The Moment

I looked into his moist sparkling eyes. There were wrinkles around them. He appeared to smile, but I couldn’t be sure. Sleepily he looked around, not recognizing anyone…anyone but me. After all, we went a long way back. He felt familiarity in my touch and began drifting off to sleep again. I put a blanket around him, it wasn’t as warm as he was used to. I noticed he slept with his mouth open- in a toothless, almost comical smile. I realized there were so many things I didn’t know about him even after all this time.

He looked very peaceful in that sanitized environment. Complex gadgets beeped all around and nurses and doctors walked scuttled about. I don’t know how long I stood there just looking at him, waiting hoping he would talk to me like all those hidden conversations we had. For nine months, in those stolen moments, I spoke to him and he knew my every heartbeat.

He suddenly woke up, yawned and looked at me again with big sleepy eyes and I realized that the journey had only just begun, for me and my baby…

Love Story

‘Next Station: Bandra’ said the recorded notification system of the local train.

She climbed into the crowded compartment with her father. The compartment was too crowded to afford either of them a place to sit and in the jostling of the crowd that followed, she was pushed further and further away from her father and landed up right in front of him. She looked up at him, slightly uncomfortable at the proximity and in a moment their world changed. In that one unexplainable moment, it was like a star was born in a faraway galaxy and world stopped moving. The heat, the dust, the crowd all blurred into the city that sped by outside and they both just stood there looking at each other. There was something in the way she leaned into him when the train curved sharply on the tracks and the way he stood firmly before her. And all of a sudden, the next station came and her father pulled her away from him and she was lost in the crowd. He remained there, stunned, as the train began to move again.

‘Next Station: Santacruz’