I See You

You look into my eyes

You think I see the love

But I see you

For who you are

I see you eyes

I see what is lying there

In the deep recesses

Hidden from plain sight

Hidden from scrutiny

You have cloaked it well

Masked it right

You can’t fool me though

I see you through and through

I know your plans

Plans for me

I know all that you want

Sweep me off my feet

Toss me in the air

Swirl me around

Have your moment

Moment of fun

Ecstasy, exhilaration

Glee, of gay abandon

Joy, unadulterated and pure

And then when I come down

Down from the heights

I know there will be nothing

Nothing to hold me

Safe and secure

Warm and wanted

I know you

I see it in your eyes

I see you

Another Chance

Ahmed Faiyaz’s Another chance promises a lot on its back cover. An intriguing saga about the intertwined lives of 5 people and the good part is it delivers.

Another Chance makes no pretense of being a literary miracle. It is a fast paced tale about relationships and here Faiyaz proves that he knows his field too well. The story starts off with the main protagonist on a flight to Amsterdam from Mumbai to meet the only woman he has ever loved and whom he has lost twice. Once to circumstances and once to his career. It starts in the present, builds the curiosity of the reader sufficiently and takes on a journey back in time to find out the reason behind the pain in Aditya’s eyes and the reason why the pristine beauty Ruheen has left him for another man.

The journey that Faiyaz takes the reader on after that is something every person who has ever been in a relationship can relate to.

The dilemmas that a young couple each pursuing his/her own career goes through.

The times when no one is wring and no one is right. When both need to put a lot of effort to save a relationship.

The novel is a refreshing and realistic take on love and relationships and Faiyaz handles the subject well without slipping into clichés.

The novel ends smoothly and is quite pacy for its genre.

Read it if relationships interest you. It was a good read for me. Hope you will like it too.

He looked into her eyes. He had always liked looking into them, whenever he got the chance. It was not as if she didn’t let him, it was just that she was very shy, terribly shy. He would coax her for hours to let him look into his eyes for a minute. And then she would. Like she always did. He always won with her. She could never resist him. She, of the iron will, just melted whenever he was around. She had weathered a lot of storms in life. She said that's what had made her strong. He said, I don’t think so. You were not meant to be strong. God didn’t create you that way. He created you with a soft core and then he sent me take care of you. To guard you, shield you, hold you close and tight. Hold you in my arms and look into your eyes.

He held her close that night. He looked into her eyes. It had again taken coaxing since the morning for her to finally agree to meet him in the evening, after work and let him look into her yes.

He had parked the car under the streetlight, two lanes away from her house. The yellow light cast a warm glow on her face. It made her look breathtakingly beautiful. But then he never looked at her face. He looked into her eyes. They always looked like pools of a thousand myriad whirring emotions. But today was different; He could see that something was amiss. That her eyes had one predominant emotion, which drowned out all the rest of them. And what killed him was he didn’t know what it was. Or maybe he did and he didn’t want to face it. It was in that very moment, he could actually feel his heart turn into a deadweight. He could feel it turning into a drowning mass of stone. He could feel it choking him. He could feel life slipping out of his lungs. He started grasping for air. She sat there paralyzed. She just kept looking at him. It was guilt now. He saw it. And he knew the time had come for him to die. The time when all he had ever dreamt of, all the dreams he had ever seen, the very reason of his existence would come crashing down and would take him down with them. He kept looking into her eyes still, it was the last thing he wanted to d before he closed his. And then he smiled. After all, this is how he wanted to die, looking into her eyes.

                                                                  "Be my Valentine"

Yes I find the idea of celebrating Valentine’s Day utterly stupid. And No. I don’t belong to any right wing organization who take up cudgels against lovers celebrating the day.

What I have a problem with is celebrating a day with obscure and mysterious origins. Of the many St. Valentines who are considered to be the patron saints or the original upholder of love has been sufficiently hyped to have been the champion of lovers. He refused an unattested law attributed to Roman Emperor Claudius II, allegedly ordering that young men remain single. The Emperor believed that married men did not make for good soldiers. The priest Valentine, however, secretly performed marriage ceremonies for young men. When the emperor found out about this, he had Valentine arrested and thrown in jail

Makes for an interesting story and all part of folklore.

So should we now be reduced to whimpering sweet nothings just because Card companies today have been able add glitz to the idea that you can’t be in love unless you have proven it by gifting each other gifts on Valentine’s day.

Over the years this one day has dominated the calendar as one of the most important days in the life of any teen growing up in India in the 90s.

In that age of innocence(pre-internet-boom era), Valentine’s day was looked forward to by most teenagers as the day of reckoning.

The popularity of a girl was pretty much decided by the material evidence which was what you received on Valentine’s day form your admirers, secret or not. For guys I think it was more about just having a girl who wouldn’t throw your gift back at your face before slapping you hard.

But it was still harder on girls, the pressure being immense to be counted as a “desirable” girl and many girls would spent sleepless nights thinking of whether or not they would receive the card saying “From your Valentine”.

From cards/gifts for the school kids the focus gradually shifted to how were you celebrating your love for college kids already in relationships.  Where were going, what were you eating and what were you gifting?

More important than the idea of love what has hogged the Centre stage is the idea of the expression of love. How do you express your love to your loved one? “Cards, flowers, gifts, chocolates and what have you in the name of mushy love.

Shouldn’t we stop to ask ourselves this question are we really that devoid of intelligence to start driving ourselves into a tizzy over some folklore and play into the hands of clever marketers who have made an industry out of it. Yes the Valentine’s Day business stands at 12000 crore per annum!

While I have nothing against the idea of love or even the idea of expressing it, what I find funny is why take out one day in the year to do it? And really what happiness do we get out of buying each other silly cards? And more importantly why do we need to express it only by buying each other gifts?

Shouldn’t love be all about feelings and emotions rather than being tangible and material?

Before we rush to the next card shop on our way, let us just ponder on the people who we love and who love us back or not, is love something that really should be measured in gifts and on a particular day? Is love hostage to the most innovative/expensive way of expression?

Isn’t being there when you loved ones need you, showing them you care by being around enough, isn’t spending time all the time all through the year important? Should we just let a day in the year to hog all the attention and then go loveless for the rest of it?

Is this what Love is all about? Are we giving the most used word in the English dictionary the seriousness it deserves or are we just being shallow by following the trend and doing the done thing?

Think about it while you decide on which gift to buy for your valentine.

As the New Year draws near, its time to take stock of the year gone by, reminisce the memories, look back with fondness at some and not so much at the others.

While we think and bid adieu to a year which was packed with 12 months of our life, we also look ahead for the one coming soon and usher it in with hope, anticipation and dreams. The places we want to see, the things we want to buy, the heights we want to scale and the time we want to spend with loved ones. Every single person has some plan or the other lined up for the new year. While resolutions are the much hyped, much abused and much clichéd to-do things for a new year, fact is in some secret corner of our heart we still make those futile attempts at drawing up that Fancy “New Year’s Resolution” and then sincerely believe this is the year I am going to turn things around.

Well I am no different , or as I like to call myself, I am a hopelessly optimistic person.

But then as the practical side, (the fledgling part of me with a very feeble voice) takes over, my New Year Resolution this year looks less like a personal development Plan and more like a doable and realistic list with more emphasis on the experiences of life rather than the PDP or material pleasures.

And while I was in the process of doing the same, I decided to do something different this year. And what possibly could I do differently? I asked myself.

Well of late I have been questioning mortality and the existence of life, trying to look for a deeper meaning of life beyond the every day mundaneness. So I asked myself, what if the world were really coming to an end in 2012, what if 2012 were really my last year on planet earth in this avatar, what would I do then, would I still be interested in learning French as a language(had been on my New Year’s Resolution for quite a while)? Will I still want to do more of Yoga and meditation on a daily basis or would I just want to eat, drink and make merry till the sun or the moon shines.

This aspect of a finality to the things I could and could not do made me re-evaluate a lot of things in my life and I was surprised to see what the end list really looked like.

Thanks to my surprise(pleasant and otherwise) the list had sent me into a cycle of introspection and while I deal with my demons (and angels) it appears I will take a little more time to scrub and polish my list of New Year’s Resolution 2012.

In the meantime I would love to hear what resolutions are creeping up my friends’ lists.

They doubted then

They doubt now

I guess they always will

I couldn’t explain then

I can’t now

Why I Love you

And Love you still

There were times

I called it a mistake

There were times

I tried

To move out

Tried I say

Coz every time I tried

I failed

I kept coming back

Coming back to You

They said We

We were not meant to be

They said We

We will never last

They said this

And they said that

But here we are

Holding to each other

Tight and fast

We have lasted

We have been together

Through ecstasy and hell

Through laughter

And Misery

Through Doubts

And Faith

And to this Faith

I bow today

And say a prayer

To have you with me

Till time’s end

Till the end of forever.

Forever and For Always Part-II
First posted on FB on May 11, 2011

When he woke up the next day his head felt as if his head weighed 20 pounds. There was a throbbing pain. He felt sick in the stomach. He was lying sprawled on the floor on his back. He couldn’t move his body. He just lay there staring at the ceiling. Thinking about his life. All the images flashed by. Only they were not images of his life, they were images of his life when they intersected with her life. He knew the sole responsibility for his state today and his life was he himself. He had known it from the very beginning. Right from the day when she had started dating other guys in school, when she had been out for the first time in freshman year. He knew it all because she had said so any times, in front of her friends, his friends, their friends, in front of him, on his face. She had said she couldn’t do without him. She did love him, but not like that, never like that. She could never love him like that. He had known it to be true. That little voice in his head, which said no, she will love you one day, one day she will come to you, coz she is meant to be with you. One day she will realize that. She will realize that she was meant to be with him. And on that day she would also know what it felt like to not be loved back. How unrequited love destroyed you, killed you. Bit by little bit. How it sucked your life out. And to do that he would wait. Endure the pain. Nurture that voice to give him hope. And watch his own life waste in of front of him.




That day he had decided he would wait even if it took an eternity. He listened to that little voice intently and soothed it, calmed it. Quietened it. So as not to make it hoarse. And he had waited. Through everything. Her numerous boyfriends, her two marriages, a kid. He had waited patiently through everything. And he knew he would wait through Aamir too. He had to. She needed to know what happens when the only person you care about will not be around Forever and for Always. Wouldn’t love you back. Wouldn’t be there for you Forever and for Always.



It had been two years since the day she had come to him and told him about Aamir. Two long



Years. He had waited. He hadn’t chaged his address, his phone number. He even tried to look just the way he had that day. Two day stubble, scraggy clothes, unkempt hair. He wanted to be everything just the way she had left it. The house, the street, the phone number, him. He had tried to freeze everything in time. And he been successful at it. He didn’t drink. He didn’t smoke. All he did was write to her letters he never posted. And ofcourse read her old letters, signed like they were “Yours Forever and for Always”.



Today when he woke up in the morning that little voice had told him, today is the day, you will have to wait no more. He didn’t feel excited, not happy either, he just felt relief. A sense of finally coming close to what one had set for a lifetime back.



He didn’t go to work, he diligently set about checking if everything was in order. He wanted everything to be perfect, frozen in time. Evening came but he was still not ruffled, or restless. Infact he was strangely calm. He knew exactly how the evening would be played out. The doorbell rang. Just the way she always rang it. Incessasntly. He knew her so well, insde out, he could know her coming from miles. There she was. She looked just the way she always had, stunning in her beauty, even in her current state. Weater beaten,tired, tanned, but beautiful never the less. She didn’t say anything, not in the beginning at least. She just hugged him and cried. It had not worked out with Aamir. They had been together only for about 6 months. The split had been ugly. She had tried to take care of things by herself. Bring up her child alone. And that is when she realized how much she missed him and loved him, like that. She knew now that they had always been meant to be together. She realized what a fool she had been not having seen them for what they were , the two people who would be the happiest with each other. And all along she had run after other people who had meant nothing. She kept crying as she said all this and she didn’t doubt for a moment that he would accept he, she was almost too sure that he would be over the moon. And yes he was. His plan was working out perfectly. Her son was with her mom. He served her dinner, her favourite, lemon rice with besan pakoras. They talked some more, about a life shared in pieces. She then sat right next to him. And then they made love, on the couch, silently, but in perfect harmony. She fell asleep soon after. Her face had a contentment he had never seen before mirrored by the contentment he felt in his soul. He carried her to bed. She was sound asleep. She always slept like a baby. He took out her all her letters he had preserved, took all her things he had kept , preserved, loved. He set them all to fire. He went about everything carefully and meticulously. He destroyed all eveidence of his ever having known her , loved her.



He then went to the bathroom. Finally , after all these years he had finally found the guts, the courage within himself to cut his wrist. When she woke up she would know what it felt like to love someone and know they will not be around, that they are gone, Forever and for Always.