Dear stranger,
You were my strength
My weakness
My muse
And my universe.

Oh! How dearly I wish
That I could at least
Be a fleeting moment
That you still cherish.

-

Dear stranger,
I had imbibed you in my day,
And made you the gleaming ray of hope
During my darkest nights.

Now that I feel desolate and helpless,
I realise
That it was not your hatred,
But my love that drove us apart.

-

Dear stranger,
It was pretty easy for you
To move out of my life.
Wasn't it?
You say even I should move on.
Give my heart to someone
More deserving and compassionate.
But do you know that
Now all that I am left with
Is a hollow body,
Somehow surviving
Without a heart or a soul.

-

Dear stranger,
Remember your cheque shirt?
The one that you gave me
When we first met.
It once carried
The sharp smell of your cologne
That always made me feel
Closer to you.
Today, the same shirt
Bears an odour
As unfamiliar
As you have now become to me.

-

Dear Stranger,

They talk of love—far more than they've actually been in it. The bloody moon, the orange sun, flying hanky proven to permit panky, glances exchanged in elevators and mall mirrors, weddings and more weddings, divorces, sacrificial lambs, campings, fire and ice, broken flowers, weeping leaves, roses, the red rain and the smell of rain, the damned petrichor setting alight hearts like fresh petrol, and the banalities of everything that spews love. I'm not against love. But I'm sick of it because it leaves me barely any scope to imagine. Has the entire set of original thoughts and musings on love exhausted already? Or am I just an unimaginative person, a slave to my scientific and practical understanding of things. So do I merely draw my inspiration from what I read and observe? Then, what is love to me? It is the same old boring story. Perhaps love is a woman's age crawling steadily along her spine and sitting at her shoulder, writing letters to a stranger with a hope that he'd find them some day. But whatever the case, I strongly feel about the ripe cliché—that love is relentless, it always finds a way, like it did in this letter.

-

एक चिट्ठी किसी अनजान को।

( In caption )

-

I’m teleporting to the Forest. You're there, waiting for me. We go deep into the Forest, a place no one can find us. None of our families come looking. You and I take a long walk through the wild roughness of it all. Like the one along the beach. Recollect that? But the beach was a story, while the Forest is a poem.
We talk or perhaps, we don’t talk at all. We merely walk. In silence. A kind of silence that encompasses our hearts in a sphere of ethereal sounds. The silence that's the music of our souls, knocking at our existence, then taking us beyond the realm of existence.
A large tree invites; its boughs—a swing of our mothers' firm arms, its roots—our fathers' unwavering feet. The tree is sort of our history. A family affair of completion. The Forest is bare with acceptance. The Forest is love. And we're walking until time and space merge into one entity or where time and space hold no meaning.

-

Dear Stranger,
You're in crisis. I'm aware and observing. Though you don't tell me about any of it, you've revealed it to everyone around. Okay, I get it. For months, you stood out flashing the chivalrous side of your vibrant, colorful wings. You were involved and social, camouflaging dissatisfaction to an extent. And we know you're not as toxic as you portray yourself to be—Batesian mimicry at its best.
Today, I watch you take a retrogressive curl into your pale cocoon. Time waves its magic wand and you're without your mojo. You're preoccupied with one thousand things and one hundred years of solitude. Love. It's been around in forms you've ignored, or probably acknowledged a little late. You sit on the open wooden patio of your rented cabin. The breeze tickles your naked feet. If there's solitude, you say, it's here. And so I slip an empty path beneath your feet. I stand at the far end of it in silence, waiting for you, just so you know. But wait, you'll never know. For that, you'll have to crawl out of your cocoon and you're not yet ready to do so.— % &

-

Before it all ends, I try to recall. Multiple synonyms of certain words ring like sirens in a chaotic street. If love is a bridge, I'd be running to and fro along it without getting anywhere. That way I'd be in love always. In love the ‘destination’ hardly ever matters. What matters is that you choose the ‘path’ of love.
Who's vending my heart, my spirit, my soul? There. Up in the folded, filed purple sheets, trimmed to perfection, lies my name hidden. Who's reading it? Did you call me yet? When will you call me? Will you call me? The emptiness is the answer to my senseless string of query.
A line of bulbs. You see them glow? Did you imagine my mouth? Was it closed and pink or red or worse, was it blue? Did you visualize my eyes, gray, lined with deep, black kohl? Did it make you sorrowful? Are you wondering? Where do we take this? Should we restart or terminate what never truly began? You can tell me. I'm usually the bait no fish seeks.
But I left you a leaf in your daily register and wish you find it this autumn. If each leaf is a dream, I want you to know some dreams break only for new dreams to take their place. It's okay to break, let new leaves grow! It's okay to let go.

-

You are the August to my October. The rain to my fall. Not as corny as it sounds, I'm talking about it in the literal sense. Seasons. Ring a bell? Don't take this wrong.
You smoked and I knew it before you revealed it. But you tried your best to not let me know. You're funny. You'd brush with a strong mint toothpaste after a smoke because you believed I didn't like the smell of tobacco. It wasn't the tobacco that bothered me, I was concerned about you. But I'd never press things too hard. However, you stopped smoking a couple of years later. That day you smelled wise.
August has evanesced like the smoke from a freshly burned cigarette. What is September but the mint toothpaste trying hard to conceal the dark odor wedged between August and October.
What I've learned about people and habits—people, even the toughest, at times break. Unlike people, some habits are tough to break. You broke both. Isn't that great?
Now when someone around smokes and I get that characteristic odor of a burning cigarette, I instantly wait for the scent of mint to follow or rather intermix with it. It seems incomplete without the sharp hint of mint. A habit broke in you, another formed itself in me.

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