When the bustling day retires behind
The night's starlit charcoal curtains,
My maverick awakens to bring to life
Music from the silence of your absence

Namaz was less prayer and more about
Standing beside Amma and mirroring her,
When as a toddler I stood on the chataai
Murmuring as she did,
Bending down as she did,
Resting my head on the floor
And then waiting to come back up
When she did,
Some days I'd be so sleepy I'd sway on the mat,
Only to be jolted up by an angry Hmph! from her side,
Some days the patterns on the mat seemed like
They were God's silhouette- something she always denied,
Times of silently bonding with the Almighty and the Amma,
Slowly faded into me deciding to pray solo,
When the hour of maghrib coincided with a
Mother-daughter tiff,
And even when we stood praying side by side,
I'd make it a point to not let our sajdas coincide,
On the mat laying bare our rifts and divides.
I wonder if Amma noticed me daydreaming during prayer,
My musings whether God understood English,
My requests to Him to make that crush like me back,
My teenage self angrily bubbling at her obtrusions to my 'freedom'
As she prayed and prayed for me.
Years have passed,
And how I'd love to synchronise again,
The pace of our prayer, the length of our sajda,
But the days, and this new house,
Are now ridden with so much more clutter,
That, though the chataai has stayed the same,
There's not enough space to accommodate
Both daughter and mother.

Why is it so hard to find my voice
In the cacophony of large gatherings,
Yet so easy to draw on paper, words
Silently arrayed into profound meaning?

He sees me from a distance and
passes a hand through his hair,
His smile changes, his voice does too,
His movements pick up a flair
Reserved for only those moments
of hopeful eye contacts,
that harbour even the remotest possibility
of culminating into the act-

The act, for which my body
Prepares me month after month,
Clouding my senses and bombarding me
With erogenous oestrogen and ferocious pheromones,
That dictate my actions every mid-cycle,
To deck me in colour and spray myself fragrant,
Like a flower opening herself and welcoming
Her visitor who's looking at her from a distance,

What more, say, is existence,
Than the dance of the elements?
The heart wraps it up in candy and fluff,
But the mind and the flesh call its bluff,
And sway to the tune of 'find and mate',
The steps known to them, though never taught,
The mind swaying along to procreate,
The flesh joining in, to recreate.

But how can I forget you,
I met you at an age when
Everything seemed possible,
There was time left for everything,
When my mind body heart and soul
Were blank pages open to all colors,
When I stayed up half night to catch
That song on the radio which reminded me of you
I met you at the age when the touch
Of your name written on my hand
Gave me butterflies,
You became all my love songs
You became all my poetry
You became all my innocence,
My optimism, my naivete, my hope,
You were my year seventeeth,
And even on my thirty-seventh,
Fifty-seventh, seventy-seventh,
You will forever be my year seventeenth,
So how can i forget you?