Will You or Will You Not?

Upon your return from the desert odyssey, facing the bedroom mirror as you dig the comb of resolve in your matted strands and a golden sprinkle of cold sand pours from your head, like a fine rain of our memories, or when the late sun sneaking through the curtains awakens my dried kiss on your nape; will you genuinely care retracing your steps back to the cold nights of Jaisalmer, into the heart of your solitude, where we always met in thoughts of longing?...

Weeping Winds

Today, the sun had receded at the earliest, I think. Fallen quietly into the trough of mountains, even before the day birds from their tireless soaring have returned to their home in the pines. The mist is thin—floating in lazily from the distance, like plumes of smoke fanned away by someone trying to light an oven somewhere for this early night’s supper. Handful of scattered stars wink and fade behind the drifting smoke, and the moon, slightly thicker...

Lampshade

It was from the early days of your embroidery classes, I remember, when you were perfecting your skills for a French knot, that you made me a lampshade. Discarding the dusty, butter paper hat from over the aluminium base, I had watched you drape the light with your creative accomplishment – a strip of orange fabric with three French knotted bright yellow daisies in bloom, etched equidistant along the length of the shade. You had then thrown the switch...

Lost Pride (Mountain Tales - V)

Evenings are a hushed whisper in the hills. Unlike the long, dwelling hours of sunshine, the darkness is a slowly befalling sheet of calm. Long after the sun has slept in the valleys, it is the cool grey of dusk that lingers, till all the mountains and the huddling pines become pyramids of shadows against the sky and the moon awakens over Srinagar - a beautiful bride blushing in the rippling mirror of the Dal. I was walking down the embankment...

Sehjad (Mountain Tales - IV)

He told me he will wait right there till we come back, as I took his words for a promise and joined the long, line of people awaiting their turn for the famous Gondola (cable car) ride of Gulmarg. Up until then, it did not feel a thing. Even as we moved with hundreds of other people to the boarding platform, down the concrete path flanked on either side by rising banks of snow, the realization of being atop one of the highest terrains in the world...

Arshid (MountainTales - III)

I met Arshid for the first time at the parking lot of Jammu Tawi railway station. It was early morning and thin fog embraced the horizon. I watched him lead us down the rubble strewn alley of the station yard to his maroon Xylo car. In the cool shade of dawn flickering through the leaves of trees, I saw him help himself to the roof of the car, as he loaded our luggage on the carrier. Arshid seem to have just the right built of a mountain resident....

Gulzar (Mountain Tales - II)

This morning in Kolkata, as mother recounts the snowy terrains of Kashmir; the equally exciting and scary pony ride in the valleys of Pahalgam; the pine willows trembling in the snow breeze, I am taken back to the man who held the cord of my life, when my own body had abandoned me. Drunk with every landscape of the snowy heaven, I remember those heart battering seconds of having my feet dug in snow at 19000 feet, while I can feel my own fall to...

Bashir and Mr. Natwarlal (Mountain Tales - I)

I had followed the sun’s trajectory from my front seat that day, propped up beside Arshid, in a day long drive from Jammu to Srinagar. It stealthily rose behind our backs to its pinnacle, lacing the dark, misty hills in the clear warmth of day. Still green valleys, wrapped in smoke and silence, absorbed the sunshine like a numbed pair of hands against a courtyard fire on a winter night, to return to their usual life of birdsongs and blooming Tulips....