I hesitated to enter the room as I saw him playing an imaginary piano and I looked and looked at his hand till it became separate from his body and I thought how beautiful, how different his hands look from the rest of him, almost as if they were someone else’s hands with someone else’s fingers, someone else’s nails: I wondered if I loved him even now, when no part of his hands resembled him.
I tried to look away but his fingers kept moving and moving until they paused for a moment in front of the Ballet Russes poster he has in his room, whose still arabesque reminded me of Rehman’s handwriting and how I could have fallen in love with him and perhaps I did, he taught me how to write Urdu, but maybe I didn’t, I can’t be sure, especially about my heart which had convinced me to buy those red shoes I wore with a deep blue saree the day we went to see old buildings in Delhi and you didn’t say anything and I knew, I knew I couldn’t be with a man who doesn’t notice how beautiful red looks with blue,
What am I doing inside this red heart?
Beyond Six Rivers 