Leaving

“You have gone insane, haven’t you?” She asked me from the between the curls of hair that fell on her face. 

Her irises appeared darker than before, literally like bottomless twin pools. That I could drown in and not surface from. I had doubts if I would even try to hold on to the hands of a rescuer whilst I drowned in her eyes or any other pool in general. I had begun feeling like an ascetic from the past few days.

She reiterated the question, had I gone crazy. Her words felt like wisps of air escaping her brown lips, which were otherwise tightly pursed, awaiting an affirmative answer from me. I had begun wearing sunglasses in the house to keep out the excessive day light. She pulled them out from my face and I shut my eyes into darkness.

When I opened them again, in the clear afternoon light she appeared feral. Exasperated with my muteness she stood up and began pacing up and down the room. She hadn't evolved much in the last six or seven months that I hadn't seen her. I had imagined she would be unrecognizable. But why would she even alter at all?

I told her. “You haven’t changed much. You haven’t changed at all.”

She approached my chair and placed her left palm on my right knee and sighed deeply.

“You have to move on”

“I have. I mean clearly I have”

“You have gone insane, is what you have done”

“You make it seem like I had a choice”

“Oh don’t be silly. We had talked about this. So many times, over and over again”

“Well clearly, now that you've seen the aftermath, you must conclude, I am not the one for the talking”, I said hoping she would calm down with my ridiculous retorts.

“Honestly, I don’t have time for this. I have to get back, I can’t be gone for such long. You take care and, and just get your shit together”

“Yeah sure, get my shit together I will” This was more disgusting than expected. 

“You should go.” I paused. “Because if you stayed any longer, you never know, what I might do.”

That didn't slow her gait but she turned and looked at me. “What does that even mean?”

“I’m kidding. I’m joking. You of all people should know that”

“Can we just talk for five minutes, before I leave?”

She came closer and sat on the floor, with her legs crossed, instantly persuading me to climb down from my chair.

On the floor, she held my hand in hers and began speaking in slow wisps again.

“This is the last time you’re seeing me. I am not coming back. Never again. I want you to know this.”

I stayed mum, feeling rough in my throat, having nothing to say.

She spoke again. “I want you to tell me that you know you are not going to see me again”

“You sound like you are the one that needs some convincing”

“Shut up. Do you want my husband to explain it to you, how all this works?”

The mention of him crashed me back into reality. For a stretch of the hour I had imagined she was here for my sake and my sake only.

“Say it!”

“I know, I know you’re not coming back”

“I strongly urge you get a life. Listen to me, see someone else”

“Why don’t you fix me up with one of your single friends?”

“I can’t stay involved. But there are lots of women. I am told there are some dating apps and some real nice young things. You've always been lecherous, you would know everything”

“Serious accusation alert!”

“C’mon we know each other. We don’t have to wear facades.”

I broke her off in the middle. “If we know each other, why the fuck did you even leave me? Why did you abandon me? Why did you break my heart so irreversibly?”

Before I realized, I was screaming at her. She put her hand on my mouth to quieten me I guess but nothing worked.

And the next minute she was gone.

She had vanished so neatly, it was almost as if she had never been here. That’s exactly how people go. People who have made up their minds to go, they just leave so immaculately, the one left behind often is seen trying to grab on to the air that rushed in to fill the vacuum of sudden absence.

Proposal

{2.32 am..}

Not to bring money into the discussion, but guys who got recruited in that xyz company make x1y1z1 a year

Okay. Suddenly you make me feel poor

That wasn't the intention at all

Nevermind

{Pause. Pause. Silence. Sighs}

{2.34 am..}

Seriously, that wasn't my intention.

It's okay really. Something on my mind

What's that

How much do you make

Really?

Yes. Since we're already talking money

Mm..about x2y2z2

God you're rich

{Laughs}

There must be women lining up to marry your ass

Will you marry me, er my ass

What?

Will you marry me

What are you even asking

A simple question, I guess.

{Deep Breaths, Couple of}

{2.37 am..}

Wouldn't marry you for your money. But for the rest of you, I would. I will

Ok. Okay, good.

{Pause. Sneezes}

What just happened

I think we just got engaged

{2.39 am..}

We must get serious you know

Matter

You know how Amazon does what Amazon feels like. So they delivered a little foldable table to me in a cardboard box more than twice its size. Initially I thought that I would throw the box away. Then a couple days after I thought why not make a shoe stand out of it, like one of my little anti depressant craft projects. I even bought tape. The storekeeper smiled at me. Not your usual storekeeper kind of smile, I wouldn't bother. But his over warmth made me suspicious and shaky. Like literally I kept the cash on the counter and ran. Should have also ordered the tape from Amazon. But anyway, that shoe stand thing never happened. So I thought I would help my sterile pegions. There is a couple of pegions that has been trying to have chicks for like a year now. They gather hay and leaves in my balcony, build a nest, lay eggs and care for them everyday. But those eggs never hatch. Like I watch those eggs, check on them every other week. But they don't show any signs of life. I even googled pegion gestation. But still no. And one day my maid would lose her mind and sweep the whole balcony away. Now I am thinking if I just kept that box in the balcony instead of making a shoe stand out of it, may be the sterile, infertile, subfertile couple of pegions would find a more hospitable nest. And I would ask my maid to just not interfere. In their business. Everybody needs warmth, it's November. Today I gave away two of my old sweaters to her. One pink, which I had bought about ten years ago as a Valentine's Day gift to self. Now it's too small for me. Also another fairy white one. That one would fit me even now. But somehow I don't like it, never wore it. A friend of mine, a rich one, had bought it for herself and hadn't liked it either and she had given it away to me. I didn't like it much. But given my rudimentary sense of fashion, I thought I would keep it. That sweater moved with me wherever I moved, and that's like half a dozen places, I never touched it once. And today I gave it away. Got rid of it. My maid didn't like it either. I had to tempt her with the pink one and said she would have to keep them both. May be she won't keep it either. Nobody would ever love that sweater. It's going to be discarded unused after an extremely stretched shelf life, I wonder what that sweater thinks. 

Ergo

All of my memory converges into one evening in the past. It was 2006. Or 2007 probably. Because 2008 would rather be too late for the events I'm going to narrate. It was a silly little evening. Nobody significant was even involved, as in physically present. But people don't have to be present in body and mind to cause effect and effectively mar an evening, a day, a life. Mostly, it's their absences that work that charm. So yes, it was an evening long long ago and I was mostly by myself. And it was then that I lost my innocence. Ergo, all my memory, if retrospectively stretched back in time, converge, then and there. 

It was January. And it was drizzling. Winter rain. I must've been eighteen. Unscathed. In love. Brimming with naivete, unbeknownst of the ways of the world, that such scales existed on which humans are weighed and chosen, and the rest rejected, I callously thought till then that love begets love. It never did. Never does. And it shouldn't either. But I was young and full of colors. Purple, magenta and violets. 

It was a grey evening we'd stepped out into. With a few friends and somebody's cousin. I was meeting somebody's cousin for the first time. He was tall, bespectacled, comfortable in a lose T shirt. Forgettable as a person, because I don't even recall him name. But he has been reluctantly stuck in this memory forever. Because he simply happened to be there. It was a huge college campus. Somebody's cousin was showing us around. Mostly from the streets, their stadiums, activity centers, auditoriums, gyms. I saw numerous, numerous boys that evening. 

I knew you were there, out there somewhere. But we're never lucky enough for coincidences. I never saw you. You never sought me out. It was a lost cause. But you were right there. Within square meters probably. It was getting duskier, cooler, darker. Slowly yellow light from the street lamps filled the streets. I looked up to see bulky deodars on both sides of the streets. Upright like our guardians. We were just a bunch of kids back then.

Within minutes the air got chilly. The power went off. It was completely dark except for the shrieks of voices. And laughter. It began to pour. We took shelter under the nearest tree. I scooted to under the nearest tree. I almost hugged it tight. I could feel its trunk on my cheeks. And shut my eyes, I wanted you so much. It was so debilitating to be so close to you and still not have you. It was precisely under that tree, that day, standing in the rain that I got my heart broken the first time. 

For a few years I imagined you were there with me under that tree. But I knew you weren't. I have concocted so many alternative memories of the same exact incident, I can't tell the real from the unreal. Probably none of this even happened. But now I am too seasoned to give away the truth so easy.

In parallel universes and in other tesseracts of time, you were probably there with me under that deodar. In a tight embrace, in galloping rain, our cheeks touching its trunk. Because that would answer just so many questions right now. 

Edge of the Night

Bikers ride by, bikers zoom past. Their tires crush the midnight roads with such friction, it's not music, not even to my semi-deaf ears. It's an awakening sound, though, on a dawn like Saturday night, smokey as hell. That crass noise of bike tires, does awaken you in ways few other things can. We are sitting inside, by the man sized window, grilled, but only hardly. Through gaps in the grille, arms can easily pass in and out. May be even an entire baby. This night feels, strangely on the edge.

The coffee table is now strewn with our paraphernalia.Cigarette butts, the ash tray over turned. Ash mixed with vodka has created a clay which darkens the color of tonight. There's like a dozen other bottles on this table. Bottles of all shapes and sizes. Tall bottles, slender bottles, stout bottles, curvaceous bottles. Just like women, who come in all shapes and sizes, so do bottles, apparently. There is a measuring cup though, that works for all alcohol alike. Hour-glass shaped, on one side it measures 30 ml, turned upside down, it measures 60.

Large drinks are for the big guys. We take small measured sips. Moisten our lips mostly. And lick the edge of the glasses. And sit and sit for minutes that melt into hours. The night is forming outside, like an amorphous being. The buds of flowers are shyly blooming outside, in the courtyard, on the roofs of our neighbours and in the rest of the world. The earth is slowly rotating on its titled axis. That axis must have also been as drunk as us, to be titled all the time.

The air feels warm for after midnight. May be, we are just locked in a closet, a closet with the mirage of a window. In a closet, mind numbed in asphyxia, high enough to believe that we are making sense, when we are not, and we are whiling away our entire lives watching American television. And then from being the size of a closet, the room expands gradually and becomes an open field, an open gallery. And there is no need to hide behind walls anymore.

There is a back room though. A bed room. With a fluffy mattress and a bobby print curtains. Should we leave the night alone and go back in there. What are the chances that we make love tonight now. What are the odds?

Perambulations

I see a man. In the 11 PM darkness. His restless perambulations on the roof top. I can only make a silhouette out. It's dark but yet not dark enough. In the faint light of distant street lamps, I can draw his rough outlines. Is he walking this way because he has to burn his dinner up before he falls asleep. Or has he a story. Is he smoking a hard day away. While his wife has nodded off on their tiny double bed downstairs. Has he a little son in a Spiderman suit. And a little girl who sleeps holding her stuffed bear. Their room painted in cartoons and their toys astray as his exhausted wife catches her breath in the hall. Our perambulating man has to make it to the end of the month, pay the rent and the fees. And the milkman and the launderer. And for the loans and the groceries. How long will this last. Time will pass. Kids will grow up. It will get easier with time, it should. But is his life a means to an end and all it is, is that.

In a blink, I turn into his wife dozing off downstairs. Or his son in the Spiderman suit. I pass through them like light would pass through a ghost. I am him, I can feel his heart beating within mine. Is he an abberation, an apparition, a figment of my drugged imagination. Then I become the solitary woman staring at it all from the distant balcony. 

Behind me, the lights in my bedroom are dimmed. The air is cooler than evening's. My legs are up on the grille of the balcony. I sit here nearly hidden from the world. Behind my clothes strung out to dry at night. Or so I think. Or so I imagine. But the man can see me clearly. Or my silhouette only. And imagine things about me, as I do. About him. About my many a daily crises, about the chaos in my pretend peace, about my trash of three days that hasn't been taken out. About my inane loneliness. And my simultaneous inability to cohabit my space with another. About my unfinished stories and my lame ambitions. About the bangle stand behind the mirror that my mother gave me years ago that broke many times, and everytime it broke I set it up again with glue. The glue that is holding me together right now. 

This faint light, is faint no more. We can both suddenly see so much about each other. Too much.

Who You Be

I don't keep a good track of time. Because what is to it. Every realization that such and such quantity of time has passed, you only feel nostalgia. And along with nostalgia, a tinge of sorrow. Helplessness because we have been so callous in life. Though we have been extremely savagely prudent, we have managed to be callous, nevertheless. So I don't appreciate keeping a track of time. I keep no album. No journal. Nothing. And it feels liberating, living like this, deliberately, without a care for time. Living life day wise. Hour wise. Week wise, at most. But not in any longer tranches of time. 

However, I remember, faintly though, deeply loving myself. Loving yourself is a good thing, no doubt. But I was a narcissist. I don't judge you if you are, by the way. But I don't like being one. It's a huge waste of time. But then what is not. If you are not the artist or the muse, your life is a ludicrous waste of time. But I was arrogant. For no apparent reason. I wasn't even pretty. That I wasn't pretty played over my fucking head a lot. I overcompensated the lack of being loved. It's basically sort of playing defense. But in a twisted sort of a way. 

After a long time, I cannot tell you how much time exactly, because I don't keep track of time, but after like a dozen rejections or so, I learnt my lesson, that beauty probably cannot be attained. And no matter what you do, you be who you be. And nothing you do, believe, can ever alter that truth of truths. So I shed the arrogance and compensated the lack of love with deep compassion for the self. Yeah. And it's been working. I guess. 

Beauty is an enormous, unmerited gift given randomly, stupidly. Khaled Hosseini

Crushed Paper

People think writing defines me. More or less. That I shall get away with life by writing. Prose poetry. About lost loves. And about the general vagaries of life. It's true, to an extent. Sort of a half truth.

Half only because I have repeatedly proved to myself that I lack the stamina for it. 

Nevertheless, when I open old closets I find neatly wrapped still unopened gifts. With notepads of hand made paper. With ornate bookmarks. The ones that have gifted them expect me to fill in their pages with an equally classy ink pen or so. Poems, may be. Some notepads have ruled pages, some are completely blank. Some have plain white rugged paper, some have fine lines and an egg shelly hue to them. Some look like straightened out crushed paper. 

People have been to places and collected such notepads as memorabilia from said places for me. I sometimes want to understand what must have been going on in their minds when they picked up these gifts for me. It's not that I have wanted earrings. But still. People come into my life and leave similarly. But they leave these notepads behind. Good old friends, college mates, admirers, paramours, if I may. 

If I went out now, looking for them all, I am pretty sure the world would have gobbled them up and in their chosen obscurity, I wouldn't find them. But a pinch of them, stays locked in those neatly wrapped gifts. Their odor intact between the sheets.

For Nina Simone. Happy Birthday. High Priestess of the Soul. 

Remember & Write

On early mornings in December
I witness,
Sisters in tow from upstairs
Rushing down with school bags & lunch boxes
Their hair split into twin braids
And tied in white ribbons
So neatly, so neatly
I can never be a nihilist again.

Life must have some reason
Some hidden order in this chaos.
It must. Because of those braids
And the bed of flowers

Here, you know.
They haven't got marigold or gerbera, I believe
All they've got is chrysanthemums & roses
In that paucity of variety, there is infinite beauty
Heaps of roses, blood red, orange, pink, magenta
And chrysanthemums yellow and white
Those hawkers, stuck in your peripheral view are omnipresent
And they make life feel akin to
A bed of roses & chrysanthemums

And even if you don't buy yourself a bunch for Valentine's,  that's okay

It's alright. It's not the end of the world
Until it is.

That your poems don't rhyme, horribly
You couldn't care less

What matters is that you remember and write
Like a mild insomniac beyond caffeinated midnights.

Remember & write.

The Lightness of Being

Your feet tingle. Toes feel so light, they might just detach and take flight. In a deep drag, you think, sobriety is overrated. Why else would God have planted the opium. Words trickle into your head, you feel the whim to write on numerous subjects. You fling your arms out and let be. Another deep drag after, memories come back to you. Those that happened for real, and some that never did. The future that couldn't be. Alternate universes. Even remorse is mellowed down by nicotine. Everything feels easy. Stress melts. You wonder why you don't do this more often. It's winter. It's so hard to resist. And be sober. You remember how much you cajoled yourself not to. But you caved in. Almost imploded into yourself. In the end, it all comes down to pushing that window open, late after midnight and experimenting with your conscious. A tweak there, a twist here. The eternal lightness of being. What could go wrong. How much could be lost. And what, in the end cannot be risked. Everything has its own cost factored in. Isn't it. One moment you are the pawn. The next moment you are the empowered seductress of life. Erudite, fluent in intellect. Then again, you are a silly girl. You are everything locked up in your cocoon. The next drag tells you that. And then the next. Your chest puffs up, eyes begin to burn a little. Water a little. Your heart fills with ash. You un-clutch your hair and toss it all to one side. To rest peacefully on your shoulder.You think of the dreaming people asleep downstairs, upstairs. You feel stacked. In a building. In a chair. In a bed. One singular soul in billions. By yourself. Inconsequential. Then you look at the sky, the darkness is unfuckwithable. You think about your next poem and resign. You call it a day. You call it a night.  

A Poem for Irrefutable Sadness

Something devastating must've happened.
Else why do I feel the way I feel.

Things must be fine in a parallel world.
Wherein time ticks in a different fashion.

Isn't most things crumbling as I speak.
It's a catastrophe in this world, may be.

Dreams being crushed, ruthlessly.
Too much for a mortal to handle.

So many handicaps to be ashamed of,
And so many smokes needed, there by.

Can't take this no more.
Now that everything has come to nothing. Zilch.

Whole Again

While smudging kohl in my eye, I noticed a hole. A tiny hole to the corner on the lower flap, on the inside, towards the nose. I thought to myself, this must be the tear gland. Not the gland, but the orifice for the gland beneath. It's amazing, how I hadn't known where tears came from. After crying my eyes out. And today, it shows itself. It's like finding a blackspot under your chin. You had it ever since, without knowing. Without caring to know.

My mood lately is a cosine curve. I sink into troughs, for a set of predefined reasons. Loss, failure, disappointment, a deep, really deep sense of feeling misplaced. Mostly, I sink because I think I am stupid. Just foolish. And that's not a good thing, feeling foolish. Because it is accompanied with inexplicable anger. I choke myself screaming, howling, literally. I tear down wall hangings, punch pillows. It's like a mad woman has gotten into me. And I actually do relate to her in the span of my fit. And cry, cry a lot. I sink into the trough of the cosine. 

A while after, I consolidate. Very mechanically. Like an auto restoring system. I cool down. I feel up again. I try hard, really hard to convince myself that being a good person compensates for being stupid. I know, it doesn't. But I try. What can we do? I try to tell myself stories. That things will turn around. Even if they don't, I am strong enough to just take the shit. I fail, I shatter. I cry. Again.

And such, it goes on and on. I don't know if there's an escape, but an escape. I so want to feel whole again. 

Paradox

You lose hope, not overnight. Not over the night. That's too sudden. In the period of a night, you cry out. And wake up swollen. Eyes burning like fire. Skin glistening sorrow. But you don't lose hope. Hope sheds itself over days. Months. At times, years. You slowly let go. Consciously, breathing, let go, like noone's watching. But you are. You believe, that way it will affect you less. Pity you and forgive. Well, does it?

Similar to the process of unloving. Unloving, keep note, is not the same as falling out of love. It's an active verb. Falling out of love is more passive an event. more real, commonplace, easier. Unloving too, doesn't happen overnight. Slow squeezing of the heart, is supposed to take time. There is no anesthesia for this one. Quite the anti-process of amnesia happens here. Instead of forgetting, one remembers. Tiny details. So much that entire events feel little before the little nothings. Unloving takes its own sour time, and mostly with no certainty of results. 

What tempts me the most is that, is there freedom beyond these? Untethered freedom, as you would put it. I don't know. And ironically, I wouldn't want to. Either. 

Losing all hope was freedom.

- Narrator. Fight Club

Requiem

He has his eyes downcast. Staring at his lunch plate. Those are the most beautiful eyes in the world. One of the most beautiful. A beautiful pair of eyes, those. He is sitting amongst a large bunch of loud women. His blush is lost amongst their chatter. But, he doesn't look lost. Not yet. But out of place. Definitely out of place, Yes. He's eating with his hands, elbows quiet on the edge of the table. The set up looks like an experiment. Except his eyes. They look like dollops of love. And a shiver on his face. That hides his age. He has a son back at home, put away in some school. Standing by the road with a huge bag slung from his little shoulders, waiting for the school bus to pick him up. And the wife, who bought the lady fingers on his lunch plate. Who washes, cooks and waits. And loves, probably possibly, with a decent vigor. Like a woman should a man. And here, he is. Sitting alone among known strangers.

He must feel stifled. Does he? I would, if I were him. But I am merely sitting here, reading his story from the lines on his face, from the glint in his eyes, the shiver on his face. Drawing illegal solace from a perfect stranger. Sitting apart. Sitting opposite. Creating a requiem, for each moment that passes. Like, life had no ennui at all.

Homeless

It is an assurance, I carry with myself. That you are home. That no matter what, when, who. If I would, I could leave everything be and run. With my eyes closed, like a child. Run into our enclosure of love. And you would be there, sitting with your legs stretched out of the window, or merely standing by it, looking at the rain. Doing laundry, or cooking, or quietly sitting, or taking a shower, leaving the door unlocked for me. From my footsteps you would know, it was me. Yes, lovers do that. And later act aloof and ask when did I get in. So many little games. Voices and visions. Fights and patches on scratches, balms on wounds. 

Now, I feel as if I haven't kept any memory. It's an honest confession, I don't remember the specifics, the details, the blur as you would say. I carry that time and that love absorbed in myself. Very involuntarily. Because I don't feel the need to create memories. Because, I know you are home. I can run to you any time of the day, and we could recreate our moments, the exact same way. Or give them a random swivel and yet they would be this maddeningly, intoxicatingly, mind-numbingly, fucking beautiful.  

But you know this juncture, honey. That home, we have to let go of. The walls, the roof, the strings, the mosaic. The smells, the sounds and a whole bunch of uncreated memories. Remembered only very faintly, for the decades to come. I wouldn't have that privilege to be with you in a moment, for a moment. You would no longer be in there. The cradle has vanished. I feel deranged, homeless again. And my heart, is skipping so many beats. Oh! Pandora. 

Middle Berth

On the journey onward, they weren't with each other. He looked older, wore a stud in his left ear lobe. She tied her ironed hair into a messy knot, her face glowed in the sun. He hung out of the door of the railway bogie when they were moving past the valleys and each time he did that, she took a picture of him with the big camera that slung from her shoulder. They must have kissed when the tunnels came. No one could tell.

On the way back, they had only one ticket. His ticket. She travelled like an extension of his, like a limb- a hand or a leg. Always conjoint to him. He coaxed her extra luggage in, let her sit on his seat and stood by her and chatted on about whatever. Later slid beside her onto the middle berth. Together, they looked like one common mass of black. Except for his man-scarf of purple striped in white. They lay anti parallelly, and hugged each others' feet like pillows and slept. 

When the night got deeper, she took a U turn though. Now they lay against each other, she tousled his hair and talked into his ear, the one with the stud in it. Night long, most night long. Sometime after that, he must have left. Somewhere close to dawn. Gotten down at some odd station, less known. 

She covered her face with that scarf and slept the rest of the journey alone, like a log. 

Faded Flamboyance.

It's unfair to say, but I couldn't recognize him. From behind, I felt a pang of uncertainty, who could this man be. And then he turned around and I saw his face. The same face except he looked older by a decade than I had seen him last. I must have grown too, but it's difficult to notice age on oneself. He had lost all his color. He had no hair at all, whatever little he did was grey. He had trimmed it today, that was his excuse. Though I wanted to ask what was so desperately wrong with him, I couldn't. There is nothing that is ever cardinally wrong. Life ruins us all in general, in bits, in its own slow paced process. The loss of friendship, fading of love, tarnishing of belief, being few of the numerous causes. Therefore I didn't ask. No questions were exchanged. 

He said he'd come by, our place. He should better, I stressed. His wife was fine and the two sunshine daughters were growing up alrite, he said. I asked if the older one was resembling their mother more by the year, he stayed shut.  I didn't ask about the younger one then. It had been long I had forgotten their names, but their childlike faces stayed framed in my eyes. The younger one, who looked like her father was more my favorite, though I never had the chance to say it. Whenever he took me to see a doctor when I fell sick, or picked me up from the train station, saw me off for holidays. Or the once or twice he took me out for dinner with his resentful wife. 

A few years from now, he would be more open about the falling apart of his marriage. The people in his life who may have demanded an explanation would be long gone. We may meet after another lost decade of his life, on his face.

Then decades afterward, real decades i.e. he would come visit his daughter for winter in the hills, the younger one. Flip through old albums, pictures of his children in their school uniforms, purple water-bottles hanging from their necks. Pictures from the few vacations they had cared to take. Right then, he would close his eyes and regain his lost flamboyance. 

Saturday

Muse:

The muse. She wore a pink sari, wound around her lean self in a way I couldn't figure. Out how. So I just bathed her with all my attention. Not the baby pink, not the rosy pink. Real pink, how pink should be. With white squares printed over. Her hair was knotted, neatly. Like the knot held her head in position. And those black bead earrings, not tiny, big enough. To be seen from far. Where I was. She, of course stared straight in front, at the road ahead. No after hang of the past. I couldn't figure out that either. Just how?

Movie:

The movie. Sprinkled with instances, some exact replicas of the past, some insinuations of the impending future. Such an amalgamation of rather contradictory contortions of love. One that shows how desperately we seek companionship, irrespective of who we have become or where we are; and another shows no matter what, all affections fade. However, hard you try, or not try, mostly, you end up alone, literally alone within four walls, or virtually alone living among a bunch of strangers you remember you  happened to know. Love stories, like these, are often that beautiful picture painted upon and against the peaceful humdrum of life. 

Summer Love:

They say, summer love. We have passed, one summer by. Half of, or rather, almost one full, eighty percent of, monsoon. Rains have lashed against the new love that in May we had realized, we had may be. Now we are stare at autumn, for the trees to come out naked. Winter then. And finally, even spring, in possibility. You know, how love takes your breath away? Moments that bless you with such a glue that you cease to exist in person, and become one deeply rooted pair of Siamese twins.

Movie in context: The Lunchbox

Acquaintance.

You are like your own reflection in water. Disappearing into waves every second. Unsteadily swaying in and out of my shattered heart. You. Are just like your reflection in water. Now you're here by me, the moment next, you aren't. I can't say. You won't say. A word about what would happen hereafter. We won't take that chance. Too much is at stake. When you are here, though you are vivid, assertive of your presence. Loud and clear. When you aren't, you are only an imagination in my mind.

And I am a woman of minimal means. I am never beautiful enough. Only men who have spend sufficiently long enough time with me, alone, fall for my internal complications and hidden falacies. It's almost obvious that I am not obviously beautiful. And I believe you know this for a fact. Yet you hang around. And then run away. As you fancy. I do not understand.

Cue.

Anklet on her left foot. Silver, like a snake. Curled, cold. His lips froze when he kissed it. Luscious curves of her feet. He ran his fingers across. Warm fingers on cold feet. Shy feet. The right one, anklet-less. Ignored to begin with, lay quietly, fuming. Then later toyed with, blushed pink. The anklet on the left made stray noises. Clinking noises. That pierced the silence of hours past midnight.

Toe rings with black dots. Dot like stones, studded in the center. Shone in the dark of the room. The trapezoid nail on the big toe. The longer middle toe. Swayed in drunken haze. Like crazy in love. The other three. Stood fixed like three tiny spheres of lust. The night skipped a phase when he took the ring off and looked up.

At her face. A melange of emotion. Stricken in lovelessness, the past had left lines below her eyes. In the protrusion of her chin. There was a question in the arch of her eyebrows. Which asked, now what? To him. Who couldn't hold his heart from thumping out loud, still awed at her feet.Her eyes were sinking in ecstasy, though. Ecstasy. Taking a cue from them, he moved up. Up.