Parth Shrivastava

Day 1. You threw the spare key on my face and banged the door so hard on your way out that the walls still shudder at times by the reverberating echo your door banging left behind. I kept the door unlocked for the whole night, but you did not knock. Feeble hopes kept coming in […]

slow jazz plays in the backgroundand your fingers make panoramas in air playing keys and blowing imaginary trumpets and your tipsy torso, and your gypsy soul put efforts in random movements you call dancedance with me, you say and we dance together like the deranged flowers wobble on stormy nights, before disappearing into the earth […]

“This town is resting place for heathen Gods of rain” my father used to say. It rained mercilessly here.  Our town was a big family of 100 odd small families; tens of temples, one Catholic church, a school, two administrative organizations from where half of the town drew their bread. After school, I would ride through […]

i) the first time i saw you, he held your hands a little too firmly. i could still see the spaces between them. your eyes reeked smokeless fires and i couldn’t resist taking a plunge.   why did you twitch your lips destitutely, when your eyes met mine. was is your heart skipping a beat or […]

The street which led to my school was paved with strange looking rocks. Fiza ma’am said they were brought in from Rajasthan during the British era.  She taught us Bengali. She was unmarried, lived in a small house just beside the school. She recited Tagore for breakfast and slept over pillow made of Nazrul’s poems. […]

Prettier women get ugliest of coffins, you read out loud from the book you’ve been reading. I ask for facts to back it up and you say philosophy is made to question the facts. You converted my balcony into a garden with black roses, some african violets and a lot of bonsai trees. You say […]

Our houses were separated by a few hundred meters, but I could see her rusted green iron backdoor from my balcony. I would watch her watering dahlias in the morning. On certain days, water would splash on her face, bouncing back from the incredibly small enclosures of her garden. The gloss those water droplets left […]

Falak will keep the mat ready before Ammi’s broken alarm clock ticks off. She would chant her prayers so elegantly that Ammi forgets she missed the last deadline the porky pawn show owner had given her. Ammi knows 31st is coming and Falak would bring crisp green notes home. “Falak works so hard. Allah has […]

“Is it okay to die a little when there is so much to live for?” She asked me. I couldn’t decipher it, so I just nodded in agreement. We asked questions to each other which we couldn’t ask other people and finished our coffees and walk back home separately. Some rituals are never said out loud […]