Sit…

Sit, drink your coffee here; your work can wait awhile.
You’re twenty-six, and still have some of life ahead.
No need for wit; just talk vacuities, and I’ll
Reciprocate in kind, or laugh at you instead.

The world is too opaque, distressing and profound.
This twenty minutes’ rendezvous will make my day:
To sit here in the sun, with grackles all around,
Staring with beady eyes, and you two feet away.

– Vikram Seth

i remember you

I remember you as you were in the last autumn.
You were the grey beret and the still heart.
In your eyes the flames of the twilight fought on.
And the leaves fell in the water of your soul.Clasping my arms like a climbing plant
the leaves garnered your voice, that was slow and at peace.
Bonfire of awe in which my thirst was burning.
Sweet blue hyacinth twisted over my soul.I feel your eyes traveling, and the autumn is far off:
grey beret, voice of a bird, heart like a house
towards which my deep longings migrated
and my kisses fell, happy as embers.

Sky from a ship. Field from the hills:
Your memory is made of light, of smoke, of a still pond!
Beyond your eyes, farther on, the evenings were blazing.
Dry autumn leaves revolved in your soul.

-Pablo Neruda

Jaafri continues…

dee says, 

Hawayein jo meri raazdaan hain

Vo mere hothon se lafz le kar

Tumhare kaano ki seepiyon me

Guhar ke maanind daalti hain

Mai muskurata hun

Tum bhi hansti ho

Aur dono

Nayi tammanaon ke zanjeeron me ghoomte hain

Na koi mehkoom  hai na haakim

Na koi kanoon hain na sakhti

Bus ek Zanzeer-e-lutf, shamsheer-e-dilrubai.

 

 

 

naaley

- Arundhati Roy
The God Of Small Things

She touched him lightly with her fingers and left a trail of goosebumps on his skin. Life flat chalk on a blackboard. Like breeze in a paddyfield. Like jet-streaks in a blue church sky. He took her face in his hands and drew it towards his. He closed his eyes and smelled her skin. Ammu laughed.

Yes, Margaret, she thought. We do it to each other too.

She kissed his closed eyes and stood up. Velutha with his back against the mangosteen tree watched her walk away.

She had a dry rose in her hair.

She turned to say it once again: ‘Naaley.’

Tomorrow.

on november tenth

For a month Kira had not approached the neighbourhood of the mansion with a broken garden fence, she had not thought of the garden, for she did not want to see it empty, even before her own closed eyes. But on November Tenth she walked towards it calmly, evenly, without hurry, without doubts.

Darkness was coming, not from the gray, transparent sky, but from the corners of houses where shadows suddenly grew thicker, as if without reason. Slow whirls of smoke over chimneys were rusty in the rays of cold, invisible sunset somewhere beyond the clouds. In store windows kerosene lamps stood on the sills, melting yellow circles on the huge, frozen panes, around little ornage dots of trembling fire. It had snowed. Whipped into mud by horses’ hoofs, the first snow looked like a pale coffee with thin, melting splinters of sugar. It hushed the city into a soft, padded silence. Hoofs thumped through the mud with a clear, wet sound, as if someone were clicking his tongue loudly, rhythmically, and the sound rolled, dying, down long, darkening streets.

Kira turned a corner; she saw the black lances bowing to the snow, and the trees gathering snatches of cotton in the black net of bare branches. Then, for one second, she stopped, because she was suddenly afraid to look; then she looked into the garden.

He stood on the steps of the mansion, his hands in his pockets, his collar raised. She stopped to look at him. But he heard her and turned quickly.

He walked to meet her. He smiled at her, his mouth a scornful arc. “Allo, Kira.”

“Good evening, Leo.”

-Ayn Rand, We The Living

One of my favourite pieces of the story, when Kira meets Leo for the second time, after anxiously waiting for a month. Time just doesn’t flow as we wish it to