Shrouds

"So we broke up. I mean it wasn't so much breaking up as..it dint work out ok "
I nodded sagely. The mall around buzzed with activity. Young lovers held hands, leery youths looked on partly intrigued, partly repulsed. Fat aunties splurged their husbands assets seeming to be hep and an anachronistic chaatwaala pushing his cart settled in front of Mocha. She carelessly brushes her hair off her face and looked again. I was listening, coz this was the first time she was willing to talk about it. they had been the envy of the college. She the babe of chiffon dreams, he the life of every mehefil. He wooed her bollywood style, she left him hollywood style. Like a 1920's actress, tormented. Seeking deliverance.

She has always been some sort of an enigma. Not in the girly way and. No femme fatale buisness for her. simply put a mystery. In all those years of friendship none of us knew where exactly she lived, what her parents did (her behaviour most likely suggested a super dysfunctional one). She never asked for love nor gave any away. He was free to woo her and she was free to indulge in him. She did so. And then she gave it all away in a disinterested way.

He drinks like a fish now. Apparently. Smokes till ethereal smoke consume him. In that darkness of tears and the sweat of his weariness only she resonates. And yet in that chaos that one calls Bombay, they met at the local station and looked gravely. Held hands and caught together that fast local to the sunset.

PS:
I havent been smoking anything. True friend. True story. I tried to recreate the mood of the moment. I think its safe to say I have failed miserably.

Love II

My name is buddy. If things counted that way, I’d be in eighteenth standard now. And this is an attempt to define my ‘crush’. Straightforward enough so far, since writing doesn’t involve being tongue-tied.

I liked you the moment I started speaking to you. Chaos theory applicable in full force. If I hadn’t liked you then, I probably would never have and the liking only increased with time. True to the sighing young man I stuck to clichés, I borrowed your assignment and lent mine away, I asked you for help where none was needed. I think the first time my heart gave a leap and my stomach jolted and I realized that such feelings were possible, was when I saw you in the gray salwar-kameez. I stopped simply to look at you. No blasé comparisions to celestial beings or earthy voluptuousness, just pure admiration for your beauty.

Like the darkness you awoke feelings in me I knew not I had. The green monster frequented me and so did a dark gloom. A lonely melancholy and lop-sided smiles were my company. When you passed on gossip to me, it was a treasured secret, when you laughed at my jokes I felt invincible. Why did you ever not cry at my shoulder? Open at times, cold and aloof at others whatever you were only served to increase your allure.

Like a deep thing of immensity it lay in my heart, with everyday life like falling leaves on a snowy patch. We went our separate ways, as people are eventually wont to. I strangely have no recollection of the last time I met you. Was it when we were both on stage together (your black saree oddly distracting me at every word I spoke)? Or was it the coffee we had (cuppa filter in the rain surrounded by old books)? Or was it at lunch, a meager spread that has never been more scrumptious?

Familiar beasts of old call upon sometimes and I wave them away with a wave of my hand. Will this be of what I will sing when I am lonely? Or write about when it’s cold and I wish coziness? I close with the sunset. Time to move on buddy.