Let’s Go on a Date: Time Travel Through April 21🖼️

April 21, 2019

A white sweater, a small bicycle stitched in thread,

two mortals sitting together as if in a fairytale,

a quiet bench at dawn, waiting for the first coffee shop to open, 

hair tied in a khajuri, a soft palm-tree ponytail

Parul helped me earlier, the first time someone did my hair

in such a graceful artwork.

For a moment dizzy silence mattered.

A partner, sleep-creased from the late night,

resting gently on lover's shoulder, 

nearby, a few older bikers in their quiet rhythm,

while the Krishnagiri Range 

lingered in the distance: vast, hushed, and god's masterpiece.

7 years later!

(Unlike movies, script changed drastically in drastically beautiful ways) 

April 21, 2026.

Removing the calendar from table wouldn't change the fact

that the next day won't occur,

accept the time ones life's ended on earth.

Framing wrong questions,

won't change your idea of wrongdoing;

Switching fan off,

won't allow the air to flow,

Yes, Yes Mr. Amitabh Bhattacharya, you said it,

“सदियों पुरानी ऐसी एक कहानी

रह गई, रह गई अनकही…”

unsaid, unwritten, less interesting.

These are mundane facts of life,

but holds heaviness of heart and art.

For both are important

to stay alive.

I don't run to find morning shoes

for I keep them at their place,

and if the room go murky,

my hands will find it easily, 

unless the scorpion 🦂 bites

or the little lizard lurk out of nowhere

that the grotesque memories,

eerie unending,

and the Little Albert Experiment 1919–1920

is proved in a moment.

I seem disciplined

when it comes to going places on time,

being punctual is a human decency now?

even running is, 

thats what strava is for,

I enjoy productive applications 

as as much as I enjoy the first few weeks of swimming lessons

breathable under deadly blue.

But... I fear dates

more than the monster

in map point (coordinate) 

50°05′15″ N, 14°25′17″ E. 𓍙 ✨ 

Geography and mathematics

loks lovely together. 

Maybe words

make a storm bearable,

both of mind depth and earth.

21 is a Fibonacci number: what a beautiful way life unfolds!

Fibonacci? 

Imagine yourself to be in a garden teaching a child this, 

“See this flower? First it has 1 petal, then 1 more—now 2.

Then it adds the last two: 1 + 2 = 3, then 2 + 3 = 5… that’s how nature grows."

I love facts; they remain intact,

like love that lingers in a nostalgic lane. 🌊 🍉

Yes, emotions can be stable too,

Exactly like finding the centre of mass!

You call that easy?

“I apologise for any inconveniences."

Consciousness?

Trapped in the density of choices,

The emotions can never be stable 

Unless you get a good sleep.

A good sleep?

“I apologise for the fairy tales."

April 21, 2019

8:00 AM, rushing for the yellow and magenta metro. ⌚ 🚇 

Shoes dusty, sandals too;

not irresponsibility, but overwhelmed emotions

of meeting human artistry.

How much I miss my painting!

A painting of cherry blossoms,

held firmly in brown oak frame. 

"I apologise for the inconveniences caused,"

The thief left a note.

Did he? No! 

"I apologise for the lies,"

For the sake of decorating poetry.

Oh! 

Why do I keep losing the plot during storytelling?

I was at  cross-platform metro interchange.

Earlier, 

A few flowers doodled in a diary,🌷

And a letter of the modern generation sent 

within the blink📨,

Through a mobile phone,

“Mobile” is defined in the dictionary as something movable.

The heart is intact yet movable,

by the cherry blossoms of his hands,

while being brushed gently.

21 April, 2026

Lohab Valley,

Rehan's place,
Our home 🏡

Rehan is a Landscape Architect in Tokyo.🍃

Inside a timbered kothi, ancient and tall,
Umar and I sat, giggling at morning colours.
Rehan is also Umar's favourite patissier.
We sat on Waguv grass as shadows did fall.🪴

The air was a mix of the meadow and prayer,
With cool, woven mats and a stillness so rare.

Watching him from a distance,
Rehan spoke the Quran with a rhythmic grace,
gently teaching children as they gathered near,
guiding their voices with patience and care,
while mapping the clouds through NASA's deep space.🌌

Rehan is a hafiz, a memorizer of the Quran in both worlds,
Linking sacred verses to scientific light🕌,
Under carved wooden ceilings,
In the heartbeats of the morning,
Between fajr and chasht. 🌅

“Maaz, season 3 actually informs the correct notion of the Catholic God. I’ll discuss it with you. I don’t mind if you were not able to understand DD references, and its completely okay to watch marvel in Hindi years ago, we will watch Nothing Hill tonight, I know your love for rom-com”

Rehan’s smile gestures his care for me, his fiancée 'I' woven softly between his words, even through a passing note of my current Daredevil fandom is hideous.

I completed the tafseer of Surah Al-Hud from Qur’an, learning,

“And be patient, for indeed Allah does not let the reward of the doers of good be lost.”

Simply, what happens, happens; And God is with those who do good.

I love admiring him from distance, his moles on left hand mark as map of Australian oceanic current. 🌊

Sleep duration: 1 hour, incomplete.

Heart rate: Cheerful and shy

21 April, 2025

1 a.m.

Memory Lane

A closed gate,

A broken wall surrounded with garbage,

With trees alive with the sound of crickets. 🦗 

Hands that smelled of floral bravery

touched the nape of the neck,

Blood oozed out,

Fall of an empire where two people lived,

something tender suddenly turned treacherous;

it takes years to shatter the walls of own home.

The red hand of love, faded into crimson and blue,

Love drained out of the frame, 

Formed a thick black scab

Magic realism of sorrow, I  suppose.

detached, distant, dissolving into silence.🗡️

21 April, 2026

4 PM

I smell a musty, sour, or mildewy odor.

The unpleasant smell is caused when clothes don’t dry in moist weather,

it is called seelan in hindi.🧺👚🌦

I ran to the roof as it rained; 

the weather changed like the minute hand of a clock ⏰ 

invisible yet quick.

April 21, 2019 (Midnight)

A cramped elevator of a the Roastery,

succumbed to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial talk,

Coffee spot,

was it brew room or Cafe Sandoz?

balancing Jenga with jokes,

“Just Give Me a Reason” song penetrates the head

like four tetanus injection for this memory,

No, we don't call nostalgia to such certain feeling;

antique literature book One Hundred Years of Solitude

placed on the shelf like it has been understood well the complexity of mortals sitting there.

(note: it took me three months to connect the dots for the characters of this Classic,

What a brilliant author, he definitely paralleled reality),

and aesthetic atheist notions

for if pepperoni is halal.

A group of four fresh graduates,🎓

having eatables, capturing moments while laughing at lame jokes. 🍕

The moon was half or full

Oh! the memory fell, 

Flames and ashes and it aches.

रात गई बात गई  🌃 🍕 

(Let bygones be bygones.)

Is that so?

Did it go?

Intense screams tearing through the dead of night,

is Inestimable.😶

April 21, 2026 (Midnight)

Where do alive lovers go?

In the den of surviving guilt!

Where do pretentious cheater go?

The arrogant losers, never lovers:

In the laughter of the men’s locker room singing “Mirror Mirror on the wall;"

Around coffee tables with new mates in the form of  Salacious jokes,

In fancy dances with beef burgers except for Thursdays,

and in the gallant whisper of new favourite song and poseur lover🩰,

Alongside the justification of the end of a hyped movie La la land.

The chaotic losers, once Lovers:

In chewing gum stickers kept inside ten years old wallets,

among favourite books in the form of leaves, 🌿 

erosion of the gifted ring💍,

lint of old socks adorned with kitten faces🧦,

unwritten journals, 🖋️ 

a fading twilight blue with a shade moss green T-shirt saved from becoming pocha,

Factory-fresh four years old black stockings,

and solved questions at the back of the notebook. 📒 

Next time someone asks why people leave and never return,

Be sure: some leave, hoping lovers will return for reunion;

others return as enemies, seeking only conflict and revenge,

passing pain from one encounter to the next,

where screams and moans become echoes of fear and rupture. 🎯

One dies of sobbing between unwritten journals,

yearning for the last breath to live;

others die in the arrogance of shame

or in the expensive massage parlours.

This, my love,

is the modern La La Land

a space of palettes of blood and lipstick,

dance and falter, 

love and hate,

mystery and clarity,

yearning and lust. :')

21 April, 2024

20:44 pm

The clothes smell of yesterday being washed even today,

for it rained and rained hard,

competing with the tears and heartbeats,

but a little sunshine will make it alright,

scratching art forms on the office board,

not tomorrow, but some day after.

Exactly like the stenching and reek of dreams of the past.

April 21, 2018

A moment of romance in books,

forever guilt in words. 

Mango-flavoured ice cream in front of Kirori Mal College with friend Simpa,

Discussing how rank would position me in Hindu College or Miranda House;

this is nostalgia, 

the reminiscence of the past.

Life was only laughter then,

nothing yet had chosen to happen,

life hovering newness lightly over time,

not knowing what was standing inside:

A whole world of mine tangled then.

2019 came like a quiet pull of gravity, 

the same air, close, present in ways unnamed,

as if life had paused to learn its own language.

Kirori Mal College became reality:

a then dream, 

now a lived and loved existence.⛅

Also the place where lovers’ last looks happen once :')

many for academic Faculty of Management Studies,

and for someone, 

the quiet longing that that one day would  remain after separation.

The place also held parents’ meetings and friends’ picnics,

where plans were gently disguised, and meetings felt ordinary,

like they still had time to become more,

I feel like the archaeologist while digging the dirt stricken memories.

April 2019, they met, without knowing anything about endings,

only the ease of arrival, conversation, and presence,

as if everything was still open and nothing had been decided yet;

Tic tac toe, moonlight, and dancing curtains sung a beautiful song then.

In 2022, they met there again for the last time,

this time in a parents’ meeting, still quiet, still familiar, still unassuming,

and it felt just like any other meeting while it was happening.

There was no sense of ending in the air, no warning, no weight,

only the ordinary rhythm of conversation,

as if life still had time to continue itself forward,

Kirori Mal saw two academic dreams take flight and grow,

But his fondest vision withered in the frost of separation’s blow.

2022 arrived softly,

like something already written but unread,

what once stood together learned how to exist apart.

And then,

nothing moved forward the way it was expected to.

Only time continued, 

Along with grief stricken cuts on skin and bones,

Memory began to take shape in silence,

like chalk on a board touched by water,

slowly dissolving but never fully gone.

Further, it all returns here again to April 21, 2018

where nothing yet had chosen to happen,

and everything still felt like it had forever to begin.

Life doesn't have intervals, or thought block.

The growth of life is shaped by creation itself, moving

in cycles of beginnings, and endings, 

Unfolding life,

inevitably, unasked.

Heroes are not made by ease, 

but by standing where it is not easy to stand.

A villain is never right.

For people who agree with Thanos or Wilson Fisk take a trip to Neverland.

Like the last pages that changes the plot in Agatha Christie's brilliant work, 

In the final scene of a cinematic frame 

Rewriting its own beginning, 

One moment can shift the entire script, “जा सिमरन, जी ले अपनी ज़िंदगी”,

like the last shot of smiling Lootera

That bullet shot and the cinematic frame with winning smile.❄️

Remember, remember the 5th of November?

An important date in History,

a distant echo of history, 

something written outside the pulse of personal time,

a reminder that some dates belong to stories, not to the soul.

April 21 stands differently.

For now,

remember April 21 instead,

not as an extravagant event,

but as a presence,

as something that did not yet know it would become memory, something ordinary,

breathing quietly inside time,

collecting itself without knowing it was being kept:

And would become extraordinary! 

Wisely, the Doctor Who says, "Nobody important? Blimey, that's amazing. Do you know, in 900 years of time and space, I've never met anybody who wasn't important before."

History is not only ink on bounded paper;

It is also what never got written, 

What stayed in the heart instead, 

What is found in  mostly silence, 

Few screams,

Million walls,

Faint light almost gone,

What still glows faintly when everything else has gone dark.

In 2019, my spirit moved as Comic Marvel Elektra’s!,

A shadow fueled by fire and a singular aim,

To fight for the right, no matter the cost,

Bound by a love I would claim by hook or crook,

Willing to lose the world to win the man.

Now, the storm has found its center;

I strive to inhabit the mind of fictional Karen Page.

The fight for justice remains,

yet now it is tempered:

Built on the bedrock of sanity and truth,

Refusing the wrong path even for the right end.

I hold to a love like the fixed foot of the compass,

As Donne once wrote of souls that are intertwined:

One stays firm at the center of the circle,

While I lean toward it, constant and clear,

Finding my goodness in the strength of staying whole.

No longer lost in the fray,

I am the master of the map,

I stand balanced

The compass has drawn its boundary, 

the ink is dry, and I am, at last, exquisitely centered.