in between the crumpled fragrance of candlelight and the half-awake, half-sleepy candlelit loadshdding evenings, you bartered my stories for all those little mellow smiles that i so proudly flaunt. we were a rubble that evening, all we had was a handful of giggles shared on a rickshaw in a paradise town and a few random photographs. then, during the long walk back to the haunted mansion we saw millions of stars, constellations up in the sky. i think i wrapped the sky around myself, shrouding myself completely, blinding myself, totally oblivious to people and places. all i want is you.

the candlelight brought us closer, i think. and somehow, i want to bottle up the moonbeams that touched your face so gently. your fragrance also. and store them up in the old cupboard like memories in photographs. your eyes reek of a love i've never felt before and your whispers carry the scent of a dream that we are both knitting with much fervour. there is a quietude outside this very room. a kind of pindrop silence that almost gives me a fright. in between these moments, you hold me close - our eyes capturing every one of those nude trices that come alive only in fairytale lovestories, something you'd never be able to understand; something i'd never be able to explain to you.

you peel off my pretences slowly, carelessly. and all i can do is nurse a delicious little agony inside. i stare into those huge hazel eyes, and wonder if you are just a couldhavebeen, just an ephemeral happiness. but your love hushes my anxieties. you bring a kind of neverland to me, and yet, you give me little boxes of reality, of logic when you paint us for me. in this candlelight, we are a space between a you and a me - a time wonderfully suspended between the months of september and october, a music in the bewildered mirrors of december.

the candlelight writes a never-to-be-read lovestory on its flames tonight. we are a memory. to be cherished forever, and somehow, it makes me wonder why everytime i try to run away from you a little, you know me a little more. it is a kind of newfound freedom that takes away all the pain from bonding. somehow, when you bind me, i fly a little higher.

Child Inside.

I feel old. Quite quite old. Too old to be feverishly in love. Too old to drop coins into wishing lakes and pray for a story or two to come true. Knowing well that fairytales remain lifeless pages in Grimm and Anderson's. Knowing well that more often than not, we do not live happily ever after and there are no charming princes, no mirror mirror on the wall, no Cinderella and definitely no magical romances. We make do with what we have. It's not like I've stopped having my illusions. I still dream. Perfect, flawless and impractical dreams. And build up stupid dreamy stories in my head. But these dreams, these stories, this part of me is tucked in old yellowed pages, pressed between old diaries like red roses. It's not like I'm not happy. But there's a part of me, broken and lost and that part noone shall ever see. It's a part made up of wishing lakes and fairytales and Cinderella and lived happily ever afters.

I think I've grown up. Sometimes I stare into the mirror and wonder if it's really me. Do we all outgrow ourselves? Do we all keep losing bits and pieces of ourselves like this? Maybe it's a part of becoming rational and prudent, and yes, practical. Maybe after a time in our lives, we are ashamed to tell others that we dream, that we are still children inside. So, we repress a part of us and let it grow in ourselves, deep in our hearts. This child, this love for fairytales keeps growing inside until one day, we explode. Explode like fireworks in the moonless sky. Beautiful colourful explosion.

I feel old. Almost like a veteran. A loser, sometimes. I show off my scars with pride and proudly proclaim what I could have but never did. I tell people I've grown up, I take unbearable responsibility to prove it. I don't believe in fairytales, or so I say. Deep inside, secretly I still wish for a story for me; I still wish for a star when we kiss. I still nurse the child inside in words and silence and photographs. Yet, in front of you, you or you, I'd be the girl almost two decades old and ready to take on the big, bad world without any trace of silly dreams or stories in her palms. Sometimes, only sometimes, I wonder if happiness could be slipped into Christmas stalkings.

Someday I'd want to a child again. I shall throw caution to the winds then. Till then, you, you and you could drop coins into the wishing lake and live my erstwhile stories for a while. The stories that lie dissolved somewhere inside the lake and behind the trees and smokecircles where fairytales are said to grow.

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas! Ho Ho Ho!

Vagabond Has A Family.

When I first came here, I had a preconceived notion that there are no friends like school friends. After all, noone can ever substitute the fourteen long years of running through the colonial corridors and ending up with bruised knees, scrambling through the serenity of the green fields, and those numerous little fights.. those tears and the wildwild laughter that is still a part of our alma mater. No wonder I kept to myself during the initial days when I came here. The headphonic idiotic, you guys call me. :P I would have probably been this detached had I not met you people. Now I can proudly say that I have a set of friends here who are not just friends - they are my family.

I'm really touched at whatever you people have done yet. (yes yes, I'm sentimental :) ) You people piss me off sometimes, yes and I feel like killing you, not talking to you and hiding away into my shell again. But I know you five will be there whenever I need you ( even when I don't need you, for that matter :P ). Right from running to get coffee when I was choking on my breath to getting food for me when I'm all hungry and can't move because I've an injured knee or a temperature.. to sending a teener tiffin box full of muree when I have pet'e baetha.. even tolerating my mood swings and the bangalar paanch'r moton mukh that I make sometimes. :P I was awestruck at how you all were so concerned when I injured myself the other day. * clumsy me *. I had never expected that you mind wasting the entire morning and half of yesterday afternoon just to take me to a doctor and get the wound dressed. :) I'm so touched that I can't even express in words.

Thank you for this family that I have found in the lifeless godforsaken city...

Meanderings.

I visited the purple hills today. Well, almost. With my roommate for a morning walk. We didn't go far because there were plenty of frustrated faces in the wee hours of morning, and we certainly didn't want to get into trouble. The hills weren't as purple as I had thought them to be. And, they had no stories scribbled on them as I had imagined. Just a mesh of green, rocks and boulders. Just an endless, infinite road with no destination. A turn here and a meandering there. And a few love notes in chalk made on the road by couples eloping, perhaps. Deepak loves Priya. Or were there other names too? They are making a school near the hills too. A kind of shabby looking building it seems to me. It looks to me like a school out of Enid Blyton books. All it needs is red paint, a very strict principal and a couple of teenagers hungry for adventure.

They say there isn't much to do in this city. It's dead. Has no life of its own. Yet, as I walked on today, I found life in the purple hills. A life still undiscovered. Waiting to be found out by wanderlust. Waiting to be devoured by an odd traveller. The roads are stories. The Pied Piper that leads the way, and promises never to come back again. The hills are full of a music, a fragrance of wanderlust, of meanderings of the mind. And it scars the skin.. burns into the soul, the music, the fragrance and it explodes in your mind like a tinybluestar in the sky.

And, I tried to bury a part of me in those hills knowing well that I'll go there again and again and there will be feeble screams of me from there too. From the part left there.

The hills are alive with the sound of music, and with a story newly etched with my footprints and a childish laughter among the trees.

Chasing The Sky.

It didn't take me much time to realize that I was almost chasing the sky today when you guys egged me on to photograph the sky. The evening sky here has a charm of its own. One of the few things that keeps me grounded here. Today the orangish churning sky captivated this random photographer and I persisted to run after it. I would've lost all sense of time had you people not joked around about my weird positions trying to take the pictures.

I ran from near the auditorium where the sky looked fiery - almost as if it were on fire, to the lawn hoping to get a better view and then, to the end of the iron-concrete wall that separates the temporary campus from the other wings of the university. Everytime I moved in closer, I moved farther away from my sky. Everytime I expected to get a better picture, I lost a part of my sky. Each time I thought I had the sky in my palms I lost the fiery gleams of orange light peeping through the clouds. A little closer and I would have probably lost my marmalade sky forever.

My dreamy sky is my muse. It engulfs me. No point chasing it. No point capturing it in my starshine eyes.