Yeh mera prem patra padhkar

With time and distance separating us as ever, I ask. With remembered ardour and lasting affection, with old familiarity and a new hesitance, I ask.

How are you?

I remember when you asked me that, once. I said it was a complicated question. You said that was a simple answer. You laughed and sent kisses on the ether to take the sting out.

If you asked me if I thought about you, I could have replied at length. I could have told you how I continued talking to you in my head all through the day, long after signing off. I could have told you that you were on my mind as I did chores and mundane things became pleasurable because you were on my mind.

If you asked me if I needed you I could have said a lot. I could have told you how I cherished the idea of you, the fact of you and that we are in this world together, here and now, and never mind the miles and other walls that separate us. I could have said you are a talisman.

But you never asked, because you knew. How I cherished that certainty of yours.

When you held your hand out, so confident that I'd slip mine into it, when you signed off so simply but with such bravery declaring love, when you called at odd hours just to hear the sound of my voice, to hear me breathe… You knew.

I could tell you, if I search for words and find them, about how I miss you; how I think of you at the oddest moments, how I invoke memories of you as if they were snapshots in an album and sort through them, how I dare not revisit some too often lest they get too familiar and lose their preciousness.

There's much I could tell you if you asked. You haven't.

I don't know what love means. I have no words for that. I have words to say to you, though.

How are you?