To bleed heavenly in your thoughts........
I don't know when I first thought of him.
Perhaps it was not a thought at all. Perhaps it was one of those strange things that happen when the mind is half-awake—when a teacher's voice begins to drift somewhere beyond the walls of the classroom, when words lose their edges and the afternoon becomes soft around them, when the room itself seems to exist somewhere between memory and dream.
A man walking through a city that had never once learned the meaning of silence, beneath a sky that might have forgotten the colour of stars.
I knew almost nothing about him.
I did not know his name. I did not know what language he spoke when he was angry, whether he drank his coffee too sweet, whether he preferred the window seat on trains, or whether he had ever stood on a railway platform waiting for someone who had promised to come and never did.
Yet somehow, impossibly, I knew his thoughts.
They were quiet.
That was the first thing I knew about him.
In a world that had taught itself to hurry—to make messages faster, journeys shorter, machines cleverer, grief easier to hide—he still possessed the ancient inconvenience of thinking.
He carried memories that did not belong to him.
Perhaps some of mine too.
He remembered wars he had never fought, borders that had disappeared before his birth, rivers that had changed their courses and forgotten the names men had once given them. He remembered people whose photographs had faded centuries before he was born.
He travelled through books.
Sometimes he stood before old maps and ran his fingers along the edges of countries that no longer existed. He wondered, perhaps, how human beings had once been so certain that their borders would outlive them.
Perhaps that was why he was lonely.
His black eyes had taught me that loneliness could be beautiful too.
The future had given him everything except a past.
So he borrowed ours.
And somewhere, impossibly, I began borrowing his.
I imagined him sitting beside a window at night, watching a city burn quietly beneath thousands of artificial suns. Perhaps he wondered whether people had become happier after conquering darkness.
Perhaps he discovered that they had not.
Perhaps he smiled when he saw sparrows taking flight together, all of them suddenly becoming one small, frantic piece of the sky.
Perhaps he felt an inexplicable sadness when he saw a lonely cat curled beneath a parked car.
Perhaps that was why I could recognise him.
Not because I knew his face.
But because I knew the ache.
There are people we meet only once.
There are people we never meet at all.
And then there are those strange, impossible people who seem to live somewhere between the two—people who exist first as an idea, then as a sentence, and finally as a feeling that arrives without invitation and refuses to leave.
He was one of them.
I was the other.
And perhaps that is why I think the day we finally met had been written somewhere long before either of us knew it was coming—by angels with honey-coloured paper and cherry-red ink, perhaps, because some days deserve to be written beautifully even when nothing beautiful seems to be happening.
It was a gloomy day.
The kind of afternoon that could not quite decide whether it wanted to rain.
A lazy wind wandered through the street, touching half-dead leaves and sending them skittering from one side of the pavement to another, as though even the leaves had forgotten where they were meant to go.
I was walking in search of a rare ghee-flavoured sweet.
With Ali Sethi singing “Chaan kithaan guzare aai…” softly in my earphones, I was asking the moon where it had gone without realising that I was about to spend the afternoon asking a shopkeeper where on earth he had hidden the last packet of ghee halwa.
It was that sort of afternoon.
I had already been walking for nearly twenty minutes.
Three shops.
Three failures.
The first shopkeeper had looked at me as though I had asked him for a piece of the moon.
The second had sighed and said, “Madam, nobody buys that anymore.”
The third had simply laughed.
I was beginning to take it personally.
I pulled one earphone from my ear.
“Do you know where I can find it?”
The old woman behind the counter thought for a moment, her fingers resting upon the edge of the wooden table.
“Try the shop near the old post office.”
“Where?”
She lifted her hand and pointed down the road.
“Behind the bookshop.”
Of course.
There was always a bookshop.
I thanked her and walked on.
The song changed.
For some reason, I slowed.
Perhaps it was the weather.
Perhaps it was the music.
Perhaps some meetings begin long before the people involved know they are walking towards one another.
Perhaps two people can spend years moving through entirely different streets, carrying entirely different sorrows, only to turn one ordinary corner at precisely the same moment.
I turned the corner.
And there he was.
Not dramatically.
Not beneath a shaft of golden sunlight.
There were no angels.
No sudden silence.
The universe, rather rudely, continued doing what it had always done.
A bus honked somewhere behind me.
A dog barked twice.
Someone was arguing loudly over the price of tomatoes.
And there he stood outside the old bookshop, as though he had always belonged to that particular afternoon.
A book lay open in his hands.
He wore a dark shirt, its sleeves folded carelessly to his elbows. His hair was slightly untidy, as though the wind had been arguing with it for some time and was winning.
There was something tired about his posture.
Not weakness.
Just tiredness.
The kind that does not come from a lack of sleep, but from carrying too many thoughts for too many years.
I walked past him.
Then stopped.
I don't know why.
Perhaps he looked familiar.
Which was ridiculous.
I had never seen him before.
And yet—
I knew those eyes.
Black.
Quiet.
They were not beautiful in the conventional sense.
They were worse.
They made you wonder what they had seen.
He looked up from his book.
Our eyes met.
For one strange, suspended second, neither of us moved.
And something inside me became very still.
Not my heart.
That would have been too romantic.
It was simply my mind—as though some distant, forgotten part of me had suddenly lifted its head from sleep and whispered:
There you are.
I hated it immediately.
I looked away.
He did too.
Good.
Perfect.
Normal people met strangers and continued living.
I had a sweet to find.
So I walked towards the bookshop.
Two steps.
Three.
Then I heard his voice behind me.
“Excuse me.”
I turned.
He was holding something between his fingers.
One of my earphones.
I looked down.
The wire had somehow caught itself around the strap of my bag.
“Oh.”
He held it out.
“You dropped this.”
I took it from him.
“Thank you.”
He nodded.
And that was it.
Three words.
Perhaps four, if we counted his excuse me.
That was how we began.
No music swelling in the background.
No rain.
No trembling hands.
No universe pausing to witness the occasion.
Just a lost earphone, a dark-eyed stranger, and a girl who still had not found her ghee halwa.
Years later, I would remember that afternoon and wonder how something so enormous could have begun so quietly.
But at the time, I only thought:
He has very strange eyes.
And then, because apparently the universe possessed a rather wicked sense of humour, I walked straight into the bookshop and asked for ghee halwa.
The bookseller stared at me.
“No.”
I sighed.
Of course.
Behind me, I heard a quiet laugh.
I turned.
He was still standing outside.
And for the first time, I saw him smile.
It was not the smile of a man who had found something particularly funny.
It was the smile of someone who had, for one brief and accidental moment, forgotten to be lonely.
I did not know his name.
I did not know where he lived.
I did not know why he had been standing outside an old bookshop with a book about vanished kingdoms in his hands.
I only knew that when I walked away that afternoon, Ali Sethi was still singing in my ear.
Chaan kithaan guzare aai…
And somehow, for the first time, I knew who the song was asking about.
Not the moon.
Him.
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