Sushupti is a Sanskrit word for deep, dreamless sleep, the state in Indian philosophical tradition where the mind is at rest and nothing is being imagined or remembered. Putting that word above six short lines gives the poem a quiet paradox. The speaker seems to be awake, listening to rain, noticing the stillness of his own mouth, yet is drifting toward a state in which noticing stops. The central idea is that silence is not an absence. When the talking ends and the body settles, a different kind of company arrives, and the mind turns out to be a place one can simply live.
The construction is spare. The poem has no rhyme, no capital letters and no punctuation, so each image floats free of the next. Its stanzas alternate between one line and two: "a sleeping rain," then "my mouth still / after dining and talking," then "deer come in the night," then "where should I be / if not in my mind." That pattern gives a gentle in-and-out rhythm, like breathing. The images also move in a loop from outside (rain) to the body (mouth), back outside (deer), and finally inward to the mind. The poem's attention is slowly pulled indoors, into the self.
The first image does a lot with three words. Rain normally suggests motion and noise, but here it is "sleeping," an adjective that makes the weather seem to share the speaker's drowsiness. There is no verb, so nothing happens. The soft consonants of "sleeping rain," the s, l and r, almost hush the reader.
The second stanza turns to the body. The line break lets "my mouth still" stand briefly as a complete statement before "after dining and talking" explains it. "Still" could also mean "yet," as if the mouth were continuing, but the context favors quiet. The mouth is the organ of both appetite and conversation, taking in and giving out, and the poem catches it at rest after a sociable evening. It is also worth noticing that "sleeping," "dining" and "talking" are all -ing participles, verbs stretched into states. The poem avoids sharp, finished actions and prefers things that trail off.
Then comes the poem's one real event: "deer come in the night." Every word is a single syllable, so the line moves with soft, even steps. Deer are shy animals, and the poem implies, without saying so, that they approach because the human has gone quiet. We are never told whether the speaker sees them, hears them or imagines them. Judging by the poem's dreamy logic, they may belong as much to the mind as to the garden, which prepares for the last question.
That question, "where should I be / if not in my mind," is the only place where the "I" appears, and only after all the quiet has accumulated. "Should" gives it a tone of mild, almost amused acceptance, as though the speaker were shrugging at the idea of being anywhere else. Read this way, the line is contentment. But the title complicates it. In sushupti the mind is exactly what has dissolved, so a speaker who still says "my mind" has not quite arrived. One reading is that the poem hovers on the threshold, awake enough to ask a question and calm enough not to need the answer.
What makes the poem significant is how much it trusts the reader. It never says that silence is valuable, that solitude can be rich, or that nature approaches those who stop speaking. It offers rain, a resting mouth, animals in the dark and a question, and lets those things make the argument. A single Sanskrit word in the title opens a philosophical idea without a line of explanation. For a student, the lesson is that a poem can be tiny and still leave room to think, and that a poem about stillness can ask the reader to slow down.