A good author writes their predecessors into existence, as do certain moments. With all the tumult and anxiety of the year coming almost to an end, on its penultimate day, I rewrote a night in June 2016, when I fumbled before anything could begin; sordid afternoons in 2017, shame masquerading as desire, or perhaps its reverse; intimations of mortality from February 2023, when age and pain seemed to insist on eternal exile…and then, four years were cremated with two short sentences and Sensei gave up the ghost before I could even show him the moves. 

Dead weight, so much of life is dead weight. 

No matter. Drown it all in a bottle of Australian cabernet, bask in gooseflesh and sweat—between Frida and Clara, yielding to the pressure of your digits, sighing in your palms. Then words scrawled on cocoa flesh, Tagore’s words as song; nervous glances at a watch, try again and again till it yields. For the very first time in your life, Kafka’s doorkeeper gives way. ENTER. REJOICE. ALLELUIA. But then, jealousy, then sordid make-belief, then phantoms from half a lifetime ago: they hide, nervously, behind an open door. To no avail, you’re caught, your shoes give you away. 

Then again, so what. A second lease of life comes the way it must, with every landmine still in place. But you are born into the light, at long last! Make all the godless prayers you can, ring every bell that makes no sound, flood the streets with bright, invisible lights. Let renewal course your veins. Let lips glide, languid and emptied of words. Let someone’s ornamental poems of revolution in your own mother tongue sound richly exotic and mysterious. Let her remind you that the last bit of darkness you’ll find in the morning will be in the pockets of your pyjamas.

And then—because solemnity is its own kind of death— let the bassline shake the walls: ''Ya akhi dus dus ‘indi khosh fasla. Ya akhi tafooz tafooz Wallah khosh raksa!''

Indeed: a life stalled by shame, grief and delay does not become whole when the door opens. But it becomes loud and embodied, refusing the inertness of years past. 

Raise a toast to this, and dance away all the years that preceded this and all the years to come. Yes, hai tujhe bhi ijaazat. Rejoice.

She lived in a house with her cat near a prawn farm in Goa Velha, palms and banana trees overlooking her windows. She rode a motorbike, played the piano, looked stunning in her emerald green cocktail dress and short hair highlighted blonde and brown, wrote passionate letters to me in French, smudged with ash from her cigarettes...

...which fit all the stereotypes I needed it to fit, my subconscious basking in the soft glow of a million clichés. After all, wasn't Goa the place to which the distance could only be measured in time and not space? There would always be a Goa trip somewhere in the near future, with beaches and booze and colourful shirts and Hemingway-esque male bonding. The planning of said trip was often the sum total of the catching up. Therapeutic, indeed, like window shopping.

Halfway between longing and self-awareness — halfway between the pure ideal and the clarity of an unconquerable darkness — she descends on my soul like moonlight. Like a soft, impossible saudade. 

And her voice returns —

« Votre âme est un paysage choisi

Que vont charmant masques et bergamasques

Jouant du luth et dansant et quasi

Tristes sous leurs déguisements fantasques. »

And when I try to picture her now, the edges blur: was it really an emerald dress, or just the green of the bottle glass scattered on the floor of my mind? 

Goa, her, the letters — all banished now to some salt-stained corner of time...