Rains.

"​How old is your soul ?"

Here Zeenat sat amongst friends and talking about old cities, the streets they once roamed, the food they gorged on and the beauty that Hyderabad was. And someone had said aloud in a story, how old is your soul and that pushed her mind back a million years. Almost like someone had yanked her body back, and that force had caused her to stumble and knock open a chest of memories. And once opened, all you wanted to do was inflict that hurt on yourself all over again. So while she sat in a mehfil and there was noise and chatter all around her, she grew still. And her mind, picked up every fragment of those broken dreams and placed them under a spotlight . And there it stayed under the spotlight, while she turned them around and let herself feel those times again. Almost, like she could see herself wearing what she was wearing on the day their hands had accidentally touched and as she pulled her hand back, he had looked at her and smirked and said "Someone's shy" and slowly pulled her palms into his and held them tight there.

And then the jazz tunes from that bar from long long back faded out in the background and the red and black colours of the decor at The Black Swan bled into a piano tune. And now she saw herself on a couch on a rainy Saturday, when the rains signaled the end of spring and the onset of winter, but something blossomed somewhere. She, who was always made fun of, because she would always feel cold and needed a cover to drape over herself, felt warm in his embrace that day, as they both listened to a beautiful piece of music.

And as the rains splattered down those wide wide windows that afternoon, she remembered thinking to herself about getting bruised and whether she needs to let her guard back up. But then, when has she ever not been bold in love, and so she told herself to give in. Zeenat smiled at that memory and the rain fell for real, in present day, and she awoke with a start on the rocking chair she was swinging herself in. Almost like someone had yanked her back again, saying, "enough now". 

​And so she came back to reality, not that any of her friends had noticed that she had allowed her heart and her soul this sojourn into the land of dreams, dreams that never came to pass.​

How old is your soul, he'd asked her, and she'd softly shut her eyelids and wondered where she should start her story from.