A Million First Times

The strangest of human bonds are born at queer places.

The first time we met seemed the last. And every other seemed the first.

And a man with a grey wisp smiled a knowing smile at that gap between the first and the last.

A place in whose geography I could easily get lost . Yet I sensed strange footsteps just by their rhythm.

A day hardly after the first meet. And yet a smile offered like known for a zillion years.  A smile quickly locked into a lifetime's memory.

Every day, like a planned meet between two long awaited friends, we dine across a table of unfinished platter.

He recognises me with an insight so sharp that it staggers quiet me. He sees through what most known miss/ed.

A zillion first meets pass by. He waits till I grow familiar with strangeness of both cutlery and the human.

Then, an absence.

An absence I noticed through an unwalked door. An absence I felt through every new struggle .

An absence I remembered through every step of aloneness.

A sudden burden of an absence beside a dead one.

An absence I hung between anticipation and disappointment till the man with a grey wisp smiled a knowing smile.

 The man with the grey wisp had life- ridden eyes that saw through the spoken and the unspoken.

It staggered within that he saw through a gap that hung in the quietest of ways. And so when the man with the grey wisp spoke something, I nodded away hardly hearing what he spoke. All I heard was, "south indian" the rest of his words drowned in the way my head beat on its insides.

Days down, the stranger footsteps rest beside mine. The same mundane query. For once I fail to reply it well.

An inner struggle gets mistaken for arrogance and he expresses  gestures of quiet anger.

We meet a hundred million first times.

Nothing defined.Nothing asked. Nothing known.

A final departure nears.

I wrap memory and thought in a pixel snared newspaper.

Like the bond , it remains hardly seen, hardly known, hardly clear enough to be defined.