Sevdah

 

The creaking of the ceiling fan at dawn, 

 my head, astir with memories amidst the broken sleep pattern.

 Beating the cymbal of nostalgia with mallets of yesteryears

 I wake up to the diurnal rhythm

 battering on the membrane of this humdrum life.

 Across the ghat, the morning arati begins.

 Humming a melodious aubade.

 I open the matchbox to light the oven of desires.

 They shine bright with the dawn's carmine hue!

 While I engage in a parley with the rising sun about its journey to the horizon's flip side.

 last evening.

Its rays carried a genome of hope

 which helped me heal my loneliness.

 "You are hysterically beautiful", he had said once!

 "Hysteria and beauty never go hand in hand", I had replied.

 The time of our togeth

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erness was an ephemera.

 Short-lived like the shooting star.

 But it defined my fundamental axiom of existence.

 The sky's bosom lacerated with an azure hue as the day took over.

 Memories of our inane banters tried hard to scour my wounds

 that peeped through the crevices of my senility.

 I spilled ink on origami paper and crafted our salad days into a poetic craft.

 The noon basked in chartreuse hues of the untrimmed garden.

 I packed my mysticism in a garbage bag

 Ready to dispose of it the next morning. 

 I preserved the matrix of longing within the prism of time.

 I poured ‘sevdah’ into a porcelain mug and sipped it with my evening tea as the sun again went on its journey

 to the horizon's flip side

 where life was perhaps better

 and youth never faded.