A Long Story

She saw a missed call from an unknown number. Called back to ask who.

'Hello, koun bol rahen hain?'
'Aap koun?'
'Aap ne call kiya tha, aap ko pata hoga main koun!'
'But abhie to aapne call kiya hai'
'Very funny!'

She hung up!

She got a call again. She girded her loins...She will show him some fun now.

'What is it that you want?'
'Pehle pehchaan koun?'
'What rubbish!'

She was about to disconnect out of sheer disgust,out of her apathy towards people who trouble innocent girls via phone.
Then she heard something like this

'Arrey main yaar...kamaal hai...tu to ekdum bhool hi gayi!'

Her heart missed a beat. Till that day she had called back every unknown-number-missed-caller begging God it should be him.
Was it him? Him? Him?

'Koun?' she whispered...

'Main yaar...(we keep the first name a secret)...(we also keep the last name under covers...)'

Time stopped. Her palms went sweaty, forehead was burning. She didn't know whether to be happy...or nervous...or impersonal..
Her breathing took a pause...

It took a minute for her to gather herself and behave as if she had never expected him to call... It was raining and thundering
outside. That didn't matter..nothing mattered...she was carried into a land faraway. That moment she had everything she wanted.

Wonder why he always called up when there was a storm outside...there were many story summer afternoons then...Could be because he
had nothing better to do...

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Days passed by. Storms went by. He didn't call again...

Her heart learned to cry again. It writhed in anguish again. It tore itself apart into pieces and pieces. Her heart brooded
about the futility of further existence.

But look at her mind. The mind thought of exploiting her plight. It squeezed her pain to make words out of it. Her mind made
her write and write consoling her that she would be able to come out of it one day is she wrote it all out! But she never
overcame anything, she could never wipe out the occurrence of that phone call two years ago...that stormy summer afternoon.

The heart was like a naive orphaned child. How shrewd could her mind be...how selfish...how cruel...how...

She wondered how the two of them, her heart and mind coexisted between the boundaries of the same body...

Her heart was so much like herself...and her mind, it was so much like that people...people who know how to churn a name
out of every exploitable source...

She wrote about her pain...people read. She accumulated accolades... Her mind liked it all.

Did anyone ask her heart? The ovation and the praise did nothing to better its situation. It writhed in anguish forever.

home

I’m going home
I miss the dust of my streets
I miss looking at the mellow morning sun
I miss my mother’s lap
I miss crying till my heart’s at ease all alone in sultry afternoons…
The river would have washed away the temples I had made with wet sand

I miss staring innocently into the infinite unknown
So much used to be unknown then
Unknown, Obscure and yet to be achieved

I’m going home
My tears have waited enough

But it’s been so long
I’ve forgotten the way back
Someone tell me where home is…

in the shadow of the stars...

WARNING! LONG POST AHEAD!

Dear Adam, (Point wise would be better)

*As I saw you riding away, I don’t know why but my heart twitched in pain. This could have been because I had placed you in it as the ideal man. The only man. My Adam.

*You were all I could ask from life, the materialization of all the day dreams that my mind had mulled over since adolescence.

*No one had ever ventured into this proximity of my heart where you lived.

*When you spoke, all my senses numbed. When I stared at you, everything else about me ceased to exist but my eyes. I saw the way you said your words, distinctly, with your own fresh style. I literally drank those moments up, when you talked about fun, about life, about the movie-‘The Pursuit Of Happyness’- I gaped at the free spirit you housed.

* The way the hair on your chest showed when you left that second button open, and my mind strayed to the places where it shouldn’t have. The smartness, the over-smartness rather…I became a fanatic of everything about you.

*Things I related you with were of the kinds of fun, I always ‘pretended’ I had a crush on you…Funny! Isn’t it? Hmmm…You kept the fires of my heart burning when there was a drought everywhere around! Never had I imagined, I would be so frozen with poignance the moment I saw you leaving forever.

*When you are gone, I would always remember with glee the moments of trance that entrapped me when you were around, and my shock the moments when I discovered that you are a Bengali and when I realized that it was the last time I saw seeing you!. Also the giggles would come back to me, the giggles that had erupted when I discovered that the initials of your name are A & D and I christened you ADAM forever! La!

***I have fallen in love many times, with many men. So love comes easy to me. But I never fell in love with you. Wonder how paradoxical it is to meet Mr. Right and not succumb to the sweet pain that love is.

May be I have achieved some kind of say over the philandering whims of my heart. Some kind of equilibrium that comes only with time!

May be she loved him. He was unaware.

When he sat beside her on her bed, she was busy typing away on her computer. But she was only pretending. All that time, she had been crying. Craving for a shoulder to lean on and cry more.

When she sensed him rustle the air around her, she turned to him and leaned. On him. This happened involuntarily.

Her tears wet his shirt. Astonished, he didn’t know what to do. He softly ran his palm on her back, afraid of hurting her. She felt like a flower in his arms.

There is a difference between hugging and leaning, we all know. The former involves more warmth and some steam. And lust at times. Leaning is more abstract a thing; more emotional than physical. It is she resting her head full of troubles on his sturdy shoulders.It involves relief and satiety. It is a subtle confession of what he meant to her.