Pens and Pages

Words engulf him The way he gulps his scotch One glass after another. He grabs his pen And writes down his love Pages after pages. He passes a smile at me At times when he isn't bothered About how he looks When his teeth is shown, When his hair is uncombed And she passes him by. He writes a note for her Without reading The stories I've to tell. He asks me, sometimes, As he drops his note In her old letterbox. His thick eyelashes flutter, A gulp in his throat, Drops of sweat  On his forehead, He fumbles as he utters, "Have you written anything new?"

I am often taken back to the old corridors of our previous house - the one that saw us grow old. Its windows would let the fresh air in that would blow over our text books, those trophies we won in school, the notebook our father kept- the notebook he had kept for future knowing not that the internet would soon take over and maybe obliterate its value. He would keep newspaper clippings safe of the featured poems written by my sister and by a younger me, unaware that soon we would go so digital we would lost count of the URLs that would hold pieces written by us to be lost forever and maybe, found again someday. It’s funny how we talk of nostalgia these days when we would still have a lot of photographs capturing our smiles, the places we visited, the fun we had and the people we met. For me nostalgia would sometimes take me back to those days when we used to run around in the house - all four of us, the smiles that were not captured by any camera, the m...