The sky outside this flouroscent lit room is a wash of bright cobalt blue. The smell of the rain still in the air and leaves whirring on the sidewalks, bright red maple leaves.

Trees undressing for the imminent winter and lovers are kissing underneath the dome that spans from me here to you somewhere there. Trees are a irridisient green. I am glad to be alive now to breath this rain washed air and to watch the sun. So what if I am alone in it like that dripping weeping willow in the yard outside?

This spring, overflowing with flowers doesn't bring much happiness to me. What it brings are only memories on a broken mirror in which I dress myself with crushed flowers as tears drip from my eyes.

Is this fiction or a fable I narrate? Even these in reality have divorced me, there is no realism nor hallucinations left to see since that spring when you left me alone, very alone to suffer and repent at slow leisure.

Was it my desperate haste to cage you as you said in my embrace of death? Not because I am afraid to die which I am. I still am a coward, I couldn't cut circular patterns on the veins terilling my hands tonight if I wanted to.

Dying anyway is a matter of few springs And I live because I have learnt something if not from you, from your remembrances that come to me these lengthening days

wearing green eapulettes of new leaves, that life is worth living at least to look, remember and smile at these red masses of flowers that come, these red gulmohars of my springs.

1999:02:10 IIT Kgp, India

On looking at a gulmohar tree in the middle of a class and suddenly remembering someone then.

Note: I changed a lot of these lines today. My old poems sound so gauche, like bad English romantic poetry. 2002:06:16 Atlanta

Dear Shahid, I am writing to you from your far-off country. Far even from us who live here. Where you no longer are. Everyone carries his address in his pocket so that at least his body will reach home.

Rumours break on their way to us in the city. But word still reaches us from border towns: Men are forced to stand barefoot in snow waters all night. The women are alone inside. Soldiers smash radios and televisions. With bare hands they tear our houses to pieces.

You must have heard Rizwan was killed. Rizwan: Guardian of the Gates of Paradise. Only eighteen years old. Yesterday at Hideout Café (everyone there asks about you), a doctor - who had just treated a sixteen-year-old boy released from an interrogation centre - said: I want to ask the fortune-tellers: Did anything in his line of Fate reveal that the webs of his hands would be cut with a knife?

This letter, insh'Allah, will reach you for my brother goes south tomorrow where he shall post it. Here one can't even manage postage stamps. Today I went to the post office. Across the river. Bags and bags - hundreds of canvas bags - all undelivered mail. By chance I looked down and there on the floor I saw this letter addressed to you. So I am enclosing it. I hope it's from someone you are longing for news of.

Things here are as usual though we always talk about you. Will you come home soon? Waiting for you is like waiting for spring. We are waiting for the almond blossoms. And, if God wills, O! those days of peace when we all were in love and the rain was in our hands wherever we went.

Notes: This poem made me go in search of a poem I wrote one night four years ago on Kashmir. I am yet to find it but it will be posted here when I find it.