imagery to render psychic pain without reducing it to pathology. His poems do not seek to render his life fully legible or resolved. Rather, they record modes of living with psychiatric disability that resist neoliberal demands for productivity, coherence, and narrative closure.
In 2012, when his first collection Bhaskar [Sculptor] was published, Assamese readers realized that a serious wordsmith had arrived in the conflict-ridden state. In this collection, stone and sculptor become the overarching trope. Kalita transforms the stone’s inertness into a living alchemy, a civilizational testament of universal suffering:
I shall first have to teach you, O stone,
That you must not look away
From people and their astonishing grief.
For in this world, the only thing a carved stone ever truly knows
Is the sorrow that clings to humanity.Footnote 76
Kalita’s appeal to the stone may itself be read as an ephemeral gesture: a minor residue through which a marginalized subject inscribes evidence of lived experience. While resurrecting vulnerable positions, Kalita desires to instil in the Assamese language an idiom of alterity, strongly inspired by Eastern European poetry’s themes of alienation, trauma, and exile. In the long list of poets he sent me on WhatsApp, Blaže Koneski, Fatos Arapi, Mateja Matevski, Mak Dizdar, Lyubomir Levchev, Vasko Popa, and Bulat Okudzhava stand out as voices that spoke to him, names largely absent from mainstream literary discourse.Footnote 77 Across Eastern Europe and the Balkans, these poets used poetry to articulate linguistic, cultural, political, and existential marginality that dominant regimes erased. Kalita’s work resonates through that broader constellation, turning poetry into a cultural safeguard.
While the disability justice framework of Sins Invalid foregrounds anti-medicalization and anti-capitalism, Kalita’s life and poetry reveal the caveats of uncritically importing such frameworks into India’s Northeast.Footnote 78 Here, access to healthcare may become a primary political demand, not only a site of oppression. Care may rely on kinship networks rather than institutions. Spirituality and local cosmologies intrinsic to the region might deeply shape experiences of illness. For instance, in his poem “Schizophrenia,” Kalita employs two distinct voices that offer a general perception of the condition while simultaneously provincializing it through reference to the Amida Buddha. The first voice is imposing and catastrophic:
Do you have the strength to contain the madness of all creation?
Can you carry within you
The burning heat of hell?
The cold-world music of hell’s countless insects?
…
No, you do not have to keep fighting like this
You merely have to keep living like this.
…
At the end, if I can gain your trust
The secret will be yours.Footnote 79
The responding voice retreats inward:
I take refuge in Amida Buddha! I take refuge in Amida Buddha
I shut my eyes for a while
And he thought
I gave my consent.Footnote 80
The first voice resembles social demand, medical authority, or normative expectation seeking quantification of suffering. The second voice refuses self-exposure, perhaps a survival tactic, a crip refusal to become a diagnostic artifact. The poem stages the ethics of legibility: what is demanded, what is withheld, and what cannot be translated. If poetry is marginalized in a neoliberal, profit-driven world, and Assam itself is peripheral within the Indian nation-state, then what does it mean for someone like Kalita to write a poem on schizophrenia? His poems provincialize Western understandings of mental illness while retaining universal affect. They resist both the inspirational crip narrative and the pathological containment narrative. They do not tidy distress into redemption.
Nilima Thakuriya Haque. Portrait of Alakesh Kalita with the Titles of his Poetry Collections and Traces of his Poems, Reference Haquen.d. [Author’s Private Collection]. Sketch is uploaded on the AK Foundation Trust Website: https://alakeshkalita.com/biography/. Reproduced with permission.
Figure 3. Long description
A monochrome hand-drawn portrait depicts Alakesh Kalita from the chest upward, facing the viewer. He wears rectangular glasses, a moustache, and a collared shirt. Handwritten Assamese words and phrases are arranged around his head in a circular pattern. These inscriptions reference titles of his poetry collections and traces of his writings. The portrait combines a visual likeness of the poet with textual elements associated with his literary work.
Kalita’s semantic framework counters the neoliberal demand for coherence and productivity, allowing poetic language to witness psychic distress, weariness, and endurance without translating them into redemptive or instrumental narratives. This alternative idiom draws on what Kalita imagines as an “extra-linguistic” capacity, available only in poetry, through which a sense of “foreverism” emerges—an imagined space of possibilities where poets from different times gather in a shared courtyard to recite poetry.Footnote 81 For Kalita, the question was not whether poetry had a future, but whether poetry constituted the only possible future for interrogating the symbolic hegemony of language.Footnote 82
In his poem “A Young Poet,” Nilim Kumar captures the hesitant, ephemeral traces of Kalita with his signature style of brevity and affective constraint:
I lay down on the bed, unable to stay or rise
Unsure to look out of the window
I lay there gazing at the sky.
I was vacant, thinking and unthinking.
I saw through the window few crows
and kites flying in hesitation!
I stood by the window
Hoping to get a better view.
All my life, my beloved was the kite.
But from today, I have grown fonder of
The crows. At that very instant
Alakesh Kalita rang me
A young poet.Footnote 83
Without poetry, there is no Alakesh Kalita.
3. Witnessing the Unresolved
This self-reflexive case study does not attempt to render Kalita’s life fully legible or resolved. It attends to the precarity of ephemera, the intimate networks of family and friendship, and the poetry of Alakesh Kalita to articulate an alternative form of disability justice that is grounded in care, intimacy, and attentiveness rather than recovery, productivity, or moral resolution. Kalita’s refrain, “All words remain unresolved,” does not defeat justice.Footnote 84 It reframes it. It asks us to treat unresolvedness not as failure but as an ethical condition of witnessing psychiatric disability, grief, and artistic creation.
Acknowledgements
The author thanks the two anonymous reviewers for their generous feedback on the article. Particular thanks to Alakesh Kalita’s family for their full support. All mistakes that remain are his own.
Author contribution
Conceptualization, Investigation, Writing—original draft, Writing—review and editing: K.K.
Financial support
The author received no funding for the publication of this article.
Conflicts of interests
The author reports no competing interests.
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