After walking around the semi dark neighborhood on a semi moonlight night, I am here conversing with this machine, which really is my loneliness. Tanhai is what Gulzar calls it in his lyric: Main aur meri tanhai askar bather karthien hai.

I and my loneliness talk once in a while. Today it was walking along the road that bobbed up And down. I said, “Do you wonder if people Living in these quiet houses suffer from This very same disquiet, my friend?”

Loneliness, I guess, is a person who Likes his solitude, so he rarely answers back. But to keep the conversation going I said, “Were you there around the edges On those nights, long time ago on the road

To Hijili, when I walked with a friend?” He nodded as if to say, “You should know better, I have been your steadiest Companion all these years. I saw you through two women, Two continents, five cities even as you were Trying to elude me, escape me.”

We stopped at a creek, the water glistened, He was still not very clear, it was as if he Was more like the creek than a chiseled rock. I said, “Perhaps I had got it all wrong, I was The rough rock over which you have flown.

Now I am smooth, eroded, worn down. Parts of me, the glistening minerals, the poems That washed away in your flow, surround me In sheaves of paper. There is no way I can place them back into me. I have become many.”

He walked off; I stood there for a little longer, And followed his fog like form up the hill. I saw him creep up to the windows, look in And smile to himself, as if he was taking notes Of how much longer he could be kept out.

I said, “So many of us are alone tonight, In those houses and few like me on empty night streets, I know a girl, who said she dived off a wharf, in her mind, again and again to escape from you. What is the ransom we should pay to be freed?”

Again no answer, not that I was seeking an answer. The sweet smell of honey suckle growing wild Along the edges of the road, the trees resting after a day’s Worth of synthesis of blue sky and orange sun Into green sap, adding another ring, another year, to their bodies.

These were the answers. These are the answers.