Twilight hours

When the sky outside changes from a deep dark inky blue to a faded, washed, scarcely recognizable ink stain on paper, she finds her eyes well up with tears. The stirrings of Chaand Chupa Baadal mein squeeze a part of the anatomy near the place they call heart- for a pain she had never felt, for that love she had never had to lose. It feels as if it was all stored inside her, all the joy, all the carefree girliness, all the free-spirited running across the desert- in her very suburban space restricted wall confined growing up. There is that girl in us, who, when bending over to scribble equations or by-hearting theorems, had looked out of the narrow strip of open window as a pre-monsoon whiff of nightly cold air stroked her cheeks, with a caress that only a reckless playful wind knows. And she had looked out into the nothingness of the black sky-that secretive mysterious stranger who looked longingly at her yellow lamp lit intent face through the only wooden shutter of the window left open. She had looked out at that Night she would never get to know and felt a searing, squishing, grinding pain. The pain legacied down to us by women from countless generations stretching back to antiquity. That pain of a lost lover. That pain of never again being able to run across the vast fields she has never ever run in. That pain of wrenching your heart away from a love you never had and bringing it to live a married existence with things that make the world go round. And then the matter-of-factness of the 7 am day pours just a little more water on the ink stains and all that pain washes away in those flat coloured non-descriptive sun-rays like some monumental silliness of order one.
For magic is in the twilight hours, in the light that doesn’t declare its arrival, in the sounds that choose to remain mute, in the wind that chooses to flirt with your hair - in that scared wide eyed palpitating wonder trembling your insides, when precariously perched on the precipitous threshold of life.