Chaudah ferwary ki woh raat ..

Call me old fashioned, but I think that the epitome of romance is being able to lie with each other in dark and talk for hours .. about nothing and everything  .. Because as long as you can do that, love will always be around .. 

khwaab mein woh raat aati hai mere ... 

yaad hai woh raat chaudah ferwary ki .. 

lamhe piroye the kuch motiyon se...

baatein karte rahe the aadhi raat tak ..

kahaaniyaan sunaayi thi kuch sitaaron ki .. 

aur goonjti rahi thi hansi humaari  .. 

shor se chand aa khada hua tha takne .. 

siraahne kuch yaadein chor gaya tha ..

aaj bhi woh raaat khwaab mein aati hai mere .. 

aur kaale din gulaabi kar jaati hai .. 

tumse zyaada kuch nahi .. 

chaudah ferwary ki woh raat .. 

us baat se zyaada kuch nahi .. 

This is for you baby, because I never told you how much the night of 14th Feb meant to me. To rediscover what we had lost for some time. I still have to learn to appreciate the materialistic gifts more, but as long as we have such nights with us, there is nothing to worry about .. :) 

With love, 

Me

Surprises

They say its difficult to surprise your spouse after a few years. When you are living in the same house, sharing money, home loans, responsibilities, relatives and bickering apart from the king size bed, after some time surprising the other doesn't remain at the top of your "to-do" lists. Or may be its just us - I don't know. But when they happen, they somehow heal the soul. And I believe they heal the soul more for the person who is planning the surprise. Leaving your big sized worries of planning your careers, your finances, your families it just takes you back to the time when pleasures were small but still felt bigger than some big pleasures of today.

This valentine's day we both surprised each other. Mine wasn't much of a valentine's day surprise, but rather a coming home surprise.

This is what I put up at the last moment. [And since baby you don't know, I was planning to come and pick you up from the airport. But the distance between my f***ing office and airport made me change my mind]. I put up the message and pretended to not be at home instead :) . The plan was to tell him that I would come back late from office making an excuse of an impromptu meeting, lock myself in the house from the outside to convince him, and then surprise him. It was too late unfortunately, to wake any of the neighbours. It was 10:15 p.m. I decided to take the risk anyways and wake up one of the neighbours . The result - a grumpy uncle woken up from his sleep. So I apologized and went down five flights of stairs to see if I could ask the security to do it for me. And as soon as I reached the last flight of stairs, I saw my neighbour's daughter, coming back from college, and getting into the lift. Before I could stop her, the lift closed and up she went.

I raced back the five flight of stairs, reaching my floor panting like a dog, what with the tender knee and loads of "health" that I have aquired recently. I was somehow able to call out to her before she shut the door. She din't understand a word of what I said but got the meaning that I wanted to be locked. So lock me she did. And not wanting to be outsmarted by my smart husband, I decided to switch off the lights in advance and wait for him in the dark. Constantly on alert, I rushed to the "hiding corner" on every sound of vehicle. Time was passing slowly and I was getting restless. Weird thoughts started creeping into my mind like how would I reach him if he gets into an accident. I was locked from outside!
Finally, after an hour or so, he reached home. Went to the living room, then kitchen and then our bedroom. I locked into the guest room, came out thinking he was in the bedroom. Unable to find him, I went to the living room thinking I missed him while he moved from the bedroom to the living room. And as I was looking, I heard a laughter from behind. And there he was, standing behind me, lauhging hysterically for five minutes. Yes! In my foolishness, I forgot that our bedroom had a balcony attached. So thus my surprise was runied. But I gave him a lot of beating in return of ruining my surprise. Yes my poor husband gets beaten up in lieu of not getting surprised ! :P 

To be continued...

Breaking free

Every once in a while, life kicks you. Hard. Where it hurts. Then twists the knife in order to increase the pain. And one fine day, pain becomes you. And you break free...

ek sau solah chaand ki raatein, ek tumhare kaandhe ka til

I heard these words and life was never the same again. Romance was never romance again, without Maya and Mahen.

Ek akeli chatri mein jab aadhe aadhe bheeg rahe the, aadhe sookhe, aadhe gile ... 
sookha to main le aayi thi ... 
gila man shayad bistar ke paas pada ho .. 
woh bhijwa do ... mera woh samaan lauta do .. 


Love can not get better and bigger than this .. 

How I was a changed man ( woman ) after the World Cup ....

Love is hard. The passion, the ecstasy, the joy, the pain, the heartbreaks. Oh! the heartbreaks. It’s hard on you, especially when you are young.

As a girl of 12, I was introduced to the game of cricket, but that is not when the affair started. It was then only a casual acquaintance. It was when came the year of 1996, with the famed world cup, that I found my heart beating to the rhythms of fours and sixes and swings and paces. Most of the time in school was spent in passionate discussions about players, discreetly trying to know their likes and dislikes; desperate waiting with flutter in my stomach for the impending evening rendezvous, daydreaming of the next match’s outcome, crying after a bad day and unbound love on a good day. Well, suffice to say, that I did everything, a girl of 14 would do when in love.

And well, we all know how that ended. A big heartbreak. But that did not mean that I gave up on my love then. I kept the faith. Days and months passed and I kept the perseverance. I kept our dates and religiously followed and cheered it up. But despair came more often than happiness. And after a long time I decided to break up - that it was just not worth it. I ignored cricket, refused to do anything with it and cut up all my emotional ties. I became a neutral third party who would just watch sometimes from the sidelines and make fun of them when they lost and dismissed when they won.

This world cup has changed it all. In those three hours of the final match, I opened my heart once again to love, and the possibility of heartbreak and pain. I sat there without steeling myself from the possibility of pain, without shying away and distancing myself. It was in those tough hours that I realized that it was an inevitable path - of pain and ecstacy - you had to embrace both to experience any of them. Or else it would just be a flat and safe road. I also learnt that belief and faith were more important and and tougher to embrace than cynicism. And I believed in belief once again.

That is how I changed this season. What about you ?

Letters to Husband - 1

Sometimes, I thought that I could do better than you. That I could get someone smarter, funnier, more handsome, intellectual. But then, not wanting to make the efforts of finding another guy, I got up and got married to you. Laziness, past commitments and all that had a hand in that you see. Together we came to Mumbai to build a home (only metaphorically!! Literally would be wayyyyyy impossible).

On the first morning of our days together, I woke up, opened my eyes, and the first thing I saw was you - you working on your laptop. At that very moment, you looked up, saw me and smiled from ear to ear. And that is when, I patted my back and said to myself "Well done gal"! For what is better than being married to a person who starts your day with a beautiful smile. And makes dinner of course ;)

Edited to add: I wish I had a camera in my eyes to capture that smile. :)

Slices of life - Luck

If you have been in Mumbai, you cannot not love Colaba !!

The feel of South Mumbai, exotic art shops, Leopold (of Shantaram fame) and other bars and eateries, crowded tourist population, tatoo makers, colorful street shops. You cannot miss the energy and vibes in the air. Oh how much I love Colaba!!

While I was thinking all this, walking along the streets of Colaba, and trying to take it all in, I saw a blond, very young girl. Wait! I saw a blonde, very young, beggar girl !! I looked again, and again. And yes, she was blonde. And definitely a beggar. Although with a brown skin. She was with two other Indian kids and a young woman. All of them eating off someone's leftovers. There seemed to be some similarity in the features of the young woman and the little girl. Who was she? How was she here? Was she really the daughter of the young woman? I observed from the side and they did seem like a family.

Maybe the young beggar woman had fallen in love with a run-away poor foreigner living in slums (like Shantaram) and had this girl. Maybe one day a good, gentle, solitary tourist, returning from a bar, had seen this woman being sexually assaulted by a street urchin and had saved her. And taken her to his hotel to protect her. Somehow resulting in a steamy night and this girl. Maybe she was just raped by a violent foreigner. Or maybe the woman was a sex worker and had the girl with one of her foreign customers.

I sighed. Whatever it was, luck was not in favor of this blonde. What do you think could be her story?