Eleven short lines, and most of them are about scraps. Manan Das's "Collage" begins with a heap of torn pictures and ends with a person looking at them, and the leap between those two moments is the whole poem: the scraps turn out to be a life. The central idea is that a life is not remembered whole. It is assembled afterwards, from fragments, by deciding what to keep.
The first stanza is an inventory. "Hundreds bits of tore pictures are pasted" gives us abundance, and then the poem sorts it with a repeated opening: "Some are black and white / Some are colored / Some are bright / Some are fade." The repetition works like a hand moving through a pile, lifting one piece after another. The order is worth noticing. It runs from black and white (which I read as hinting at old photographs, though the poem never says so) through colour and brightness, and it ends on fading. Even before anything is thrown out, time seems to be draining the pile. There is only one real rhyme, "white" and "bright," two lines apart. Because nothing else answers it, it feels like two scraps that happen to fit.
The grammar is rough. Standard English would say "hundreds of bits of torn pictures," "faded," "thrown away." I can't know whether the poet chose these forms, but they have an effect either way. The language itself looks patched, as if each phrase had been cut from somewhere else and glued down slightly crooked. In a poem about fragments, a broken surface suits the subject, and it keeps the voice plain and unpolished, closer to someone talking than someone performing.
Line six is the longest in the poem: "All may be threw away in waste paper box." It tumbles forward without a pause, like a bin being tipped out, and the small word "may" matters, because the scraps' fate is only a possibility. Then comes the most puzzling line: "Or it was done, from those." What "it" refers to is unclear. The most natural reading is that the finished collage was made from the very scraps that might have been binned. The verb shifts from "may be" to "was done," from possibility to fact. The same pile can be rubbish or raw material, depending on what someone does with it.
The second stanza narrows sharply. "Hundreds" has become "Few." The word "pasted" returns from the opening, but now "picked" comes before it, so selection has entered the story. Even here the verbs are passive: bits "are picked and pasted," and nobody is named. The "I" appears only afterwards, with "I see...," as though the speaker has stepped back from the table to look at what has been made. That one word of self-reference comes late and quietly, and it carries most of the poem's weight.
"See with unwinking eyes" repeats the verb, as if the speaker were correcting himself: not just *I see*, but *how* I see. To be unwinking is to refuse to blink or look away. Applied to a pile that includes torn and faded pieces, it suggests an honest, steady gaze at one's own past, including the parts that didn't survive the picking. Then the poem stops on "My life..." with another trailing ellipsis. The speaker never says whether he is proud, sad or simply resigned. The ellipses hold the look open and let the reader stand beside him and decide.
What makes the poem worth reading is how little it needs to make a large claim. It never explains the metaphor, since the title and last line do that for it, and its form quietly demonstrates the idea. The poem is itself built of short, pasted-together lines with white space between them, and it too leaves most of its material out. Its suggestion is modest but unsettling: the self is a made thing, and the choices about what to paste and what to discard are part of who we become.