I shifted in the bed, opened my eyes to a conversation in the kitchen,

which would emerge again with tear-drenched eyes, later day, on

someone’s funeral. That’s how dead and lost people are declared

of “being missed”. I sorely miss those mornings when I opened my

sleeping world to the music of little birds, a few familiar ones like

sparrows in the badam tree, and softly lapping waves of the sea.

Things changed in my life. So dramatically. But not something worth

talking about. What I see, touch, move about, or talk to, feels strange

to me, though they look familiar as I grew up with them. Perhaps, this’s

how everyone feels when they come back home to their families, after

a few expeditions in life – failed or successful. I lie as still as possible

for as long as possible, in the bed, filling a body of emptiness with

a few pieces of words and pictures written or drawn on the walls,

which I gathered during my evening walk yesterday: someone has

a new glamorous car parked in front of his home, someone just

had returned from a land where everyone looked at him wondering

how different and foreign material he looks and talks like, someone

moved into a freshly painted house, someone lost his mother,

someone gave a cute puppy dog a home, someone left his job

and idles away time at home, a mother stood in the kitchen crying

for her daughter, as she does every day, a fresh war broke out

in some corner of the world, someone settled down in her new

neighborhood, someone wrote the final note in the stillness

of the night, a group of stranded penguins returned to the sea.

Someone walked away from his guitar feeling guilty about what

he said to the woman he is in love with. Outside the day, slowly, is

progressing, without changing the light in my room much.

The radio spreads songs on my face filled with despair. The ceiling,

under the pressure of my constant stare, would break up, soon,

into pieces. Everything changes, closer or further away.