The Literary Mirror

Anand returns, in a different register from A Field Guide to Heartbreak, with a book-length narrative poem tracking a single almirah — sold, inherited, sold again — across sixty years and three owning families who never meet each other on the page.

The verse is plainer than his lyric work, closer to prose broken into lines than to song, a choice that suits the furniture-catalogue structure but occasionally flattens moments that might have benefited from more music.

The final movement, in which the almirah is finally broken up for scrap wood, is genuinely moving without straining for the effect. The Weight of Empty Almirahs is a minor-key book that earns its quiet ending.

“Anand's second entry this year proves the almirah is having a moment in Indian letters, deservedly.”