Yours, Neera

The pen that you held, like the mysterious wand of an ancient sorcerer,

has conjured my flesh, my blood, my essence, from

the turbulent sea of your imagination.

Through every careless scribble, ink smeared blotches on paper,

you breathed life in me, carefully weaving the artful arrangement of senses,

shaping the ever changing and unruly flow of emotions.
 

Your written words have never claimed me.

They have touched me unabashedly, the way

autumn breeze whispers to freshly bloomed petals of Dahlia.

The countless lazy afternoons that we spent are lost between passing decades,

leaving their remnants in the withered pages of a second hand book,

among the few other possessions of a low income family,

whose taste for literature refuses to kneel before poverty.
 

You never saw Helen’s beauty in me.

I looked at you through the moist eyes of a homeless mother,

sitting in a pavement, cradling her child from stray dogs.

You found me hiding in the nervous yet expectant gaze

of a bride trying to envision her new life through squinted eyes.

The fledgling intimacy that wrapped us under its spell fifty years ago

was not mere chance, it was as certain as the changing of seasons.

You were not the forgotten hero of an untitled epic and I was not a lost princess.

We were Neera & Sunil! Two transparent spots of light fused as one,

living in an opaque world.

I remember the days when violence marred the world that we knew.

We were standing in the crossroads of time, where normalcy was a distant dream.

The half charred bodies around us didn’t bear any mark,

of the different ideologies they preached.

The invisible walls which choked the life out of them

had faltered in front of death, leveling the playing field,

making them equal victims and murderers in games of social and political upheaval.

Does a poet and his creation ever consummate their relationship?

In every verse, you gave meaning to the magnetic pull of desire that never left our side.

In the chilly December mornings, when stepping out of the quilt is extremely

painstaking, I often reminisce of your warm touch on my bare back, fingers grazing

the nape of my neck, your words taking the shape of every contour of my body.

I heard that you have grown older, that age has finally caught up with you.

But why did I find your touch as juvenile as ever, eager without any trace of weariness?

We have seen the world through us. From the complex maze of canals in Venice to the

forlorn roads of a famine ravaged village, every milestones that we have passed have urged us to

keep our caravan running. Sometimes through a scorching desert fruitlessly chasing a mirage

or in our backyard, savoring the solitude of being in each other’s arms.

In this poem spanning half a century you have run out of ink too early,

leaving me with the errand of writing these last pages with hasty words.

But ever since I picked up the quill, oddly I cannot foresee an end.

The unknown young man about whom Shakespeare wrote in his sonnets on fair youth didn’t

fade away. In the moors surrounding Wuthering Heights the spirit of Cathy Earnshaw,

free and wild as ever, has outlived Emily Bronte by a century.

It’s not our perfections but the imperfections that brought us close.

To the two of us, to the world, turning me into your interpretation of womanhood.