Videsh

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Photo by Maid Milinkic on Unsplash
Written August 24, 2014

 I'm sure you've heard these words before 
I'm sure these dreams have come a visiting
Dropping in when you least expect them 
Come to transport you 
Back to a place you used to call home 

 A place where the roads were paved
In the sounds of your footsteps 
High heels running home 
Feeling breathless and angry 

 Because they're all gone 
They didn't care to wait for you 
Didn't let you linger awhile 
Sing a few more notes 
Before the night takes its window signs down 

 A place where the air whispers of cinema 
Of dreams you breathe in 
Ballooning up within you 
And you're rising up, up
Up along with it 

 Because the cinema is just down the road
All your paths take you 
Back into the dreams you had 
Of the boy in class who was/
Most definitely an actor's twin 

 A place where every night is dandiya night
And a song of euphoria populates your ears 
You wore the lehenga you only dreamt of
You bared the midriff you still don't have 

 Because you still had places you wanted to go 
The world was an oyster of glitz
And every little moment was spent 
Window shopping among the malls of aspiration 

 A place where winter brought its own jealous blazer
And socks were at our ankles just so we could pull them up
Boys would stand right outside the windows of our bus
Just so the graffiti on their notebooks become/

 Gleaming crystals of a moment frozen in time 
A moment of no consequence 
One I'll remember forever 
A life belonging to a girl long dead 

 Even as the evening songs float back in 
And life's little pigeons croon their wake up call 
I wonder whether the dead can find their way back home 
Are ghosts condemned forever to languish in that circle/
Of perdition they call videsh

 Because I'm pining away in a land far away
Foreign and strange/ For they have no frozen yoghurt here
The servings are never super sized 
And the cinema is always way too far away

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