Part 1: Potpourri
Every time she visited him, he plucked a flower from his garden and offered her one. She would rejoice like a butterfly at the sight of the blossoming flower. She would keep the flower with her for all the moments she stayed at his place. And before leaving, before that final hug of his, she would open 'Alice in the Wonderand', from his small library and calmly place the flower in between the pages.
When she had put the first flower, she had informed him that she would take it back with her after it had dried fully, after the colour of the flower would have turned brown. She really liked the sight of pressed-dried up flowers.
It has been six year since he had last met her.
And yesterday, I met him at his place with a couple of beers. I noticed Alice in Wonderland in his library and could not resist the urge to turn few pages of one of my favourite books. I saw eleven such flowers dried up amidst the pages of that wonderful book. I asked him that whether the flowers had belonged to 'her' to which he replied he had never given any flower to her, rather he only gave those flowers to himself.....
Part 2: Winter is coming
It was his third summer in delhi and in the previous two summers he had been with 2 different beautiful girls: one in year one and another in year 2. His every year was cyclical in matters of love. Summers, he dated them and before winters they left him. To both the girls, he had promised that the coming winter he would take her to those old delhi monuments, take her to the thin bylanes of puraani dilli, to listen to the qawwalli in hazrat nizamuddin, to sit and talk in the ruins of Tughalaqabad, to drink by the Lodhi Garden lake, to drive by the neela gumbad, to eat kababs near chawri bazaar.
But then before winter came, they broke up due to some trivial reason. (All break ups are like that). But he did all his travelings, eatings, drinkings, drivings all by himself alone. He would eat the kebabs alone, he visited the monuments alone, drank alone. Two years, same routine, same chilling winter, shivering all alone.
And yesterday, I met him at his place with a couple of beers. And he told me that this third summer in delhi, he is dating this third girl and he has promised the same to her as well.
