Stranger, Friend...

I see you peep
And then retreat
Through the fluttering curtains at my window;
And then I hear you...
I hear you rustle,
As you move with the wind.
Are you trying to hide?
Are you trying to catch a glimpse of me,
Without being seen,
Like your friend at my window
Yesterday?
I feel the smile on my lips
As I leave my desk,
That holds a silver-framed picture
Of him.
Maybe I'll tell him about you
Maybe not...I think not.
I look out,
And there you are-
Unfamiliar-
And strangers though we are,
I seem to remember you,
From some random moment
Of disenchantment.
I see you soar today,
Fly free and soar high,
Yellow tail flapping in the wind;
The green smile on your face,
Has smudges from the fingers
Of the nine-year-old,
Whose hands are still sticky.
Not so disenchanted today, are we?
Do tell your other friends
To drop by.

Some Things That Will Never Be...

I watch the blue threads on your loom

Skipping up and down

As the shuttle races

Zig-zagging tiny green patterns

And I think perhaps it lacks some yellow

To add some happiness

But it seems you have other plans

With just blue and green

So I sit back and watch

And I tell myself

That there are some things

That could have been

And some

That will never be.

Autumn Leaf

An Autumn leaf
Drifting in the wind
Sticks to a cold, glass window-pane
And weeps for the loss
Of it's lonely tree
Someone tell it
About life and loss.

An Autumn leaf
Drifting in the wind
Sticks to the fingers of a little boy
And smiles between the pages
Of his picture-book
It tells us what
We ought to leave behind.

Another Lifetime

It had been raining for a fortnight - the sky wept as if mourning the loss of an irreplaceable lost love; the sounds of its grieving cries echoed by thunder. The clouds that sailed overhead were massive, gray tufts of cottonball conjuring up random shapes, not very different from the sticky cotton-art pictures made by the chirpy 6 year olds who went to her for art lessons on Sundays. It wasn't Sunday. It was one of those days in the middle of monsoon when the joy of the first showers had long been spent and the empty, wet roads ten floors below her 4 bedroom apartment made her feel what she vehemently refused to give in to on better days - loneliness.

She was all of 39 years: married for 14 years and a mother of two. She had jumped into an arranged match with much hope of turning it into the warm, enduring kind of companionship that she had seen her parents share. However, the only adjective she could think of befitting her fourteen years of marriage was 'mellow'. They never had much to talk about beyond the shared mumbling of a few meaningless words across the dinner table drowned by the excited narration of the children about their newest achievement or mischief depending on which one did the talking. The worst was not when he was too immersed in work to talk. The worst were the silences when he did not have much work.

Mellow wasn't how she felt that evening. She felt the loss of something she had never had, something she had seen in the eyes of some of her friends who laughed more often. It was one of those days when loneliness crept up on her. So she did what she always did on one of those days – she closed her eyes and went back a thousand years to a different time –

She was young, perhaps pretty and a little breathless with laughter over some joke shared with the man holding her hand and looking at her with laughing, brown eyes. There were about a dozen other couples in the room dancing to the tune of a slow chart-topper and oblivious to the baby butterflies fluttering in her tummy just the way they were oblivious to anyone but each other. The music stopped for a couple of minutes as the orchestra prepared to burst into another feet-tapping number. He could see that she was a little tired and it was the perfect excuse for him to sweep her off the dance floor and have her all to himself for a few minutes until the next song. The empty couch near the balcony was soft enough to sink into and they slumped into it gratefully, still holding hands. She burst into a fit of tiny giggles and turned to him.

“I’m so happy”, she breathed between giggles. “You make me so happy.”

“Do I?” he asked. “Well that’s a start ‘cause I’m going to love you and keep you so happy for the rest of our lives that it’ll be enough to last you another lifetime.” 

Sometimes, when she thought hard enough, she almost believed that that was her. And then, like all those sometimes, she opened her eyes and whispered to herself, “I was another girl. It was another lifetime. And he loved me enough to last another lifetime. It has to last one more lifetime…this lifetime.”

Tomorrow

Cut from the neck of your guitar, 
I am but a broken piece of string, 
Rolled up in a spiral 
And left in the corner

With crushed up music sheets...
I can read the notes on them, 
While you go on making music - 
Some new and some that I have heard before - 
Every word a bleeding poem , 
Every note a crying song. 
At times I see you lost, 
At others you find yourself, 
And each day you walk away, 
Leaving me to wonder If I'll see you again...

Tomorrow?