Perhaps the most unsettling thing about home is that one can love it deeply and still ask it to become something else.
A woman can belong to her homeland, love its mountains and inherit its memories, yet still find herself longing for a world where she can simply exist.
That tension runs through Homesick for Another World, the debut poetry collection by Themreichon Leisan, officially released in New Delhi on September 17. The book does not merely ask where home is, but what kind of world allows a woman to feel at home in her own existence.
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In conversation with Ukhrul Times, Themreichon Leisan shares that she does not question that world through a vocabulary of revolt so much as through a quiet challenge to systems already made familiar. “I want people to ponder,” she says, hoping readers will pause before they decide what the poems mean. She does not promise them a happy read either. The collection, she warns, is melancholic, born largely from sadness and difficult experiences, but it is written in the hope that its sadness will make readers reflect, feel and recognise something of themselves.
Much of that recognition comes through women whose lives are not necessarily Leisan’s own. Her poems speak of mothers, children, grandparents, marriage and the constraints placed upon women, drawing not only from autobiography but from lived experiences witnessed and absorbed vicariously, over time. Her writing becomes a way of inhabiting lives beyond her own.
At the centre of that writing is a demand that appears deceptively simple: to be allowed to be human before being required to perform womanhood.
“I hate the word resilient,” she says. “I don’t want to be resilient anymore. I don’t want to endure anymore. I don’t want to bend anymore. I just want to be me.”
WHERE TO FIND THE BOOK: The book is available at Prologue Bookstore & Library in Ukhrul. It stocks books and also ships across India.
For Leisan, patriarchy is not solely an abstract structure. It is visible in the expectations surrounding a woman from before she is even born—the quiet hope that a child conceived will be a son, the greater celebration that can accompany a boy’s birth, and the expectations placed upon a girl that may follow her through marriage, motherhood and old age. She also questions the social pressure surrounding the biological clock, arguing for greater room for women who may imagine lives outside the timelines society has prescribed for them.
Her feminism, however, is not framed as a rejection of men, but as a call to unlearn inherited privilege and suppression. Men, she argues, can unlearn the advantages patriarchy has normalised for them; women, too, can unlearn the conditions that have taught them to endure. “Where they come from is something which we can unlearn and relearn,” she says.
That perspective also challenges the idea that feminism is merely a Western-borrowed language. If questions of women’s freedom, identity and dignity arise from the lived realities of women in a small, geographically neglected community, then the questions clearly existed before the terminology arrived. For Leisan, the need is not for women to become more acceptable to society, but for society to reconsider what it has demanded of women.
Her journey towards the book itself was similarly intentional. A lifelong reader, Leisan traces her reading habit to childhood, when her father brought home magazines, dictionaries and encyclopaedias. Oliver Twist was her first classic. Years later, after studying journalism in Bangalore and English literature at the University of Delhi, reading remained central to her life.
Her When Belonging Is Not Enough: Themreichon Leisan’s Homesick for Another World grew from that same impulse—not simply to display books, but to read them and articulate what they made her think. She intentionally makes time to read, and intentionally sets aside money to buy books. The distinction matters to her because she sees the limited reach of her Bookstagram audience as one evidence that her community is still not a strong reading community.
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“If we are not reading, how will we write?” she asks. And for her, reading others’ works is also a way of eventually writing about oneself: “We have to read about others in order to write about us.”
Homesick for Another World is therefore not an abrupt arrival. The book exists because of what Leisan calls “many quiet pushes”—the encouragement of people around her, her younger self, years of reading and the persistent desire to write. Its release may have been public, but the making of it was gradual.
The collection begins with “Mother” and ends with “This Is How We Win”—a movement Themreichon Leisan herself recognised only after the book was arranged. Between the two lies grief, memory, womanhood and despair, but also the possibility of choosing something beyond endurance.
Perhaps that is the “other world” of the title: not another geography, but another way of being. A world where a woman does not have to negotiate her humanity, prove her strength through suffering, or bend herself into acceptability.
A world where she can simply be.
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