Parts of Me

There are gazillion parts of me

I do not know how many more

I will be before I tumble into a single unit.

There is the part of me that sees the sunset

and there is the part that falls in love

 with it every time it happens.

There is the part of me that keeps

running away in order to be found some day.

Then there’s the part of me that wants to

grab people by their shoulders and shake them hard

when they say I am shy.

There is the part of me that coughs

into my hands and there is the part of

me that forgets to say god bless you when

the other part of me sneezes.

There is the part of me that pins hundred

needles in my brain when someone talks in numbers.

There is the part of me that makes swoosh noises

in my eardrums when I read words.

There is the part of me that watches the darkness

of the moon on the walls and there is the part that

 waits for the stars to emerge out.

There is the part of me that wants to rise up

from the reality like a cloud and float away

And there’s a part of me like a block of concrete

 filled with no air making the former part quit.

There is the part of me that says

nothing matters and there is the part of me

that does everything to make that true and there is

the part of me that realizes how ridiculous

that is.

There is the part of me that feels

it is solemnly the best I can ever be.

SERENDIPITY

They say the earth laughs in flowers. And sometimes even the earthlings get to share it. 

On a not so very special evening you’re waiting for the red light to turn green. Those 120 seconds of your life make your heart run away wearing your blue reebok shoes with a wide smile. It is like it can’t stay at its position anymore. 

Right after you use the brakes and the wheels of your car stop spinning, your inklings begin to process. And you don’t realize the window is half opened; until the process of your thoughts gets interrupted by a voice. A voice of a boy who in his adolescence is clothed in poverty. He smiles at you with a broken tooth. You give him I-don’t-want-any-nonsense look and he smiles hard in his tattered clothes. 

Even before you roll your window up, he drops a red carnation flower inside. You don’t want it, you say.  He says please and his eyes grow bright. You nod in reassurance. He compliments saying ‘it’s looking so beautiful here, please take it. I don’t want money for it’. You’re silent and he goes on. You are confused and you involuntarily accept it. The next moment he winks at you and goes behind the auto rickshaw standing next to your car. Leaving you feel awkward.  You realize the auto driver is observing everything. He seems perplexed too.  

You take the red carnation flower in your hand, give it a baffled look and pan your eyes to the side mirror. And for the next ten seconds your eyes are stuck to it because the boy peeks from behind and hides back. He is playful and you can’t stop yourself from calling him back with a grin. A huge one. You feel the different shades of a usual day and then you present it to me before I learn the sweet fragranced tale hidden in its wilted petals. And it’s only afterwards I realise how it tickled the chime of laughter inside me just because of a flower. And what it confirms is that the universe is always speaking to us. Sending us little messages, treating us with reasons to smile and causing serendipities to make us stop, look around and believe in it.