I wonder if you would’ve told me about the woman living in Calcutta, her love reverberates through the kitchen walls and her love is caged between what she calls a home.

/do you still call it home, if you slip through it everyday?/

I wonder if you would’ve told me about the fakir in Delhi, crooning a song to his lord, he asks, ‘how do we learn to speak about the things that haunt us the most?”, only to receive the silence of the mandir.

/is there a timeline for healing?/

Would you have told me about arnab, who manages to steal some food for the girl who lives around the corner, his back is a testimony to his father’s intolerance and his heart serves as an ode to be a wanderer and yet to have a home.

/and what kind of madness is it any way to be in love with a heart, that was constitutionally incapable of loving you back?/

About your mother, as she weeps in the memory of the man who was never hers, I think grief might only be a circular staircase – to be the remains of body wounds breaking apart between one loss and then another.

/silent screams of despair left the tongue of the helpless./

I wonder what would you tell me if this is the last time I ask you, “yeh ishq kya hai?

Akshita, we are all but an amalgamation of our pasts.