The night is cold

Stars watching the moon with sly smiles

I'm gazing into the autumn sky

Your name on my lips, your song in my heart.



I cannot tell the world what you mean to me

How much you've changed my life

Replaced the sad smiles

With sunshine and happy cheer.



Fate it seems, brought us together

The distance and the separation brought us closer

God's test and the angels' blessings

Everything was written long before we'd guessed.



Your words, your embrace, your love

Each little thing about you is special

You make me feel like a girl and a woman

All at the same time.



I do not know what tomorrow will bring

Whether we'll be in each others' arms

Whether we'll be as happy as can be

Whether we'll build a house on the moors.



But as long as I have breath in my body

As long as the blood gushes in my vein

As long as the sun rises up in the sky

As long as the moon waxes and wanes.



You'll be my hero,

My knight in shining armour

Life has changed, life has meaning now

And it will as long as we have each other.

And we break

And we take

And we cry

And we lie.



And we fight

And we die

And we love

And we hate.



With all our heart

With all our spite

With all our venom

With all our passion.



And heartaches come and go

And pain fades and resurfaces

And friends stop by

And some pass into oblivion.



And then we forgive

And then we forget

And then time slips away

And the seasons blow into eternity.



And still the angst eats at our flesh

And still desire feeds on our blood

And still hope waits on the doorstep

And still misery sticks to her habits.



And then it all comes to a stop

And then the clock stops ticking

And then the story ends

And then we are back at the beginning...

Were there spaces between us?

Unspoken words and silly smiles

Strangers along life's path

A journey without beginning nor end.



Books lying open on the sand

Waves crashing and seagulls whistling

Happiness waving and sadness retreating

One step at a time, one beat at a time.



The evening stretches into eternity

Champagne drowned in a gulp

The pellets of rain glistening on your skin

Strangers all the more, never friends, just strangers.



Romance some distance away

Shadows of alluring hope

Drops of joy, strands of faith

Take my hand, lest I fall.



You're not a believer

Nor am I

I just live my days like a nomad

Driving past caravans of fate.



The rain has stopped

The sun has come out from her siesta

I look at the sky

And she grins back at me.



I had abandoned love ages ago

Buried her in the bosom of my broken heart

Started looking for hate

And then I stumbled across a stranger.



I was a poet, he was a painter, he was a musician

And he would sing until I fell asleep

The stars watching over us

The moon brazenly peeping amidst the stars.



No more darkness I see

I am not afraid of tomorrow's equivocal surprises

I've been bruised and I've tasted despair

But he's changed the course of destiny.



Where there were ransacked dreams

He replaced them all with renewed strength

I did not ask for even a ray of sunshine

He effortlessly handed me the sun.



And she did burn

As she did, she warmed my cold heart

The sun was my friend since the beginning of time

If only I'd ask for her protection when I'd needed it.



And now he sings melodiously

Even the winds cannot drown his music

His compositions are like rainbows stretching over miles

Riot of colours in a summer sky.



And then he paints a canvas

Plays with the pallet,

Sprinkles paint on my tear-streaked face

I laugh some more, I cry tears of happiness.



And like Keats, he rides with Bacchus' bards

Like Shakespeare, he sees life as a play

Like Pinter, he contemplates the irony of existence

And like Moliere, he plays with words.



While my Lord watches from above

He takes my hand and asks for a dance

Today I am happy

And I will be, for all the days to come.

Tendre Provence

I woke up with the first rays of the sun today. My bed was warm and I wanted to sleep for a little longer. But I remembered that I had my last criminology lecture of the year at 8am and bounded from under the covers. I sneaked a peek outside and a feeling of contentment settled in my heart when I saw the glorious morning which was waiting to be tasted, to be lived, and to be enjoyed in all it’s simplistic grandeur. Having taken care of the daily rituals of early morn, I proceeded to be swayed by Hiruma Himawari’s flawless piano rendition of ‘When the Love Falls”. Incidentally, I happened to discover the magic of Hiruma while watching the movie “Twilight” for the second time yesterday. I was so enthralled by the music of the above that I youtubed the soundtrack and there began my chance acquaintance with a wonderfully talented artist who has struck a chord in the innermost vibrations of my being.

My room was transformed into a peaceful abode and I savoured the spell which lingered on even after the music softly died away. Nothing soothes the soul quite much as music played for the glory of the Lord: graceful, wholesome, passionate and eternal. Outside, the melody of birds found its rhythm with the sweet caress of the wind. The result was a pleasing sound which earned the credit of making me fall in love with nature all over again. To be at peace with Mother Nature is to be at peace with oneself and such a feeling is priceless.

I opened the refrigerator and poured a generous dose of milk in my favourite blue bowl and the cereals crackled with complicity. The cold milk received a warm welcome by my senses and wetted my dry lips, only to trickle amusedly down my parched throat. Breakfast completed, my prayers said and done, I prepared two emmental cheese and jam sandwiches, dressed lightly in blue jeans, a sunflower- yellow T-shirt and my favourite pale blue pair of trainers and set out into the provincial domain to fulfil the day’s duties. The short bus ride to the Aix law faculty was uneventful, save from a humongous smile accorded to me by the lady bus driver. I grinned inwardly when I arrived on campus and was greeted by the lovely rose garden which was in full blossom and had already lost all its morning dew in the heat game played by the untamed sun.

A light breeze ruffled the mess which supposedly gave itself the name of hair and pink rose petals and dead leaves swirled at my feet. I headed in the direction of the ‘Boulan’ amphitheatre and a wave of sadness washed over me as I realised that this would be my last criminology lecture ever in this faculty with a lecturer which commanded both my admiration and respect for delivering with gusto and never giving his audience a dull moment. As I scribbled away during the two hours which followed, I was immensely thankful and grateful for the year spent in Aix and quite sorry at the prospect of leaving all too soon. Monsieur Lassalle ended the ‘cours’ with his usual inwardly satisfied crooked smile and wished us luck for the exams, amidst a round of hearty applause as a note of thanks for the knowledge that he imparted so gratuitously.

The rest of the day was spent in an overheated university library which apparently had not equipped itself with an air conditioning system and revision notes of droit des contrats, droit constitutionnel, droit delictuel, criminology, and histoire du droit, were scribbled away very painfully amidst suffocation and dehydration. Still my resolve refused to suffer a blow and give in to the whims of bad (or non-existent) air conditioning. So I buried myself in the ‘delightful’ subject of ‘la division horizontale des pouvoirs’ and endured, till hunger pangs demanded a bite of the sandwiches in the company of white, pink, red, and yellow roses. I found a nice bench in the shade and devoured the cheese with a voluntary ‘gourmandise’, read a few pages of ‘Toujours Provence’ and laughed at Peter Mayle’s benevolent outlook on life, while my ears enjoyed the privilege of being soothed by the genius of A R Rehman’s Delhi 6 album and the excellent voice of Kailash Kher in the song ‘Arziyan’. Another three hours elapsed in the joys of french law and when I walked back home in the blistering heat later during the day, tired but blissfully happy, I mused about the fact that nearly nine months ago, I was complaining about my fate. Fate, it seems, has this unusual way of turning itself into what we make of it…Life is good, it has always been and will always be.

Light

LIGHT

I open one eye...The sun’s fugitive ray of light steals into the dark, annihilating hell which is my room...Light...Light equals life; light equals hope; light equals happiness; light equals dawn...I hate light and so I hate its synonyms: hope, happiness and dawn. When I think about the word light, I feel like I want to cover myself up with a black cloack and hide from the surface of the earth. Find myself a place where light cannot reach me, where its stare and spells cannot touch my skin.

I open another eye and search for something in the semi-darkness. There’s light outside, so it must be early morning, or maybe late morning? Or midday? How do I care? It’s been a while since I have risen from bed, shaken myself out of my lethargic state and wandered outside. The outside world scares me, leaves me frightened out of my wits, gives me goosebumps as I even think about the strangers living in this big town. But who is a stranger here? I am the stranger, I came here to start a new life, I was not unwelcome nor was I welcome, but somehow I am an alien on earth, I am a misfit and I do not ft into society; I never did.

HAPPINESS

I shall start with happier times, times when the world would smile at me, welcoming me with outstretched hands and beckoning me into a phantasmagoria of opportunities and buoyancy. Life then was a mixture of happiness, excitement and harmless fun. Expectations would crystallise out of nowhere and sparkle with all its attire and fragance and my eyes would stare in mock wonder and amusement at the excess of joy God was spreading in my lap. Happy-go-lucky, bubbly, effervescent, radically different from the rest of the crowd, I was a pastel of all the shades that you could pick from the colours of the rainbow, I was more than a mystery, a pearl of non-fiction coupled with a zest of spiritedness. My rage to live life like a tornado urged to crash with all its force, like a whirpool bursting foam into the torpor of the earth, like an earthquake pushed to its limits...used to stun my entourage, sometimes making them shake thieir heads in disbelief, at other times, staring at my antics in utter shock, and trying to fathom what on earth I was made of...And all I coudl do was laugh at them...Nothing could stop me from tasting the fruit of life, the forbidden apple was withing my grip and I would climb every mountain, cross every ocean and pass every hurdle just to satisfy my hunger for adventure, quench my thirst for passion and discove the grandeur of dear old existence...


DREAMS

What are dreams made of? Reality coupled with bits and pieces of the past and the future. Dreams are nourishment for the soul, reinvigorating the hopeless, raising the lifeless from their slumber and driving the adventurous along the course of their destiny. We live and we dream. We dream and we live. We live life, but we dream of things out of this life. When we are young and bursting with freshness, dreams explode with all their force within us and as we contemplate them, we get pumped up with renewed energy and a sense of wanting to fulfil them all. Dreams are what keeps us convinced that we have a motive, a goal and an objective in life. We wake up at the crack of dawn and as the sun wakes up from its lethargia, our minds become active with hope and bursting with strength to face the challenges of the day. But what happens when platitude and boredom settle in like unwelcome guests?

BEAUTY

Beauty is truth, truth is beauty, I dare echo Keats's powerful words...A single red rose arching from wakefulness and painting the garden with it's red hues; a sunset sending shy rays of vermillion and orange into the sky and leaving traces of blue and violet as a reminder of its prowess; waves lapping into the ocean mild fury; winds caressing dead leaves and sending them into a twirling session as they are lifted gracefully off the ground, tossed radiantly into the air and then as they tentatively land on firm soil again; a song rehearsal where crescendos brush aside the tumult of bland life and from where a song of life is fashioned again, dug from the magic and brilliance of music. Life is beautiful...If only the joy it offers were not ephemeral...

PAIN

The tears come even though they have not invited. They cascade out of nowhere, creating riot and prick the eyes without the least warning...When pain bursts from the confines of the heart, when you cannot remember just how you lost it all, when rejection is at the end of the corridor and when you come to terms with the cruel realities of life, that's just when you realise that pian is a constant companion and that happiness is only a reminder that sadness and loss are a door away. That's why I prefer remaining a stranger to bouts of pleasure...


HOPE

But even through the confusing mazes and the hopelessness, there is a time of atonement and forgiveness. God is there to listen to our angst and our troubles. He watches over us and understands our woes only too well...That's why he sends His angels to dry those tears and bring a tentative smile to our lips Because life is meant for living and however down the pits we are, it is not over when the clock strikes our doom. For every broken heart, there is a friend who is there to heal the wonds; for every grim dawn, there is a nightingale singing brighter songs; for every missed opportunity, there is another sunrise which prepares to give even more good reasons to stay focused and seize the day; for each of our miserable yesterdays, there are a million more tomorrows hatching with bluer skies, rosier clouds and lovelier rainbows...

That is why we have to sport our best smile...Even when it seems like the tears will catch up with us any minute now...So SMILE:)

Unsung songs...

There is an unsung song in my heart, a tumultuous heartbeat, an agonising truth…Time and fate have played the strangest of games with me, and here I stand alone, trapped in the seamless and hapless avenues of my destiny. There was a time of laughter, of happiness, of vibrancy, of plenitude and of cascading joys… Now, I watch the sands of time quietly slip from my outstretched fingers, unable to dictate fate and to give reason to my jumbled feelings. How I wish I could hop into a time machine and go back to those days when the mornings used to burst with freshness, where I could taste the dewdrops on my thirsty lips, where I could feel the sun in the palm of my hands, where I could be that rainbow sending gorgeous hues into a petulantly mischievous sky of velvet blue. How I wish I could be that girl who had that constant smile on her face, who would skip and dance about, oblivious to the pain and the hurt.

But dreams are just dreams and wishes seldom come true as my dear friend once said. We can dream all we want, wish all we can…But the cold truth will never change, will never move one pace. There have been so many challenges, so many opportunities, and so many manoeuvres… But however hard I tried, the dreams have been too distant and my hopes have melted into the labyrinths of dread and failure. While success has played a game of hide-and-seek with me and happiness has evaded me every step of the way, I have also been unable to make peace with my troubled past, preferring to dodge harsh reality and live in a world of make-belief. Love has never been a companion; it has always been a burden I’ve carried, a heavy cross of rejection and betrayal… Tormented by the demons of my past, haunted by the shadows of fear and forever directed towards the precipice of deceit, I’ve shared a love-and-hate, hit-and-run relationship with myself.

Now that there is no more hope lurking in the shadows, now that the time of judgement has insidiously swept in like an unwelcome guest, now that each ray of sunshine dies at my doorstep, there is no space for love and forgiveness. I will not be able to break the shackles I’ve tied to my feet and arms, I will never get the chance of tasting that last drop of rain down my throat, I will never be able to embrace my lover one last time. I am doomed to a silent death… I, a monument of pain, will stand naked in the centre of this populous street and scream a soundless cry of dismay… And only those who share my angst, those who have treaded this earth in search of solace but only found solitude, will be able to hear my cries…Only those who have relied on friendship and have had blind faith in that ephemeral thing called love, but have been rewarded with nothing but hatred, and felt the pangs of betrayal…Only those lost souls will be able to lend me a sympathetic ear… But I will smile a sardonic smile and remain like that stone everyone has labelled me as…

My motherland's lullaby

Far away in a distant land,
Far, far away across the miles
Rests an island of sun and sand,
Sparkling with rainbows and smiles.

Here in my cold and drab flat
Perusing over mountains of books
The darkness transforms me into a blind bat
As I am surrounded by glares and strange looks.

As much as I fit into this higgledy-piggledy mess
I am still very much a stranger,
A mere visitor, a tad hapless,
Wondering if I might ever win this wager.

Outside, all looks dull and morose;
Nothing cajoles me back into happy cheer
I stop in my tracks and take a half-hearted pause,
Reminiscing about things so far, yet so near.

Old times, happier times, grander times,
When the sun would warm my heart
When the rain would fall in rhymes,
Waking me from my reverie with a start.

As I long back and contemplate on the past
Everything comes back in a blinding flash
Swirling and knocking my senses so fast
That I only get flimsy glimpses in a dash.

Winter nights wrapped in togetherness
Candle lit dinners for grand occasions
Huge bear hugs offered in utter randomness;
The joyous reunions, the deep communions.

Secret wonders under the tree at Christmas
Unimaginable number of cakes at the festival of lights
Often, uncountable dinners are a must
The after party ending in gales of laughter and pillow fights.

Crispy ‘gateau-piments’ invariably prompt an excited cheer,
May it be a fancy reception or a simple convening;
While the incoherent list of abuses after a rowdy evening
Is logically explained by generous sips of our national beer.

Here the cold compels me into dark mood
Nothing comes close to home’s spiritedness
Nothing matches mum’s Love and dad’s companionship
Nothing can soothe away the gnawing fear.

Nothing like the sound of waves singing over the ocean
Nothing like the feel of the sand on one’s feet
Nothing like the rays of the sun over a velvet blue sky
Nothing like the lullaby of one’s motherland.