Most poems about memory hand you a picture: a house, a face, the smell of bread in a kitchen. Urna Mukherjee's «Being» hands you the weather instead. In three short lines, which the poet labels a haiku, she says that the memory of simply existing is "a haze of restless thoughts, / a sultry summer noon." There are no people, no places, no events. The poem is about the faint, blurry sense we have of having lived at all. Its central idea is that consciousness, looked back on, feels less like a story than like a mood: heavy, shimmering and hard to hold.
The construction is a chain of equivalences. The first line names the subject, "the memory of being." The second says what it is, a haze, and the third renames that haze as a noon. The poem moves from one of the most abstract words in English, "being," to something you can feel on your skin. Notice also that the poem never says being itself is a haze. It says the *memory* of being is. That extra step puts the experience at a distance. We are not living the moment but looking back at it, and what returns is blurred. The absence of "I" or "my" adds to this effect. The memory belongs to nobody in particular, so it can belong to anyone reading.
The imagery rests on a small contradiction. A haze hangs in the air, vague and still, softening every outline. Thoughts that are "restless" do the opposite: they shift, fidget and refuse to settle. Put together, they suggest heat shimmering over a road, where nothing moves and yet everything seems to waver. Then "sultry" tightens the screw. It means hot and airless, but it also carries a hint of sensuality, so the noon feels charged rather than merely uncomfortable. Noon is a well-chosen hour, too. The sun is at its highest, shadows shrink, and the day seems to hold its breath. One could read this as a mind with no shadow to retreat into, no dark corner of clarity where the thoughts might rest.
Formally, the poem bends the form it names. In English, haiku are often taught as 5-7-5 syllables, with a seasonal reference traditionally part of the form. Here the lines run to roughly seven, seven and six syllables, depending on how you pronounce "memory." Mukherjee keeps the three-line frame and the season but loosens the count. The lines are longish and trailing rather than clipped, which suits the subject, as if the poem itself were slightly overheated. There is no rhyme. Sound does the work instead. The hissing s's of "is," "haze," "restless," "thoughts," "sultry" and "summer" build a low, drowsy buzz, like the hum of a hot afternoon. "Memory" and "summer" quietly echo each other in their m's and soft endings, linking the first line to the last. The poem closes on "noon," a word with a long vowel that cannot be hurried, so the ending lingers instead of snapping shut.
What makes the poem worth reading is this compression. It takes a question that philosophers could circle for a whole book (what is it to exist, and what do we keep of it?) and answers with a sensation. It does not solve the question. "Haze" and "restless" admit that the answer stays unclear. The final image is also a pause rather than an ending: a noon, not a sunset. Nothing resolves, and the reader is left standing in the heat, which may be exactly the point. For a student, the poem shows how little a poem needs in order to make an abstract idea physical: one metaphor, one season, and a few well-placed sounds.