Lo, and behold, you came to my study and ravaged my virgin heart.

Your words of lilting love and sanskrit slokas

A happy coronation as I twisted around in my new foliage,

Burning, reddened to crimson in the hearth and home of your candle-lit promises,

I carried you, in my mermaid fish-tails and swirled around,

In the lustrous, magical nights, my winged flight

taking me to the heady jasmine, the flora and fauna of your European homeland,

Our bodies undulating in the sensual calling

Of the ocean, the mirrored reflections of us, coiled, smothering.

Deep into the sea, in the turquoise blue waves,

Your hungering touch raced, sobered down, and whispered:

“Would you love me, all your life, little mermaid?”

Resting on my newly blossomed breasts, deepest sighs of pain

Slide down the waters, holding me for moments,

Strumming their unsaid words like fingertips dancing, playing,

I feel the ripples of their fingers, emaciated, drowning.

Fingers that had wrote a world for long forsaken love stories,

I drift ashore. I open my mouth and moan, in an island of unrequitted love.

Did you take in my zephyr breath then, Mircea Eliade, 

While my sand and gravel burnt?

The world around us, a carnival of trampled love,

Our longings, crackling with unfinished songs,

In the ripped off pages, we laughed, crackling

At the impending warranty of our mortality.

In the ephemeral twilight of the island,

The conch shell blows, awakens, unleashes and conjoins

Copulated souls. The symphony of a scraped, ebbing raaga

Plays on, “na jayate na mriyate va kadaachin, naa yam bhutwa  bhavitya

Na hanyate hanyamaane shareere”……

The soul that is unperishable, immortal, old, eternal,

Undefined by birth or death, becomes a trembling, raging river of love.

Your withered footprints dissolved into our dusty corridors

As you returned to your own orbit, your wind-kissed rivulets and 

the iconic Eifel Tower. Your Amrita, the light of your soul

and her smoldering hearth had waited for you,

threw herself in the boundless waters, melted with you

in the wild spring’s song, as you whispered to her:

“Would you love me all your life, little mermaid?”

The dream, only but a commonplace one, collapsed and resurfaced

As we had to choose our own paths and destinies.

In every wake of dawn, I have talked to our calf-love,

a corpse washed out of its last remnants of blood.

It has called us, in a chilled world of grey, to take in its scattered ashes.

For all these decades, playing a courtesan to duty’s calling,

I had exhaled the promises that had blossomed in our vintage Kolkata home,

The memories we had stitched up in pieces, memories that wilted and died,

to rise from their ashes, phoenix-like, spreading across the spring canvas.

I stand before you today, Mircea, your Amrita, the tectonic plates of your love

The nemesis of your very young, crumbling days.

“Ajo nityo saswatohayang puraane/Na hanyate hanyamaane shareere”.

The soul that is unperishable, immortal, old, eternal,

Undefined by birth or death, chases you in curved lines

Grazing with you the landscape of this life, dancing threadbare

to the silken music of death. In the horizon beyond,

another life, surges, ripples in light,

in a shared tapestry where our gorges narrow down, and collide.