“Migration shifts your relationship to home forever. You can visit the same house, walk the same streets, smell the same rain, but it is never quite the same because you are no longer the same.” Shilpa Wason
For poet and writer Shilpa Taneja Wason, these words are not just a reflection on memory but the heart of her debut collection, What the Suitcase Still Holds. Born in India and now based in Australia, her 21 poems linger in the spaces between belonging and exile, love and guilt, presence and absence. Shilpa Wason
Shilpa moved to Australia about a decade ago, drawn by professional opportunities and the desire to expand her worldview. “Migration gave me a chance to grow in ways I couldn’t have imagined back then,” she recalls. “If given the chance again, I would absolutely make the move, though perhaps I’d carry it with a lighter grip, not to grow roots in one soil alone but to keep travelling, learning, and weaving different places into my story.”
That weaving is evident in her poetry, which she describes as an ode to the Welsh word Hiraeth, a longing for a home that no longer exists. “When I first came across the word, my immediate reaction was disbelief—how could language possibly hold so many emotional states within a single word? Yet it did. It captured what I had been carrying all along but didn’t know how to name.”
Grief, home and longing to belong
The collection opens with a poem about a suitcase never unpacked, a symbol of both memory and migration. “That suitcase is both literal and symbolic. It is a metaphor for everything migration asks you to carry but never fully resolve. Inside are things I no longer use in my life here, yet I can’t bring myself to discard them. It feels like a museum of my life: fragments of a self that once existed, suspended in limbo.” Shilpa Wason
Her jumble of prized possessions within this metaphorical suitcase consists of forgotten histories and parallel realities. Her poetry is weighed with the sadness of what could have been.
the scent of my mother’s food,
the softness of her hands.
A sari I swore I’d wear someday.
My grandmother’s bangles.
Letters in a language
I don’t write in now.
Her work also confronts the quiet guilt of distance: missed funerals and absent goodbyes. “Grief that is divided by oceans carries a weight of its own,” she says. “You live with the knowledge that you cannot always be there—not for the final breaths, not for the rituals that mark closure, not even for the simple act of holding a hand. For me, writing became the only way to live with that.”
That writing, though deeply personal, speaks to a collective story. “We carry the guilt of leaving, the longing for home, the invisible labour of belonging, and the pressure to succeed, so we can justify the sacrifices made in some way. In that sense, my story is not mine alone. In the poem, ‘I am every immigrant,’ acknowledge that what feels deeply personal is also profoundly collective.”
Her poems also trace an inheritance of displacement, linking her own migration to her grandparents’ memory of Partition. “Displacement doesn’t end with the generation that lives it; it ripples through silence, through absence, through fragments of stories told and untold. The ache of exile is not just emotional, it is cellular. It is carried across generations in our bodies, in our memories, and in the way we learn to love or fear losing homes—almost a haunting that repeats itself.”
“Growing up, I heard only some stories of my grandparents’ experiences of Partition, yet even in what was left unsaid, I could feel the weight of their loss. Years later, when I migrated myself, that inherited ache rose to the surface, as if their displacement was somehow braided into my own,” she says.
Honouring roots and routes of migration
In ‘The Alien,’ she explores subtle and everyday exclusions. “Exclusion rarely announces itself loudly… More often, it hides in the small silences: the pause when someone hears your accent, the invisible boundary between belonging and otherness. For me, poetry isn’t about resistance or reclaiming—it is about honouring myself exactly where I am.”
In her poem ‘Homeless’ Wason portrays an immigrant who has consciously internalised their own “otherness.”
Too foreign here,
too foreign there.
My accent shapeshifts
depending on the room.
I pause before pronouncing
my name.
Her poems move between Delhi streets and Australia’s landscapes. “Delhi’s everyday chaos and Australia’s vastness both leave their imprint. My poems try to honour that overlap in the way memory insists on carrying one place into another, until belonging feels less like choosing and more like holding both at once.”
Asked which the most difficult poem to write was, Shilpa reveals, it was ‘I Did Not Say Goodbye’, drawing memories from the COVID years. “It was painfully personal. I had to say a final goodbye to someone who mattered deeply to me over a video call, knowing I would never see them again in person. That moment of being oceans away, of grieving alone, marked me in ways I’m still processing. Writing the poem was traumatic, but it was also the only way I knew how to honour that loss.”
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