To Indumati, with love

 I was but a boy of 15 years, brown-eyed, brown-haired, brown-faced and brawny-physiqued, staring wide-eyed into the great Indian dream of getting the best Indian education and then leaving the great Indian subcontinent for good; firstly, because there seemed to...

Killed in love

If there was any planet I ought to have been on, it should have been either Neptune or Mercury. One year on Neptune is equivalent to 164.8 years on earth and Mercury on the other hand, does not have any seasons. Similarly, my life...

Wildflower

And for a moment I was 16 again- a ridiculous and conflicting mixture of naivety, bashfulness, eagerness and excitement. How to be one emotion for a moment and to then metamorphose into something opposite the very next! But that's how...

Dead

When the lands stop being enough should I eat air ? There's no water in the civilization that stopped living years ago We cross oceans climb mountains melting into rivers of acid, dissloving into fumes of poison No sparrows sing...

Of enemies and temptations

He had never liked tea. Even as almost the whole office rushed to try out my latest blueberry flavored import, he simply sat and watched, with nonchalance and amusement, the sort of dismissiveness with which a teen scoffs at beings...

A modern love song

How much I love you! Comparing my love to infinite stars shall be offensive, and to the depths of the ocean, nauseating The sun is too bright hot and furious, the Moon too cold and insensitive to the emotions of...

Visiting Alleppey

Have you been to Alleppey? Seen the limpid serene green liquid host poetic boats that converse with adjoining palms, did you see how calm the villages are They don't chase time like you or me and they still eat fresh...

Our kind of art

I never felt the need to know how thistle differed from mauve or what gave scarlet and crimson their distinct identities; to me they remained labels marked on the little tubes of water colors. It was the final shade that mattered....

The house over a crowded street

We lived in a house somewhere over the road that had no steep rises, no curves; absolutely flat and insipid as it could be. Insipid with blaring, cacophonous sounds that made music only in dissonance. The house was nothing like...