Leaving...

The door was half open,

From the partial openness,

I noticed her bags and packed cartons on the floor,

Neatly labelled with black bold markers,

From Hostel Room 303 to Flat 17D, 

On orange post -it notes and brown tape.

The packers were coming in five minutes,

She looked lost among the cartons,

She stared at her phone,

While I stared at her,

Tetris, calendar and the calculator applications on her Nokia E-71

Were over-used. 

She still played tetris when she felt lost. 

She wanted a smoke,

Marlboro lights.

But she chucked the pack last night,

Into the River Sabarmati flowing in darkness,

Right outside her dusty brown balcony,

Filled with the rivers sands. 

She was leaving,

She was getting lost in society,

She was fulfilling her social obligations.

She had a reserve in the grey groove,

Of her Nike backpack, 

Stung with badges collected from all over the world.

I hated her to break her promise,

But I loved to see her smoke,

Of how she pretended to take the nicotine in its entirety,

But almost choked before she released most of the smoke.

But today she was different,

She rolled it herself in a marlboro light,

It helped to ease the pain,

Of tolerating me for 2 years.

She stared at me from the half opened door,

She wanted to stay,

But she also wanted to flee,

She stared at me constantly,

For the last week,

As if her eyes wanted to store my every movement,

In a polaroid snapshot.

She loved me,

She left because she fell madly in love with me.

She decided not to come back

Because Alexander Super Tramp inspired her stupid soul

With his last words…

What if I was smiling and running into your arms,

Would you see then what I see now?

The packers took her belongings away one by one,

As she descended from the cemented stairs,

I stood still like concrete on the striped mattress of her room,

I could not bid her good bye.

The synapses asked for consultation,

Stopping her would be more painful,

Than letting her go.

I thought so then,

But was it vice-versa?

Questions have weird textures.

All questions don't have answers.

And do answers change with time?

Time infects context.

It creates and clears doubt.

I wanted time to help me,

But I fell in love with time,

More than her.

So I let her leave,

Leave me with her shadows,

Intermingled with time.

I loved him through pictures...

I loved him through pictures,

Clicked secretly and cropped at friends get togethers,

And birthday parties.

I kissed the pictures,

So that he could feel my warmth,

Through the distance.

I collected tea bags from expensive hotel rooms,

Because he adored tea.

But I never got a chance,

To make a cup of my favourite tea for him.

He remained silent,

In a room of loud chatter,

Thinking about things,

I wanted to know.

Then one day,

The crumpled white paper napkin,

Scrawled with a black pen,

Was pushed into my fair hands.

He wanted me to make a heart,

And write I love you,

With curvy typography,

On the cream card chosen specially

For his most loved one.

I laughed in my head,

That finally the dream has come true,

The man I loved for 633 days,

Will propose under the moon lit skies,

And melt my heart with his warmth.

He gave the card to my closest friend.

And gave me a huge smile.

Yellow Shorts

She sleeps in her yellow shorts,

The ones she bought with Him,

In the yellow Bennetton shop,

When she found her right size,

Number seven.

She baked the hilsa fish,

Wearing her yellow shorts,

As he smeared mustard paste on them,

She never washed the stains,

Fearing she would lose His only touch.

She found her fears a month back,

When her frail body failed to fight her fears,

The world told her, 

That a body once sold to love,

Can never be loved again.

A month back,

She sold her body to love,

For the first time.

Now she sleeps alone,

Under a blue striped blanket,

Wearing her yellow shorts,

In a white washed room,

With white wires in her ears,

Listening to Floyds Wish you were Here.

She had found, 

Her same old fears,

After waiting for years,

She wished for Him to be near.

Her slumber,

Her yellow shorts,

And white headphones,

Gave her a new world to dream.

She ran away from reality,

The claustrophobia made her scream.

She could not fight her fears anymore,

So she slept till reality came to knock on her door,

Reality posed a question,

The answer to which she did not know.

If love wanted your body today,

And after loving it,

Threw it away,

Would you let love,

Come tomorrow,

To love it again,

And give a chance,

To shatter it, 
A. g. a. i. n.

Fighting reality,

With her same old fears,

She chose to love Him,

Without Him being near.

She gave love a chance,

To shatter her again.

She washed her yellow shorts,

In a bucket full of water,

Mixed with antiseptic fluids,

And strong detergents.

She loved to hold on to her dreams,

And for the first time she loved her body

Even if the world didn't.

She slept under the blue striped blanket,

With white wires in her ears,

Wearing her yellow shorts,

And dreamt of Him to be near.

The yellow shorts may have lost His stains,

But her dreams remain embedded with them.

She chose not to get rid of them,

Even if it meant

That the world chose

Not to love her body again.

If you don't have hatred…

It took me a second to hate the

Stroganoff on the cream colored menu,

And ten minutes to hate the

Strawberry peach yoghurt shake.

But hating people for what they do

I just don't think that is in my taste.

We come across multitudes,

Some we love, and some we hate,

But what…

If you don't have hatred?

Does it mean,

That you are a saint,

Or saying a lie,

Or fooling your inner soul,

And suppressing the truth inside.

Or does it mean you never had

The power to truly love?

If you don't have hatred

You don't have love.

Protected

I cannot talk anymore,

I just hear people chatter,

So I chatter in the noise.

I float across 

White cement,

Water pipes,

Grey cubicles,

Glass windows,

Central air conditioning,

RFID cards,

6 latte's,

White paper cups,

Keyboards,

Clicks,

White hair,

Bitten chapped lips

Dark circles,

Dairy milks, 

Black pigment liners,

and Tyrells,

Knowing how alone can a person be.

I hear them talk,

So I talk,

About black plugs,

And good design.

I cannot talk anymore,

So I listen to Blackfield and Lacuna Coil,

And soak into Sigur Ros,

And write down lines,

From Into the Wild.

Others tried to define my identity,

I tried defining it too,

But while defining others identity,

I lost mine way too soon.

I cannot talk anymore,

So I scribble scrawly lines,

To know that I have my identity,

Protected,

In cream papers of my notebooks,

That will get lost in time.

I don't want to be protected like my lines.

It happened in a second...

It was just a transfer of signals,

Codes, numbers, accounts, identity,

From one secured space to 

Another password protected space.

It happened in a second.

On September 28, 2012,

I got my first salary,

First internship salary,

Sitting in my grey cubicle,

Made colorful by doodled

Paper coffee cups.

Is this what I wanted?

Is this what I needed?

Atleast it seemed that way,

When I signed on the call letter,

And contract forms,

Which made me sell my creativity,

For a while,

To a company that I owed a lot to,

For making me survive all my juries,

In my under graduate and post-graduate

Design life.

Material can never satiate the soul,

That is something I have concluded,

When the dream you had, 

Of earning your first salary,

Gets shattered, 

In a second of your life.

Then the vacuum sets in,

That makes you write,

Pieces like this,

Drinking scotch on the rocks,

And smoking marlboro lights.

If everything was complete,

And was going all right,

Was life worth living

Without the void and the fights?

The irony lies in ourselves,

We complicate our own lives,

By trying to simplify the complicated,

Only to get sucked into monotonous black holes,

Of a daily routined lifestyle. 

It happened in a second.

But it's novelty is gone.

Because it will happen again and again,

Like a letterpress machine

Printing paper leaflets,

That will get extinct with time.

Chips...

We met through strangeness,

Engulfed in a vacuum filled stench

Of past relationships.

You told me later

That you were in a relationship

But I was not.

How did you decide

On a conclusion like this I wonder 

Because I always ran away from

The disease of defining it.

I cannot define love

Or the feeling of being in it.

I had agreed with you

On the logic behind it,

You were the first

To introduce me to it.

The antibiotics and rasam

Has made a concoction

That has evaporated all consciousness

Sometimes I feel,

Its fatal to breathe.

But your thoughts helped me to sleep.

Why are you trying to eradicate my sorrows,

What will happen when you disappear?

I know,

God won't come and pick up my little pieces,

Meticulously massacred by you.

But, maybe Satan will.

I fear your disappearance…

I fear your exit,

I fear for loving you so much,

I fear being so weak.

Chips make me happy,

Because they are so crisp,

They break into pieces,

When they are bitten with sharp teeth.

I bit chips worth 225 bucks,

Remembeing that night when you

Bit my fair skin, with your soft lips.

I stay apart wondering,

How can another entity

Give you so much force,

To make you believe

All the hopes and dreams,

That were shattered with grief,

Every time you tried to believe.

My warm tears trickled down,

As I cried my heart out,

For the first time,

Clasped in your strength.

How scared I was to believe,

A stranger who I loved,

Without the logic,

That the stranger had carefully taught.

The dogs barked silently

On the empty dark road.

They witnessed the words,

That came pouring out 

Of the strangers simple soul.

I fought my own feelings,

I betrayed myself to not know,

That the stranger stole my heart,

And understood me much more,

Than I had ever known.

Its strange to love a stranger,

But it is even more strange, 

To battle your own strange soul,

To understand the power of love,

And to never let go.

Chips make me happy,

Because they are so crisp,

They break into pieces,

When they are bitten with sharp teeth.

Your love can make me chip with ease.

She  travelled across the sands,

In a dusty yellow mustang,

With a man who wore checkered linens,

And sipped cognac at sharp turns.

The dark skies showered moisture,

To abandon the warmth,

The smoke of his red marlboro,

Touched her staunch stance.

He stopped the car, 

To mingle with the mirage,

While she still dreamt of ajrak grids,

To block print the tiles of their house,

Which they had built in their dreams,

With their own hands.

Changing Contexts

I questioned God to come down and greet me,

From a dark narrow tunnel,

Or from a bright illuminated sky.

Satan has visited me more often,

To reaffirm every time he exists,

Unlike God.

Will I stop believing in God,

If he does not visit me, 

or has not even met me once?

I believed in you,

Even if I have not met you.

Homo sapiens are Homo religiosus.

They believe in religion,

But not a unified one.

They believe in God,

But God to them lies in contexts.

God changes to men and women,

Because of ever changing contexts.

You might change tomorrow,

And your pomises might evaporate,

Due to changing contexts.

But if context infects belief,

Then we will live with guns in our cupboards.

And God will pull the trigger through your hands.

I hope I find you stagnant in the shifting sands.

I hope changing contexts don't poison our soul.

I hope we can Imagine the world to be more beautiful

Than even John Lennon did.

Changing contexts,

Cannot change,

What we firmly believe.

Move...

I loved you for exactly 961 days,

In my dreams.

I sometimes wonder did I imagine to love you.

Imagination can be deceiving.

It transcends physical reality.

We had trespassed reality.

But yet got entangled in it.

Inhumans would have moved on easily

But I write and frame words

My words move

But I cannot move anymore.

Move...

because love has been promised.

Move...

because I cant say no.

Move...

because stagnancy pricks my dead skin.

Move...

because my organs are infected with your touch. 

I was in a white room under a white machine,

As they analysed the infection injecting the yellow fluid

through my veins.

I did not move a mm then,

But my thoughts did move.

In death if people remembered God

I remembered you.

I went through the pain

Because I wanted to live,

For you.

You were embedded in my secrets.

I remembered you when the veri-sign page opened

Every single time I booked movie tickets,

Hoping you would accompany me.

But you did not move.

Move

when a stranger tried to alleviate the pain

Move

when it was already late to restrain

Move

when I smiled but I was going insane

Move

when you kissed her parched lips

As I writhed in pain

I want you to move...

Away

Move away now...

Before I cease to move again.