“Phir nahi baste woh dil jo ek bar ujar jaate hain, Qabrein jitni bhi saja lo par zinda koi nahi hota."

"The hearts that have once been destroyed…

they are never rebuilt again.

Even if you adorn graves with flowers,

no one ever truly comes back to life."


A heart that has collapsed under the weight of departure doesn’t ask for tenants again. It becomes a monument instead. Still standing, but hollow. Still beautiful, but echoing with absence.

Like the love that moved out but left all the light switches on. Like wounds that never closed, only learned how to sing.

Some devastations are final.

You may try to decorate the remains, romanticize the loss, speak kindly of what was—

but what was destroyed, never truly returns.

A heart once ruined never learns the shape of shelter again.

That even grief, when decorated with flowers, still smells like death.

You can decorate grief in white—call it a wedding,call it forgiveness—but it still remembers the hands that let go first.

You can dress a grave in white. It will still whisper of the body beneath.

You can hang fairy lights in the graveyard. You can sing lullabies to the tombstone.But the body beneath does not rise.

But then sometimes,we don’t decorate graves to pretend the dead are alive.

We do it so our own mourning has somewhere to sit. Some of us still fold flowers into the silence, not to wake the dead, but to tell our mourning:"I see you."

And love—

once lost that violently— doesn’t return.

It reincarnates as poetry.

The poet buried his loneliness under a jacaranda tree but still wakes up purple. 

A failure?

Yes.

But look— even the grave is shaped like a cradle, if you’re brave enough to love backwards.

They said,

"Phir nahi baste woh dil..."

And perhaps they were right.

But here I am, sitting in the ruins, setting the table for absence, writing letters to what won’t return—

not to bring it back,

but so I don’t forget how soft it once was.

So I no longer ask love to stay. I just leave the door open—just in case it ever wants to look back....

And if it doesn’t?

I’ll keep the kettle warm anyway. I’ve learned how to pour tea for things that never arrived. I’ve learned how to speak to the shadow of what once knew my name.

Because some absences become habits.

You stop waiting. You just start living with the empty chair as part of the furniture.

And slowly— grief becomes less of a collapse and more of a room you walk into gently with bare feet, so as not to wake what you’ve buried inside.

So let them say:

"Phir nahi baste woh dil..."

Let them believe it.

But I—

I will continue setting flowers on the graves of old versions of me.Not because I expect resurrection.

But because even ruins deserve ceremony.

I will still hang windchimes in the wreckage. Because sound, too, is a kind of hope.

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