Dear Hasini,

Wishing you lots of joy on your special day.
May you achieve all your goals of success and happiness.

Lots of love and hugs.
Your Shail Aunty

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Dear Hansika

Wishing you a world of happiness on your special day. May you be blessed with good health, confidence, awareness and success.

With love and hugs,
Shail Aunty

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Lost without reason.
Happy in the season.
Care to join me?

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Dear Gor,

May the Almighty, the Gurus and Amma bless you with the abundance of peace, good health, prosperity and spiritual love for you on your special day.

Live and best wishes,
Shail, Om, Vinod and Uncle

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“Collectors are happy people.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Peeling off stamps from envelopes.
Begging for foreign coins from NRI relatives.
Nagging parents to buy car miniatures.
Collecting perfume bottles dry without fragrance.
Mini liquor bottles to decorate a non-existent bar.

Collection is an art, an art of survival
to flaunt before people who talent shame
others.
Collection is the shadow friend of the lonely kid,
introverted by a tsunami of extroverted fiends
whose only name to fame is their weight
which they throw around.

If you have never collected anything,
comics, greeting cards, key chains,
memories, then you haven’t lived life.
Remember, others can abandon you.
Your treasured collection under your bed
won’t!

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“Let’s rewrite parenthood,”
we told one another.
“Let’s not climb the ladder of expectation,”
we told one another again.
Unconditional parenthood
rarely sprouts in season.
There is always a reason.
To save a marriage.
Someone to care for.
To light the soggy wood.
Unfortunately,
the more a parent expects
the more he/she is left
picking up dried yellow-brown
leaves on dusty roads.
Fortunately,
despondency always brings
with it warm memories of parenthood
flying fuzzily on fireweeds of nostalgia.

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Older
like in baked,
wise like the owl?
Or,
Older
as in roasting,
decomposing reflections?

Older
like mature
beyond the years?
Or,
Older
as in counting days
before death hits a six?

Older
like in content,
grateful for the present?
Or,
Older
as in grudgingly
letting go of birth and breath?

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26, petite, her flowing light green parallels
and burgundy shirt swayed into the room

to revive lost energy in a bored office atmosphere
floating in phases of temporary amnesia like

dandelions having their fuzzy tops blown away
into areas unknown, she approached the young man

seated at his table, lush beard and moustache covering
half his wheatish baby face much like a chess board

with white pawns waiting for their turn to move
which she sensed like a little star wanting for its turn

to blink in a blue sky hidden by towering
buildings of cement and steel housing people who

yearned for love that transcended lines of stereotypical
affirmations which only satiated sensual energies

of flesh while the heart and mind remained lost for fodder
like in a game of cards waiting for aces to win.

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Nothingness

Against the tranquil blue of the magnanimous sky, you roll towards me in heaps of white foamy tides beckoning me to join you in your games of fun and galore.

My hazel rocks of subsistence are tempted to take your welcoming hand exhausted as they are standing guard for a life mundane, monotonous but they pause, wondering whether they were prepared to give up what they had built and melt into nothingness.

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Realize that like day-deprived February I need to make the best of time allotted to me in this human stint of life.
Short and sweet!

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