i promise i will look for your face in every photograph. i promise. you are not the boy i love. you cannot be the boy who wants to become another peter pan. you are not him, you never can be. however, i will always search for you in crowds when i am alone. i will sing songs of you to the skies and they will draw patterns of you in blue and white and orange. i will conjure up words and poems to think of you. i will run away from people and places and blame you. and at night i will empty the sepia of my eyes to my pillow. yet, i will search for you. and find you, perhaps?

in some photograph. an old class photograph. not visible at first. but then, perfectly discernible. i will chart the laughlines on your face with my eyes, and some archaic voice of you will laugh in my head. it will be almost maddening how parts of you will have survived still, and how they will continue to haunt me sometimes, despite being safely buried in the sepulchre of my heart.

you are fear. yet, i will search for your face. in photographs, in crowds, in farawaylands. in unwelcome dreams. in songs. in poetry. and somehow you will live right inside me. parts of you i couldn't let time gnaw away at. and someday i will stare at one of the photographs long and hard, and try and scan through them to see you grinning. and wonder if the smile you are wearing is the one i left you.

i promise i will look for you in unknown, tucked-away photographs and new ones, too. and wait for that grin, the one i left you, to disappear. and for a new one to appear. that is the day my world wouldn't come off in pieces.

Cities Are Like Tattoos.

Another serenading suicide. Another trip to insanity. I hate this part of the city. The part that surrounds home. There are stories written in the wind. Memories are scattered here.

I walk on with a lonesome song blaring in my ears. I want to walk to those parts of home that trouble me, that madden me. Autos, blue buses rush past. I walk past the 'favourite chicken roll' shop, and then, pass that old I-pill medical store. Noone knows what I'm thinking. Not even close people can guess that I'm constantly comparing myself to that girl in the picture postcard, whom I wasn't even supposed to find. I get flashes of the photographs I saw last evening. I create stories about that girl in my head. And wonder how this idiot wind with infinite memories could never ruffle her thoughts.

I walk ahead. I curse S on the phone who has kept me waiting knowing how this place torments me.

I want to purge myself off this city. Of certain people. Even if it leaves bruises, even if it leaves me empty with an unendurable void. I want to close the doors to this part of this city. I want to return to that night in Delhi when I drank so much that I forgot everything and went to sleep with temporary memory loss. I want that retrograde amnesia to continue. I want this city to be devoured by that Korsakoff's syndrome. I want to search for an Axis Bank ATM, pick up whatever money I have and run away where this city won't find me.

S still isn't here. I cannot take it anymore. I want to rush back home. I want to be left all to myself. I want to go back to university. It's safer there. Even Delhi was safer, for that matter. At least, I'm not scared of those cities, like I'm scared of this one.

I look ahead into the darkness, with the same song now playing in my head. This place has long spells of loadshedding.
I wonder what the girl in the picture postcard must be doing with her newfound lover right now, and cry.
I am selfish, I think.

I stare at you in silence holding a storm of words inside my stomach. The moment is perfect, the silence pristine, the nothingness surrounding us like a bubble. It is not evening, and the afternoon sun has not faded yet. We are frozen in time. Plain frozen in timeboxes that are more than just trices.

Come close to me. Keep your face close to mine.

The twinkle in your eyes is like silver stardust. And, the fragrance of your unkempt hair makes me want to feel the faded light that falls on your face. We are a single silhouette.

Let me hold you in my arms.

I want you to keep looking into my eyes, and pull me by my Om pendent and ruffle my hair a little. I want us to lie in silence, my head near your heart.

I love you.

But I don't say it. You don't hear it. Today there are no words. Only a single strand of colourful silence that binds our souls together.

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.

We are running around in circles in pursuit of the maddening season of songs and love. Just like ripples. We are in a crowd, dying to find each other. We are in each other's shoes, living each other's stories, yet we don't know us. We are dying, I think. Dying out of sight. Living on morbid whispers. Just whispers that once had the fragrance of a sunshine we basked in. You sit beside my tainted reflection and wonder why your dusks are not like your dawns, and why we use this season of careless whispers to dream and talk to our own shadows. I ask the mouth of sky inside me why it is falling and how the stars just died out. And, we let us fade away; we are being gnawed away silently by the ebony darkness we ourselves created for our comfort. We are the debris of our own hopes and dreams, deadened even more by our wishful thinking.

I think we are running around in circles in pursuit of the maddening songs and love. We are waiting for spring. We'll sail through this. We'll shine on.

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.

The World In A Room.

They are dressing these moments up in red. A kind of tranquil, sublime red. Something like the scarlet sky blushing like a bride. Or maybe it was a nuder shade of vermilion. Like the ladies on doshomi, smearing red onto each other's faces - shindoor khela, they call it. Aaschhe bochhor aabaar hobe. And it is stark and almost ironic how they stain each other.
In the next room, they are playing a shindoor khela of sorts. Smearing each other with words. Playing with words. Stealing every word and stabbing it a million times. And I hear sobs. The words are unnecessary. The tears are unnecessary. Them playing such a pitiable game is absurd. I feel like stopping them, telling them what they are doing is wrong. They aren't only playing with words; they are playing with lives, with friendships that could have lasted forever; they are playing with the happiness that is a part of them. They are playing with love. They are smearing parts of themselves on pieces of broken glass and watching themselves drip like the shindoor-aalta words. Like blood. Knowing little that the wounds will show, the stains will remain.

There are pregnant pauses in between. And everytime the hiatus is broken, it is as if one of them has deliberately picked up the words said before hurled against the other. Each battle of words, each new round of shindoor khela creating a stronger barrier between them. It's disturbing. Even for someone from a completely different world. Someone who hardly cares to look into their world, their little biosphere which they are now tainting with a maddening shade of red. Someone who'd smear a nuder shade of scarlet in her eyes in the middle of the night sometimes, making sure noone is watching. I'm the detached one and yet, this game is too much for my detached sense of fun. I see others gathering outside the wooden door of their world, some giggling, others mocking at what words can do to even the "bestest of friends" or how they knew "he only used her". It's crazy how in the middle of the night a world is exploding at the force of words and people are actually picking up the pieces of each monologue trying to make sense of the weird but true jigsaw puzzle. They find it fun? Ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous.

What about her sitting and staring silently at the others, wondering, probably,whether she'd use still more fierce words or silence to calm this coup of words? All she can probably think of now is her world falling apart. Bit by bit. Her beloved world. Falling apart; being blown down. Only the debris at her feet. Only a silent murmur of the million words she's heard tonight in her head. A deep shade of scarlet-vermilion red in her eyes.

It's perturbing for me. The words throb at our walls. We have no world of our own. Yet, it penetrates into our make-believe walls too. And I can hear a feeble scream or two, sobs and a deafening silence instead of a glowing laughter that normally echoes in their world. It's more than shocking for a vagabond like me. I'm afraid of worlds. I fear being the part of a world for too long. So I transcend from one world to another. And I like this painful but painless process.

I look into the sky from the window at this hour. The darkened clouds give way to a reddish hue almost like the words they were painting each other with.

Marble Moments.

In between whispering to the winds lines that are meant only for you, I think I spend most of my afternoons daydreaming on the kitchen floor. Imagining the fragile moments of you holding me so close that I can almost feel the fragrance of your unkempt hair seep into me. Imagining counting stars on your bare chest. I think most of the times I'm too tipsy during the afternoons, or too sleepy. Or, maybe I just get a high just thinking about you. And on cold winter mornings like these, my reveries keep me warm and I think about playing with your scent and kissing your brow while you're asleep.

I've tried shaking these thoughts away but they get to me, you know. You set me free, somehow. I see my unchained skies in your eyes. When you smile. When you take off your glasses from all that silly laughter we've had, you enchant me, your eyes - they leave me a little breathless. And to be with you, around you is like walking under the rainclouds. You are love. Love is you. I don't know what love is. I'm curious to know who you really are. You, like love, are nothing and everything. To me. You are silence, like love is silence. We walk together in this silence, sometimes. We know when to fill those voids with words and songs. We smile, and don't let us know. I think we're in love and yet, we do nothing about it. Sometimes we do almost everything about it. We don't know we're in love; we don't know we're silent. And, you don't even understand how at times I steal our metaphors to capture into poetry in vain.

You intrigue me. You and your words, and your ability to keep things inside and yet, smile. I wonder how you glow like a tiny firefly in complete darkness. No, you aren't really a firefly. Fireflies die everynight and fireflies come back as marbles; they bring back memories. Fireflies become tiny rounded colourful marbles that stare right into your face reminding you of trices that you couldn't hold in your palms. Nay! you are not a firefly or a marble. You're you. You're silence. The partial absence of words. Love. An ennui. Shards of daydreams cascading through the blinds like sunshine on lazy afternoons.

You're the road I take with you. You're the long long walks around the old storyteller town under the moonlight. You are the crevices in the hills where we find wild purple flowers and capture them on polaroid. You are the poem you don't understand. You're nothing and everything to me. You're love.

Diamonds And Rust.

I can hear my mind humming Diamonds and Rust as we walk. It's a strange thing how my mind is singing songs to me even while we are together. It is as if I have a distraction, something I don't want happening. It is almost seven in the evening and the purple of the sky has been washed by the grey-blue clouds. We are walking, searching for somewhere to sit, with a vengeance. While in one corner of my mind there's Baez playing, another part of my head screams out loud. This place sucks. This shitty place sucks. There's just too much noise in my head. Too much to capture in words, or chart down in diaries. I wish you'd turn around just once and try and see what is wrong with me. Why Diamonds and Rust? Why not something else? Why Baez? Baez kills me slowly with her music and lyrics. And you cannot let this happen to me. My head is spinning. Baez's arsenic treatment has already begun, I guess.

Well I'll be damned
Here comes your ghost again
But that's not unusual
It's just that the moon is full
And you happened to call
And here I sit
Hand on the telephone
Hearing a voice I'd known
A couple of light years ago
Heading straight for a fall

You look back more than once to check on me. You're wearing black and white. You're walking faster than me. Ahead of me. Just like Baba. Something that makes you even more desirable to me. Did you know girls love men who are like their fathers? Yet, you don't notice the crinkled expression on my face. It's the ebony darkness, I think, that plays with your eyes or is it my fake smile that has snared you. I see pictures. Several pictures in front of my eyes. Like family polaroid collages on softboards. They are scary pictures. Pictures of the past. I think, they call them memories. Memories I thought I'd buried in some corner of my old book cupboard. The memories flash past, as I smile foolishly. I don't want anyone, not even you, to know that these pictures are running through my mind. And these pictures are scary, they have no nexus at all; they just go on one after the other. It's like a deja vu. I've been here before. I've walked this way before. I've been with you before. Who are you? You are him? This is scary. I want to close my eyes and pass out.

As I remember your eyes
Were bluer than robin's eggs
My poetry was lousy you said
Where are you calling from?
A booth in the midwest
Ten years ago
I bought you some cufflinks
You brought me something
We both know what memories can bring
They bring diamonds and rust

We are still searching for a place to sit and I hear you mutter an expletive under your breath. You smile at me. Your eyes have so much affection in them that it leaves me a little dazed. You are not him. You cannot be him. I'm in a different world away from the shreds of old, abandoned rust. In a happier place with you. We reach the place near the building with mirrors, where we had first sat down after we discovered we like each other. There are far too many people here than there were a week ago. We decide to turn back.

Well you burst on the scene
Already a legend
The unwashed phenomenon
The original vagabond
You strayed into my arms
And there you stayed
Temporarily lost at sea
The Madonna was yours for free
Yes the girl on the half-shell
Would keep you unharmed

We are walking back. I can see you walking ahead again. You stop at intervals so that I can catch up with you. I decide I'm better off observing you from the back; it gives me time to deal with Baez and the pensives she rekindles. You really want a place to ourselves so you keep searching. I have given up long back. This has happened before, and has left me disappointed before. Expecting leaves me in disappointment all the time. So, I had stopped my expectations until I met you. You are him. He is you. And I'm sure I'm going to turn to stone again if you leave. Your images will be all I'll have left of you. And the images of the shadows of the trees on the road, that I can see now. I've bared too much of me to you. You know me quite a lot. There are only a few shades of me that you haven't managed to explore. The more you discover me, the more liberty you get to leave a scar-story on the wrist of my left-hand. The more you know of me, the more opportunity I give you to call me up one July afternoon to say goodbye. This is crazy. Baez stop playing. Stop it, this instant!

Now I see you standing
With brown leaves falling around
And snow in your hair
Now you're smiling out the window
Of that crummy hotel
Over Washington Square
Our breath comes out white clouds
Mingles and hangs in the air
Speaking strictly for me
We both could have died then and there

You're still looking around totally oblivious of the demons in my head. And thankfully so. I tend to mess up things, you know. I destroy moments. My fear does mean things to happiness. Someday my fear, my thoughts - I - will gnaw away at your happiness. Stay away from me, dear. You know, I could do with some crying on your shoulder now. I want to hold you tight now, and tell you about my fear. I don't care about this conservative city or the orthodox people here. I'm not scared of loneliness. All I fear are these pictures in my mind. And this song. It's haunted. It makes me feel dissolved. You are him? Ends are often beginnings. Where is this place? We reach where we started from. I want to run away from all the chaotic thought. I'm really hungry but I don't want to eat anything. The song is maddening.

Now you're telling me
You're not nostalgic
Then give me another word for it
You who are so good with words
And at keeping things vague
Because I need some of that vagueness now
It's all come back too clearly
Yes I loved you dearly
And if you're offering me diamonds and rust
I've already paid.

We go sit inside. The song still plays incessantly in my head but I'm too dizzy to acknowledge it. You smile at me; you know something is wrong. I'm plagued by uncertainty. I really want to run away to somewhere more secure, somewhere more safe. I'm tired of my mind, I'm tired of this fear. I want to write down about all the pictures I saw, about all the thoughts I had but I know time will eat away at my ink. I just want to put my head near your heart and hear your heartbeat. This is strange - the farther I want to run away from you, the closer you become to me. History repeats itself.

A few moments later, we are sitting beside each other. The song has almost faded. You have your arms around me. I don't want to think about those pictures or that uncertainty. At least not now.