Three small moments carry the whole of Manan Das's "Stairs of Rainbow": meeting an old friend, walking a lonely path, watching feathers fall. None is dramatic, yet each opens a door backward in time. The poem is about how suddenly the past can arrive, and about what a person does when it does. The speaker doesn't mourn. The speaker kneels down and touches something wonderful.
The first two stanzas are built on repetition. Both begin "After a long period," a phrase that works like a slow clock tick and stresses how much time has passed. In the first stanza the word "Suddenly" gives memory the force of an ambush, and what comes back is "the days of / catching of butterfly..." A butterfly is quick, fragile and nearly impossible to hold, which makes it a good emblem of childhood itself. The ellipsis that ends the stanza lets the thought drift away unfinished, as memories do.
The second stanza moves from friendship to romance, and one word in it does a lot of quiet work: "solitary." The speaker walks alone on a path where they once "gossiped with my lover." The poem never explains where the lover has gone, and it doesn't need to, because the loneliness sits in that one adjective. "Gossiped" is also an unglamorous, warm choice. What is remembered isn't grand declarations but the ease of ordinary chatter, set in "the days of new youth."
The third stanza is the longest and the turning point. The falling "feathers of birds" are light, drifting and shed, so they suggest time letting go of things. The poem doesn't say how feathers lead to thought, only "Then I think," and after that hinge the grammar changes. The earlier lines were statements ("I meet," "I walk"). Now come bare verbs with no subject: "Open very cautiously," "Sit on bended knees," "Keep my palms." They read like stage directions the speaker gives themselves. The pages of fairy tales must be opened "very cautiously," as if the book of childhood might crumble or the spell might break.
Inside that book the speaker becomes a ruler: "Going on one's round / To my conquered kingdoms / By riding on horse..." The phrase "one's round" sounds formal, almost royal, like a monarch inspecting the realm. "Conquered" and "my" show the pleasure of a child's imaginary power. The poem has moved backward through layers of life, from friend to lover to fairy tale, ending in the oldest and most imaginative layer. The second ellipsis, after "horse," lets that daydream thin out as the first one did.
The last two lines hold the poem's central image. A rainbow is something we see but can never stand on, and "stairs" suggests a climb between earth and sky. Yet the speaker doesn't climb. They "sit on bended knees" and "keep my palms" on the steps, a posture that could be a prayer or a child crouching to touch something precious. The poem stops at the threshold, before any ascent. That restraint is its most interesting choice. The speaker doesn't try to become a child again but touches the edge of that world with respect.
The form supports this gentleness. There is no rhyme and no regular meter, and the short lines, often a single phrase, give the reading a hesitant pace. The English is sometimes unusual: "catching of butterfly," "Fall of surrounding feathers of birds," and missing articles throughout. Some readers will find this awkward. It also keeps the poem plain and unornamented, so the images carry the feeling.
The poem's value lies in how truthfully it traces the way memory moves, triggered by a face, a place or a feather, and slipping toward the earliest and most imaginative corners of the mind. It suggests that the fairy-tale kingdoms aren't lost. They are kept in a book that can still be opened, if one is careful.