Happy Eleven my Daughter

Tomorrow, my little girl officially becomes Eleven.

Unlike the Eleven from Stranger Things, she doesn’t use telekinesis (at least not yet), but somehow she can still move things without touching them—especially my wallet, my snacks, and my heart.

Over the last 11 years, she has shown me that real superpowers aren’t about opening portals or defeating monsters. They’re about kindness, courage, curiosity, laughter, and getting back up every time life knocks you down.

To my beautiful daughter: never stop being wonderfully, unapologetically YOU. The world will always have its Demogorgons, but it also needs brave, smart, compassionate girls who aren’t afraid to dream big and stand up for what is right.

As you step into Year Eleven, remember:

• Be curious.
• Be fearless.
• Be kind.
• Be yourself.

And if your actual telekinetic powers happen to show up this year, please use them responsibly… and maybe help with your homework.

Happy 11th Birthday, my little Eleven. 

When you bleed in absence

 In the absence of sound between midnight’s breath and sunrise’s soft sigh is that empty, shivering moment when the world forgets its noise and leaves hearts to beat alone in the dark. 

I breathe your name here, quietly, as though the letters might shatter the calm if spoken too loud.

Everywhere, I take you with me: you are the skin beneath my fingertips, the sweetness on my tongue when I whisper your name in dreams. Your absence isn’t empty. It is a living thing, a pain itself in my ribs and rooting deep and quiet in my bones until I ache with a kind of knot that knows no release.

There are moments I imagine you close enough that your breath storms the small, fragile places in me, the ones that awake at the sound of your name. I imagine your hands, not even touching me yet, just hovering, longing, and the space between us growing thick with everything we are trying not to say. 

Your laughter is like the lightening at the edge of a storm. The weight of your hand in mine, then the impression of its absence, soft as the echo of footsteps across an empty alley.

Each day I learn a little more of how to gather my calm together so I can walk through the world without giving myself away. But you, you undo that quiet. One thought of you, and I’m undone in ways I can’t admit out loud without shivering. I have tried to quiet this wanting, but it keeps rising, tidal, unreasonable, and shaped entirely like you. It presses against the inside of my chest as if my body is trying to escape itself and find yours instead. I don’t know if this is longing or hunger or something nameless that lives in the dark in between, but it moves through me in time to your pulse.

Enough of this thirst, longing and the hunger. I want you and i want you now.

This hunger doesn’t consume but claims.

You make me want to open every locked door inside me and let you walk through as though you’d always belonged there. I am greedy for you. Greedy for the breath you leave behind, the echo in the room where you once stood. Greedy for a second glance, another whispered, “Wait.” Another feel of skin against skin that says more than words could. 

I want to surrender, but not in the way people think surrender works. I don’t want to fall at your feet. I want to fall into the hollow of your throat, into the curve of your shoulder, into the quiet heat of your wanting. Descend into the holiest parts of hell, where one burns without respite or redemption.

And if you asked, softly, even once, I would confess everything:

how you live beneath my skin,

how the thought of you betrays my breath,

how desire turns my bones to gel,

how I ache with the impossibility of being close enough.

This is my truth. My offering. My vanquishing, still warm.

Take it, take me. I’m already halfway in your hands, in ruin and in waiting.

Ten years and counting

 Ten years and you ask why I love the way I do?

Ten billion reasons  but then your beauty renders my pen dry. Beyond a point I have no words. I only want to shut up and look at you until my eyes grow old.  Love is wild, blind, madness.      

I love you.

And I am prepared to say it until your skin is singed with the words by my breath. 

My lips to your navel. 
My life in the blink of your eyelids. 
Your hair, let it be my blindfold. Let me see the dark of your tresses before my eyes greet the light. 

In your beauty one is a poet. In your love one is a sufi mystic. In your embrace one surrenders. By your mouth one is transformed into plasma. Your kisses are vertigo. Your fingers in my hair are failed parachute strings. Your fingers on my cheek are lacerations on the imperfection of time. Your breath is a brick klin, burning and moulding my desire.

Your fingertips are the entrance and exit of all desire, worship, surrender. I lay at their door my eyes, my lips, and the soft thud of my heart. And your neck… Your neck is a ski slope where I go to die. No part of my being is incidental in its love for you. Each eyelash will meet its purpose upon your body.

From thousands of miles away my gaze does not move from your face, beloved. I have touched you in ways that have made words get up and leave the room. I have loved you in ways that has made language raise the white flag of surrender.

I tell my beloved, “let me have my way with you.”  
My beloved asks, “and what is your way?” 
My way is to extinguish the desire of ages upon your being. 

I grow anxious for a time when I can't show you – “look. This is what it is. This is the volcano. This is the sea. This is the whirlpool, the cave, the fog, the blood, the speed, the gasp, the low moan, the exhale, the steady silence. This is what i feel".

The seasons exist because the sun and moon stay locked in the eternal struggle of who stays in the sky longer to gaze upon you. And so, they take turns and rejoice in solstices. 

Time passes. Miles come in between; minutes hours and days. Then years. Ten long years. But your beauty, your beauty remains. I remember the pebble shore of your neck. The vulnerable beauty of your hands. I remember your smile and the way it lights up cities in fireworks.

Memory is fragment and yet with you, 

with you it is a living anathema. 

A Rose For Her

 I should give you a flower, a rose perhaps.

Yes tonight I should give you a rose... a red rose.

But I will not purchase one or borrow from someone.

Tonight is not for borrowed words or passion.

I will pluck a seed from my heart and sow it into the soil and wait for love to grow.

I will lay on my stomach and wishper into the earth about your beauty and  about your love.

So wide and infinite. 

I will tell stories about you, about your hair falling on your cheeks.

The moment when time refused to move.

I will tell about your laughter. The lightening in the dark.

A match stick to gasoline.

She brings the sunlight into your room. Her voice tender like the rain water.

Her touch feels like life.

Words like this.

I will pour words, thoughts, my mind and heart into the moist soil that is her heart.

My world is you and the world is for her.

Everything is for her.    LET HER HAVE THE ROSE.

She Says Ï Love You", bids good night and drifts into slumber.

Every night I prepare myself for the journey.
For the battle, I have to fight with the mythical creatures.
For the storms, I have to conquer.
For the years I have to pass.

              Without you.....................

Love that gives

Give me the sweetness of longing dripped in the syrup of love.

My hunger knows the abyss of your heart.

Give me wanting smeared with what people know of loss.

Your love fills the chasm in my heart.

The want  that doesn’t close. 

And your love that never runs out.

To The Boy who is going to meet my Lover

Before you go to meet her, there are certain things you must be aware of.
You will see her, and her beauty will blind you. It will derail you.

You will sit across the table from her in the restaurant and she will rearrange the furniture in your mind and open the dusty windows and you will let her.

You will be stupefied. You will be dazzled. You will become someone you do not recognize. Such is her charm. Such is her wonder. Her beauty like thunder. Like a black hole appearing before your own eyes. Incapacitating. Dismantling.

You will fall, as I did. And you think you know yourself. She is most wise in things unknowing and needing undoing. Tie your shoelaces tight and watch.

Go with your chest open, my friend. She takes up so much room you might burst. You may need stitches. You may never need anything ever again.

When she looks at you, look away. Don’t look at her. It makes you fall off your seat. It makes you dizzy. You’ll need to make room for air. You’ll need to make room in every compartment of your heart. She is a river. She will erode you to emptiness.

She smiles in a way that makes people need to leave the city. Because they have homes and families and she makes them forget it all.

Are you listening to me? You are one lucky son of a bitch. You fortunate whore. Are you listening? Bleed every clock in the city for her.

Give her anything she asks for.
She asks for nothing.
Offer her your life. No. Listen, offer her mine. Tell her I will come with it in person.

Oh she will rob you blind. She will take nothing and when you see her leave, you will feel everything you own disappear before you.

Go with loosened purse strings. Buy the day back. Days are moments. Over lunch, you become an older man. She hides all time under her tongue

You will forget your knees, my friend. Don’t forget your knees. You will need them later. She has so many knees from everyone who forgets. Where does she keep these knees?

Give her everything. Everything is for her. Come back broken and empty-handed. Give her what you have of me. And what you can part with of your own. Come home a pauper. Then I know you have seen my love.

Another Sleepless Night

I never knew sleep can be a barrier between you and me.

I am laying beside you, watching you sleep.

You are smiling in your sleep, perhaps laughing in your dream to one of my PJs.

Your's is a beauty that loosens my flesh from my bone and makes home inside the conduits of my marrow.

Each time I see your smile I feel an earth quake in my chest.

I am that person you will find looking at sky and negotiating with God , asking what I can offer in relief  against this eternity. 

And in reply I hear a laugh, God, you and LOVE asks me to be on my knees.

Often my stare wakes you from your sleep, in half slept eyes you lean on me and ask me the question!

My brain freezes, I am afraid that you will hear my hammering heart. My body condenses into a whisper.  

I think we have to find a way to comfortably in love, that love awaits in the cervices in my heart where the light does not reach.

Your love propels me to a time that does exist yet. That doesn't make me sleep. 

And I wait for you to awake from your sleep.

What's in a date?

There is not a single day that passes where…

I will leave that sentence there. You have already completed it in your mind.

I believe you have not forgotten the day we met. That you can't the way I can't. 
That you know, we were destined to meet against all odds.

We just met once, the witty conversations, the raillery, the candours, the verbal jousts. I always win those.

And everything that follows, I lose.

Do you remember that evening, that nervous sunset, the freedom, the way my fingers touched your cold hands, the way I wanted to warm it against my ears.
Oh the memories..

Each second more palatable than the last. Souls bursting with the flavors of the moment; of the present.
The right here, the right now.
The you, the Me.

The implausibility of us.

And here we are gathering the memories and sowing the seeds in the fallows for more.

Seasons and Moods

I dreamed….

I was standing facing a meadow, oddly dressed for the weather. It was the middle of the week, middle of a night. Dense fog was settling on the grass, the naked ghostly trees across the meadow daring the blistering cold. I was looking over the slope & swell of the hill where your house stands.

Now I lay on my bed, white sheets that call for the summer lazy afternoon. I am wearing the T-shirt you gave me, now faded and worn to its thread. My head is on the soft pillow and the afternoon summer breeze on my face. And I am thinking about our time together, the way I used to keep my head on your lap and you used to caress my hair.

I was standing in the rain, arms spread wide. Soaking my soul to the core. And you were there hugging me from behind. I remember the thirst in me to drink the water droplets from your eye lashes. 

Its morning now, you must be awake. You must be feeling that something is lost. Something you left behind somewhere. You will touch the other side of your bed and feel surprised with the warmth it has. Then only you will know that last night as you slept fitfully, I traveled the distance through time and season into the place where the sky meets the earth, to find you.

Read.............

Read… It is one of the private of the pleasure that you can experience. It asks you to wear only your vulnerabilities and to leave your armor at the door.

Books have their secrets. The secrets they can’t keep. Like all the secrets, the secret a book keeps, gives it the power. With each page turned you grow roots within the secret that you accepted with complicity.

Pasts reopen, words reveal all, and skeletons tumble out.

You had relationships before, but the one you have with books can best be described as “Complicated” at most. Sometimes the scars it leaves on your mind and soul shows, like the paper cuts that leave bad memory scars anything like a dagger can’t.

Books can tear open you, right through your guts. They can open you and spill stories.

There is no mercy.

The book and its secret will make you bow and surrender to it. After that your existence is irrelevant unless you are making the knowledge of the book to be your nucleus. And in this particular moment of your life you are in a false impression that you have chosen the book, but in reality the book has chosen whether to own you or to leave you. And once you close the book, your existence cease to exist, your identity evaporates.

Opening the book and starting to read again feels like a long lost lover pulling you and sucking on your neck till you are faint. The book behaves like a hungry canine, and you have to reciprocate the hunger. You starve for the next piece of the story. You bite into the soft part of the story and wait for the warm blood to flow into you.

And you know what happens when you don’t feed a hungry dog.

Reading is like making love, your throat becomes dry, your knees go weak, your cheeks start to burn and you can’t unknow the things that are now known.

You share secrets.

The half truths, the bodies under the bridge, war torn cities, the torture, the fetishes, the fear, the disease, the fallen angels, the shame and the unthinkable deeds.

Everything a book tells you is a form of a lie. The one who believes the written words and falls in love with it is a fool. You should not construct loyalty towards a book; you are not the only one.   You know the written words can be read over and over again by anyone.

You can’t give what a book gives you, nobody can. The book reprints itself on your soul.

So what do I suggest you? I can’t tell you not to read when I myself enjoy the book as a lover who asks from you everything and leaves the moment the story gets over. 

But I can tell you I have seen pieces of people lying on the floors of the library when they came to return the book.

If you want to really hurt someone, give them a book that will leave them with a baby they can’t have.

So read…. And ask to be ruined.

A Prelude

The seed is where it all begins. Her arm brushing against yours at the library. A look shared and then hurriedly denied across the class room. The sillage of the perfume that belonged to that girl who just left before you entered. How does someone find her now? Put out a hue and cry ad? Leave it to destiny?     Or Forget………..

The seed of the desire, the seed of a stare, of flirt, the seed of dare dropped just so; the seed of mystery. These are the seeds that we scatter and collect each day of our lives.

I used to wonder may be it was the way she smiled. The way the sin went to hide inside her hair or the arc of her eyebrow that dared me to not love her. I wonder it was the way the morning woke up in her eyes, or how a whisper seemed to escape her lips each time she threw her head back and laughed at me.

And when she held my face with her hands caressing and gently running her fingers in my hair, I looked at her mesmerizing face, I saw the seeds scattered everywhere around us.

I screamed……

Pick them up, Make them yours.

Pick them up, Make them mine, Be mine. 

I am yours.

I have made you mine.

Put a seed in your shirt pocket and the heat of your heart will force it to germinate.

Put a seed in your mouth and think of your love. Watch petals fall from your lips each time you take her name.

Put a seed in your palm and close it when you sleep.

In the morning, you will need to climb down from the monster ivy that grew so high that you are in the clouds.

Pick up the seeds thrown at you in an act of fate. Some are made to be banyan trees, some to be roses, some just destined to be cactus. Every moment alive is a chance to grow and to make things better. Each time she look at you waiting to catch your eye, linger, Let yourself be caught. When your fingers brush against each other’s, 

stop and plant the chance to hold a hand.

And if by chance you happen to fall in love with an impossible thing, sow the seeds of passion, madness, truth. There is one for everything.

Try to see fallows of every future that you did not dare to tempt fate with.

And always remember: Where she is standing is a field of everything that could be, and all that have no possibility of survival.

A Story In Three Fold

Chapter - 1

Nandini has lost count how many temples, shrines, trees she has left red threads heavy with prayers to find Deva. From the char dhams to the churches in Goa to the Pir baba darghas  pleading …

“Come Back, I am here; I haven’t moved an inch away. Please come back to me.”

BUT THE THREADS REMAIN TIED.

Knots. Everywhere she goes she sees them, She feels them. She fumbles with them; her fingers an angry jumble of thumbs. Her love is a knot that cannot be undone.

Her intestines churn each time she waits for the phone to ring. Her veins are a maze of labyrinth. Who knows where they begin and where they end. The only time it ever mattered was when she needed them severed and stared undecidedly over her wrist with no understanding of physiology.

Her fingers do not stay still anymore. They tremble when she watches them and turn stiff when she pretends to fall asleep

Knots in her stomach, knots in her chest. Nandini turned every living memory of Deva into a living being that pulses with life that begs to be kept. When she can’t sleep she looks at ceilings, willing Deva to appear. Untying knots are tedious and painful. Imagine combing out dread locked hair after 14 years of Banwas.

Patiently, penitently, pick, pull, and loosen, Untie, Undo, Unmake, Unwill, Unwant.

Nandini is thinking of all these little words and the impossible things they mean. She is thinking of how Deva’s name, small enough to fit into her pocket, spans the skyline and the depth of all oceans.

She is thinking of how the word, “untie”, can be rearranged to “unite”. And because there is nothing left to do with their realizations and personal dawning, She cuts another line of string and take her shoes off before making one more knot in Deva’s name that she will never be able to undo.

For a Yes ...... For a No

I heard that she left the town, moved on from the past.
I heard that when she left even the town clock tower stopped working.

Nobody speaks of her to me anymore.
Of the one with hair like the monsoon clouds and lips like ripe strawberries. And a skin like vanilla with a pinch of saffron.

They used to write her and my names inside heart shapes drawn on every wall of the town.
Those relics are faint now, washed away with time and rain.

Sometimes those people who knew me with her, want to ask me about her, but their sound dies out in their vocal cords before forming a word.

The last I saw her was in my dream.....
I saw her walking down the streets, She was all red, torn, crying, screaming and begging me not to leave her.
All the faces I know are there standing, watching her, with sorrow in their eyes.

And there I was the culprit trying to find words, reasons, excuses .....

For a Yes ...... For a No.

To whom it may concern ........... The Anonymous.

To you who feels too much, loves too much, gives too much.
Yes you are one among them.

I tried to start like this “I want to bury my face in your neck, in your hair.” but then my words fell onto the floor in that loud clattering noise, all broken and distorted.

My mind is distorted.

I wish you were with me or maybe not. I am happy that you are following that great american dream.                                  I am truly happy.

Sometimes I regret for not being brave enough to travel that two thousand six hundred and thirty five kilometers to meet you. 
Sometimes I recreate the possibilities of that trip.
Sometimes I pretend it to be real. But at the end it was terrible and beautiful and unforgettable and I don’t know how to be without it anymore.

For all our left turns, you are the right thing, the one thing that is mine. Seeing you in the flesh, touching your skin, and kissing your mouth was the bravest thing I have attempted and the weakest I have felt. You are the fire and the fire maker too. You are the woods man and the axe too. You are everything I did not know I wanted and now struggle to live without.

I can love you or live without you but I cannot do both. I cannot say the words that offer simple respite; “I love you, I miss you.” I don’t miss you. I miss myself. Ever since I met you I lost myself on the way back and I never came home.

Ooh anonymous I pray God to bless peace upon you and me.

You Bring out the Beast in Me

You bring out the beast in me.

You bring out the muscle and the sweat of me.

You bring out the musk and the male of me.

The bulging fore arm and the sweat soaked brow of me.

You bring out the passion and the swagger in me.

You bring out the George Clooney in me.

You Bring out the gentle man in me.

The gentle poet who writes about longing in me.

You bring out the thoughts that can not be described in words.

You bring out the Rumi in me.

I can not recognise the body that I call my own, when I pressed mine into you. I thought its mine but I can not call it as mine.

In me there is a man, a lover.

Ten thousand men ..... Your lovers.

Lovers of you in me.

You bring out the man in me.

I want to bury your face in my chest.

Tell you things that are not meant for hearing.

I want to hold you still, kiss you numb.

I want you to show you that I am your man.

Perfect Fits

Being Sincere....

With Great Powers comes Great Responsibilities

Heal me to Sane

Sometimes my mind becomes so chaosed.
That I am unable to deduce what is real and what is the dream. 

Sometimes I can't decide whether to wake up from the nightmare
Or to fall back into the dream.

No matter what, I know that you are real.
Whether it's the dream or it's the reality.

I often wake up to find that you are not here with me.

I don't know what to belive and what not to..

I beg you, pull me to the reality.

Hug me with your warmth, 
Fill my clavicle with your breath,
Burn my lips with your kiss.

Heal me with your love.