Alpenliebe

For the fourteenth time in as many weeks, Vasudev Bakhshi was faced with the question of what to do during the two and a half day long weekend, when the office admin girl, Alisha Bhatia of the blunt nose and domed forehead, began giving out candies at every desk with a cheerful, if shrill, cry of "Happy Friday", stopping at every desk, and before he knew talk of what everybody was going to do on the weekend filled the colossal yellow-lit hall lined with fifty thousand desks, or so they seemed to Vasu, who, obese as he was, had been running the tip of his index finger along the periphery of the opening created between two ridiculously stretched buttons of his grey linen shirt, and wondering what it was that he used to do with his weekends during the summer four months ago when Sonia, his wife and a professor of Geography at the University of Bundelkhand, was home for the vacation and, to his surprise, he couldn't remember anything of import, neither any elated partying like when they were both collegiate and hungry for each other's touch all the fucking time, nor, thankfully, any crazy, viscious fights characteristic of the year before when she was still working in the city, although he did recall a certain Aarohi's phone number scribbled on the last page of one of her books, a number that he had committed to memory with a suspicious, foreboding fear, a fear that it wasn't Aarohi, but whoever Sonia took her increasingly numerous cigarette breaks out on the backyard to probably converse with, always in what he imagined a voice so low her own shadow couldn't overhear, but why o why o why couldn't she have talked about it, what is the worst that could have happened? Little Ridhi wouldn't be screaming in her bed every night, and I would at least have been able to eat this candy.

Sight

Sight.
In my sight a pretty face.
At first tantalizingly small,
it gets bigger in my eyes.
And then it gets still bigger.
So big only it could be seen.
The very next moment
it disappears,
like it never was there.
But, momentarily.
The very next moment,
from next to my same restless eyes,
it whizzes away like a bullet
away from me.
Farther, farther.
Out of bounds,
no matter how much I try.
Now the rear view mirror
has instead of her
a police bike, and
I am fined for overspeeding.