Inertia
A plane roars above my roof.
I've never looked at planes the same way since two years.

They've carried me to lands I'd never dreamed of, and  just might carry me to the lands I still dream of.

They have taken me away from you, just as firmly as the slow, yet steady chugging of the train.

Your hand does not slip from mine, you do not pit yourself against mechanical speed, the platform does not run away from my feet,

The land does.

My feet fight. My mind is a red, brewing rebellion. But the engine roars, and the steel bird takes flight.

Trapped inside its belly, face pressed against the  scratched glass, I map out the city in memories.

I give names to roads I have walked with you.
I name days and trees and pebbles and the odd snakeskin.

The plane shudders, rises higher, leaving my stomach and my heart somewhere far down below.

My breath rushes to catch up, but my heartbeats never quite do.

So, whenever I hear that giant bird soaring again, I am filled with a strange thrill, and a fear.

Arrival and departure. Two gates earmarked for a volley of emotions.

Two partitions that cordon off the flow of time.

Two distinct states of being.

Euphoria, nervousness, excitement, flushed cheeks, silly daydreams, music that transforms the ticking of the clock, time that cannot run faster.

Despair, upheaval, sleepless eyes, fatigue that knows no cure, nightmarish terminals, crowds, voices, all a blur,

Time that cannot slow down, and I, who cannot keep up.

The miles carve their markers in flesh and bone. Distance becomes much more than a statistic, just a few random numbers.

It becomes real.

And you? You become a song, the strumming of the oud, the ululation of the dhadhis, the soil that rises like a cloud, the fireflies that settle like the wind.

You become a poem, by Mohsin, by Faiz, by Bulleh Shah, by Farid,

You become the artistry of the couplet, the twisting and fraying of words, the spaces between them, the length and breadth of each thought

You become paper, inked with the heartache and longing of a million poets, some striving to find God, some striving to find love, some striving to find that which lives within and without.

You nestle within the bellies of many, many dialects, many kinds of painstaking scrawls,

You become the spraypainted names linked forever on the side of a bridge or on the walls of an abandoned mud house by a burning paddy field,

The immortality achieved by lovers from all eras in the desire to be reduced to a handful of letters etched on a tree.

You become their hometowns, their pind, their glassful of nostalgia, the trees they have nurtured, the dreams they have left behind, their loves, their mothers and wives, their children, their ambition, their faith, their friends, their childhood, their pain, their joy

You flit from being any of these to being all of them, and I am left overwhelmed,

How easily the simplest of things connect with you, how innocently you assimilate all my surroundings, and colour them as it pleases you

Distance goes from being bloodlessly real to colourful, whimsical,

A valley filled with unknown things, worth exploring

In it, blossoms longing, not in its drooping weeping willow garb, but as if it were sunkissed bougainvillae,

In it, memory is no longer a template that cannot be modified,

In it, fresh experiences entwine to create a graft of the most enthralling kind of plant, the sort that imbibes the best of both its parent cuttings,

In it, new dreams take root, old ones flower, while a few others are blown away with the wind of change

For that while, when a diaphanous thread travels from the web of my soul to yours,

An instant is paved with infinite tiles, a neverending path that stretches across all visible and invisible boundaries

For all my maudlin poetry, for all my parlour tricks, for all the smoke and mirrors and for every feeling and emotion I try to make real with feeble words,

Each tremor sent across that thread is so much more tangible, so much more alive

Each moment, spent twinned with you, is so much fuller, so much more flavourful, as if life were bursting with strange new tastes and shapes

For each jar in which I try to trap your essence, there are hundreds more out of which you break free and fly far above my grasp.

For each instant when time tugs at my sleeve, my heart digs in its heels and refuses to budge.

For each time I think I am filled to the brim and can fit no more, you dissolve into my being, sweetening it, making my heart grow,

For each instant I think the flow has stanched and the words will bleed no more, you draw a veritable river out of me.

This moving, this resistance, this tugging, this changing, this transforming, it is endless and beautiful

For it is the flowing of you into I.