Archives: Impressions

Verses. Poems. Limericks. Whatever they were, I never liked reading them, studying them at school. But sometime in the 1980s I had this friend called Amit. He wrote his self-indulgent poems and implored me to write too; the contagious habit rubbed on to me for a while. Those were frivolous, pretentious verses. Streams of the subconsciousness. Words flowed as they came out, we did not damn them. They created, ostentatiously, meanings as they crystallised on paper. The papers made their way to the waste bins just as fast. Poems were never meant to be retained. Then came that mistake...

The first time that I set my eyes on her, she managed to steal my undivided attention. As she flitted from person to another, I sat there a bit mesmerised, a bit intrigued. Not like a dead leaf of the fall, yet she almost went by the wind with gay abandon, virtually rudderless. Presently, she landed up within hugging distance of me, looked me up and down of as much as she could see, and without even waiting for me to react, scampered away. She was all of four feet nothing, not a day more than ten years in age. She was what you would call an urchin, a beggar. I could see her only as...