Another Letter to the Beautiful Stranger
Dear acquaintance of my soul, From a safe distance, from the corner of my eye, I had listened to your leaving. We had never met, never become anyone to each other, there had been no exchange, no transaction with a transcript or a trace, and I had lived on in my beloved obscurity, hiding from…
Wet paper
Dear Friend of my heart. A yellow paper boat floats into my world, across time, I gasp and laugh a little. It reminds me of the papers my father used to get us. I wrote on those. I wrote so much on those yellow pages. I sit on the roadside, it is raining. Someone took…
Sustaining Vagabondage
All words wither, a river of rain falls upon my bare skin at midnight. Servus imprisonment, the mother of all freedom, come hither radiant raindrops! I feel cold and it warms my heart. There had been a zillion degrees of nonsense posing as a god, posing as the Northstar and I said: Enough! Let me…
Rain and Reminiscing
It rains. My mind drifts. It feels like I made a mistake somewhere along the path. I cannot help but think of… forget it. Thunder outside. My heart is weighed down by a terror that I do not yet feel completely. Skies rumble. It sinks like a nervous rock. There is a strange sense of…
We broke the clocks and seasons
Dear friend of my heart, I got rid of the clock on the wall long ago. My wrists have been bare for longer. There is another though, perpetually on my person; a reminder of mortality, of fragility, of ephemerality. My heartbeat unlike the absent monotonous machine on the wall slows down when soothed by quiet…
an Old Ache and a New Song
Dear friend of my heart, Some days an old ache that I thought I had left behind returns and intensifies. I look for a friend of my heart who would share an afternoon with me and listen to me falter with words as I try to tell them how the earth can be hard to…
Chair of Poetry
Dear friend of my heart, There is a chair I once came to occupy; a chair of silence, of reflection, of immersion, of thought, a chair of meditation, and I often wrote to you sitting on that chair. I wrote of beauty. I wrote of many joys of sacred seclusion. I wrote of melancholy evenings…
a drowsy afternoon
Dear friend of my heart, The sweltering mid-summer afternoons here in Dehradun are not half as unbearable in the placid shade of Mahogany trees, sipping on a jar of liberally iced Americano, pouring over a Wodehouse, in the rare company of a chummy cat, called Jojo. I have been writing, you see, and when I…
A Gypsy in Dehradun
When I studied the west, which is all many of us seem to be doing by design, I came across the Gypsy as taking many forms of the outside. They were those colourful and suspicious nomadic folk, who became many things to the more settled kind. They became scapegoats for criminality and social evils, threatening…
A Letter to the Beautiful Stranger
Dear Friend of my heart, For years I have written songs for the singular joy of music and for the pleasure of those who would listen to them with kindness and love. In the most pleasurable company of the most delightful musicians I have come to become one myself. Here is a little something for…
O Monkey, Monkey, wherefore art thou Monkey?
There was a time, though I cannot seem to either remember or imagine it anymore, when I was actually excited to see monkeys. I was a child and monkeys lived in the forests back then. Now it feels like they have been here forever, all around us, in ever more populous groups, leaving behind gardens…
Writing Potion
That brown earthy aroma of ground coffee in a wicked alliance with rum is made homelier with a deliberate allowance of vanilla essence, or so I surmised today, as I took the first coveted sip and felt the beverage warm my insides like an old friend. I have been mellow like water, flowing about the…
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