The minute, true-to-life details, from which many of Arvind Krishna Mehrotra‘s poems are comprised, give his poetry a candid, documentary-like quality. The imagery which appears within Mehrotra’s work is often that of the natural world, which Mehrotra sometimes uses to draw parallels between forms of human and natural life, as in ‘Lockdown Garden’: ‘Close to each other, / socially undistanced, / the mulberry leaves, / uniformly green, / shall turn brown together’. Mehrotra makes frequent use of enjambment in his works, especially those which deal with subversive themes. ‘Engraving Of A Bison On Stone’, which contends with ideas of war and national identity, is a pertinent example of Mehrotra’s use of enjambment to create the impression of a frank – yet reflective – commentary on these emotive topics: ‘The land yields / In places, deliberately, / Having learnt warfare from the armies / It fed.’ 

Mehrotra has translated a variety of traditional Indian poetry, including the works of Kabir. His translation style, in his own words, circumvents what he finds “repetitive or formulaic”. Mehrotra’s first translation is a poem by Kabir, written circa. 15th-16th  century. Mehrotra’s frank and gritty rendering of this poem conveys a story of birth through to death, with existentialist undertones and blunt reflections about the carnality of life. The second translation by Mehrotra is a poem by Bhartrihari from c. 5th century BC. The poem sees the direct address of a deity by the poetic voice, who confronts ideas of fate and nihilism. In the audio recording, Mehrotra first reads the original poem, in Hindi, followed by his own translation. 

In The Nulla Nulla in Nullah Mehrotra describes this poem as a meditation on ‘words that are hidden inside similar sounding words’, which often have conflicting or even opposing meanings. He further highlights the existence of words which belong to more than one language, and their curious discrepancy in meaning. Mehrotra’s illustrative example of this is the titular ‘nulla nulla’, an Australian aboriginal word for hunting stick, and ‘nullah’ – a Hindustani word for stream or arm of the sea. While Laugh Club of Gandhi Park is an unvarnished snapshot of life in Gandhi Park, where Mehrotra, in his minimalistic style, evokes nuanced themes of social and economic entrapment, Lahore, is a meditation on the city where Mehrotra was born in 1947. While the former poem evokes the daily life of the park, Lahore reminiscences the nostalgia of fabled history and speaks to themes of isolation, both in in the lives of residents. For Sale or Rent is written in the style of a commercial advertisement for a home. Mehrotra utilises his stylised and clinical descriptions of this home, and its inhabitants, to highlight elements of the mundane, and even the macabre, within the realm of everyday life.