The doorbell rings
At four in the morning
I reach the door
With blurry eyes
The room smells of smoke
From the candles I lit hours before.

It’s you at the door
Clenching my favourite flowers
Greeting me with a grin
I ask you in my mind
“Where were you last night?
I waited for days and hours
To get a glimpse of this smile.”
Guess you heard me,
Like you always do.
“I was caught up in work”, you say
Giving me reasons for your absence

Two sides of the same coin
We’re like a glass of
half water, half wine.

Just as the kettle is meant for tea,
And the hill always shelters cold breeze
Just as every picture has a memory,
Some things are meant to be
Together, inseparable.
Like the green of the forest
Like the sweet in the dessert
Like your hand in my hand
In a 0°C weather.
And I may not ask for perfect endings.

She was trying to
Find the oxymoron
To her sorrowful life
As she turned
The pages of the past.
“I will travel the world“,
She had once proclaimed
When asked what her dream was.
Oh, what an irony it seems
That she travelled through countries
From the Arab states to Turkey
And sailed to the beautiful Greek islands
Which were nothing like her home,
Where she woke up to dark skies
And where the alarm
Wasn’t the chirping birds
But deafening explosions
And still, unhappy,
As if she regrets
what she dreamt of.
She now searches for a covert
Which would be her home
But unlike her home
Where faces wouldn’t be so alien
And love and food would be in excess.
And as she takes refuge
In the next alien country
To be persecuted again,
All she wishes for her life
Is to turn from awful
To awfully good.

Like a bright light
You came in through my
permeable window-like heart.
I opened it all for you
For flowers to bloom
And darkness to fade
But too much of something
Is bad, they say.
The heat burnt my skin
The flowers wilted
The home of amour I offered you
Was filled with hot air.
Guess you were like summer
Seasonal, transient
Leaving raindrops as you depart
Washing off every trail
But making a promise to come again,
Making a vow to come again.

While most people have summers or winters as their favourite seasons, spring is equally admirable to me. An underrated, yet a beautiful time of the year, it is associated with colours. In summers you’ve yellow, sunny days. Winters are all about white and grey. Spring starts with yellow leaves, eventually transitioning trees to green, while I watch the orange flame-like flowers bloom under the blue sky.

Spring brings me memories of childhood. It’s the time of year when I used to have a short vacation before getting upgraded to the next class. I’d walk on the yellow path that the neem tree at my house adorned with its leaves. I’d also regularly observe if the mango tree bore any mangoes, because collecting raw mangoes was definitely one of my and my cousins’ favourite pass times. We have always been enthusiastic about plants, due to which we sowed numerous of them during the time. Before the vacation ended, we’d start preparing ourselves for the summer break. We’d take out our ludo and carrom boards after a year, and start having demo games to be skilled enough by the summer vacation.

Draped in white,
She,
Born in hospital
With all the glee
She bloomed like a flower
Away from thorns
A daughter, a sister
Cheeks, red and curls, brown
Embracing red as she marries
Discovers a life
That’s not about fairies
A brunt of home
She, a wife, a mother
Eyes glisten bright
Hiding all the trouble
She grows old
A stick, no teeth
Her soulmate has died
She’s all bleak
When end comes near
God, they see
Draped in white
She.

You wonder, how resilient
Are those sunflowers
At the backyard
Fighting the winters
To be able to see
The sun, afresh.
I see a sunflower
Everyday, in you
Tackling issues
And waiting in calm
To be ready to bloom
In the morning, yet again.

Twirling to the song,
I giggle endlessly

Trying to plie and flip
As I open my arms
Not sure if
I should move along
To this catchy beat
That’s taking me away
To the world of happiness
As I go on with my sway

What was that phrase
In the ‘Kite Runner’?
“They only let you
be this happy
When they’re preparing to take
Something from you”
Well let’s just risk this once
I will see what to do
So I take a leap
To get in to that place
But guess I’ll fall
And break my legs

Years from now I’ll reminisce
How you and I were a thing
Lending shoulders
To sleep and cry,
But got estranged
In a labyrinth
And couldn’t come back.

You wrote a song for me
Said it entails everything
From what we had since the beginning
You added tunes and jingles
Took all the efforts you could
And presented it to me
On a sunny day, in the woods
I didn’t like it
It broke your heart
Disheartened, you went away
Somewhere far.
Turns out the song
Got imprinted in my head,
I listened to it everyday
Till my death.