Aaditya Bajpai

  • If the world ended in Her name

    Kafka wrote, in one of his letters to Milena, that “Dear Milena, I wish the world were ending tomorrow. Then I could take the next train, arrive at your doorstep in Vienna, and say: Come with me, Milena. We are going to love each other without scruples or fear or restraint. Because the world is ending tomorrow.”

    And then I think of you. Not in a way that is linear, not in the way that sane minds think of another, but in a way that bends in on itself, like light trying to fold back into its own shadow. What Kafka said, I wish to say, though with a trembling that I cannot hide. If the world did end tomorrow, I would not ask for explanations, for your careful reasons, or for the logic you cradle in your palms like broken glass. I would only say, “Come with me. Let us love like cowards never could.”

    But the world does not end. And therein lies the cruelty. It keeps moving, like an unkind clock that mocks the weight of our longing. And so I circle around you, endlessly, in words that refuse to arrive.

    I wonder if my love for you is an apocalypse already disguised as devotion? Because every time I think of your name, the world does collapse for a moment, the streets blur, the air trembles, and my chest becomes a house with all its windows shattered open. Perhaps the world ends a thousand times a day, but only for me. And you, you walk untouched, unaware, as though immune to the ruins I carry.

    Yet, if I had his courage, the courage of Kafka, who never quite had the courage, I would come to you and say, “The future is a lie; tomorrow is a fraud. Let us burn the maps and calendars and live in the violent honesty of this second.” Love me now, not later, not someday, not when the world gives permission, but now, as though the world had already ended, and the silence after the end belonged to us.

    But I do not come. I only write. And writing is my cowardice & my devotion braided into one long, endless, unraveling confession. So, in the end, I keep loving you through my words. Because even the words and worlds might end, but my love for you won’t. 

    –aaditya.

  • A Twenty-Five Minute Love Story?

    11:22 A.M., Juggernaut, Connaught Place, New Delhi

    It was just another humid afternoon in Delhi, the kind where time feels heavy and slow, like it’s leaning on your shoulder. I found myself at Juggernaut in CP, seated near the window, sipping filter coffee and waiting for my idli and sambhar to arrive. I hadn’t come searching for anything. Maybe some quiet, maybe just the comfort of South Indian food that tasted like home even if it wasn’t. The kind of lunch you eat with no expectations and a mind full of to-do lists. And then she walked in.

    She came with a friend. Her laughter was the first thing I noticed, before I even turned to look. The kind of laugh that doesn’t ask for attention but gets it anyway. She had curly hair, loose and alive, and skin that felt brighter than the afternoon sun trying to press its way through the glass. Her eyes held mascara like a secret, just enough to make you feel like you were noticing something private, something not meant to be seen by everyone. She was wearing a pink kurti, embroidered gently with threads that caught the light like her smile did. But honestly, I don’t remember much of the kurti. I spent most of the time looking at her eyes, trying not to be obvious about it, failing miserably.

    She was happy. Not the performative kind of happy people wear on their faces for selfies, but the rare, real kind. She clicked a few pictures, laughed with her friend, and sipped her drink. I, on the other hand, forgot about the sambhar cooling beside me. I had picked up a pen from my bag and was writing bits of her onto the tissue paper on my table. Just words. Curly. Kurti. Bright. Smile. Something about her needed to be written down, even if it was only to be thrown away later or folded into the pages of a diary I would pretend I don’t read anymore.

    And then, our eyes met. Brief. Soft. Almost accidental. But something in that half-second stretched longer than it should have. I smiled. She smiled back. I think I even blushed, which isn’t something I do anymore, or so I thought. And then she looked away. That was it. No dramatic pause. No music in the background. Just the quiet return to reality that hits when you realize a moment has ended even as you’re still inside it.

    She left the cafe not long after. Her smile walked out with her. But something stayed. Something tender and inexplicable. I finished what was left of the cold sambhar, paid my bill, and booked an Uber like a person who hadn’t just written a stranger into a poem that would probably never be read aloud. But she lived on. In the ink of a borrowed pen. On a napkin that carried the faint scent of her perfume. In a corner of my memory I didn’t know I had left vacant.

    What should we name this incident? I am figuring that out still. For the time being, let’s remember it as a 25-minute love story?

    –aaditya.

  • Love and Other Words

    There are some things that silence cannot hold. Her name, for instance, always escapes it. It spills out of me like sunlight through the cracks of an old window, soft and stubborn and unwilling to stay quiet. Do you ever feel like you’re lying down in a field full of sunflowers, the sunlight brightening up your face, with this cool wind blowing the strands of your hair, and suddenly soft romantic music plays in your head? I have. And that’s the proof; I am in love.

    I have tried, I swear I have tried, to speak of her with restraint, but she makes poetry of my breath. And what can a man do when even his pauses begin to rhyme?

    She is not merely beautiful, though even the stars might dim themselves in her presence out of humility. No, she is good. In a way the world no longer teaches. There is a mercy in her laughter that forgives even the worst parts of me. And when she speaks, it is not only my name that she calls, but some forgotten version of myself I had long abandoned. With her, I am more than I have ever dared to be.

    You once told me that love is a kind of madness, a soft unraveling of the sensible self. Then let me be unmade. For if all love is madness, it is the sweetest kind, a fever I do not wish to break. I would trade reason for the sound of her footsteps and certainty for the chance to hold her hand on an uncertain day.

    She is not the answer to my life’s questions. She is the question itself. I will dedicate a lifetime to asking her the right questions. The one that makes the rest of the world fall into place, not because she solves it, but because she makes it worth solving.

    And so I love her. Not in loud declarations, but in the way I move toward the light when I hear her voice. In the pauses I save just for her. In other words, I no longer need to say it.

    –aaditya

  • And if time’s supposed to heal, why does it ask for more of me every day?

    I spoke to the spaces between words today because they felt more honest than what I’ve become. I keep retracing conversations like they’re constellations, trying to find the shape of what broke us, but maybe it was never one shape; maybe it was a shifting thing, maybe I was the shift. Or maybe silence crept into the cracks I pretended didn’t exist, and I fed it too long, mistaking quiet for peace.

    You once said you liked the rain but hated getting wet, and I laughed like that was a metaphor and not a warning. Now I stand in every storm without an umbrella, thinking maybe this is penance or poetry, or some fusion of both where neither makes sense. I keep thinking of your voice at 2:07 a.m., how it could ask, “Are you okay?” like it had already cradled my answer. Now I only ask myself that in the voice you left behind.

    There are hours I scream internally in Morse, in backwards scripts, in letters never sent and messages unsaid, hoping you catch the wavelength of guilt I broadcast. I don’t even know if it was one thing or many tiny careless ones—like paper cuts from pages I didn’t bother to turn.

    And if time’s supposed to heal, why does it ask for more of me every day? Why do I keep rehearsing apologies in mirrors too tired to reflect anymore? I’m not asking for yesterday; I’m not asking for forgiveness wrapped in neat conclusions. I just want to know, what version of me do I have to tear apart, rebuild, unlearn, and relearn for the path to shift even slightly toward the place where you don’t look away?

    How do I make things right?
    Tell me where to begin.
    Even if I won’t like the answer.

    –aaditya

  • Oranges and You, Again

    I once sat by a broken clock that ran backwards and thought it was wiser than me. It hummed in rusted circles, and I, a fool with open hands, kept asking it for the right time. The trees around whispered sideways, and the river bent into knots, laughing with its back turned. I didn’t mind. I kept waiting.

    You were somewhere in the smoke, maybe dancing, maybe just breathing, maybe peeling sunlight off an orange, one slow curl at a time. I didn’t know. I just knew the sky had changed its spelling the day I saw you.

    Sometimes, I carry a basket full of rain to the hill where all the forgotten things are sleeping. I’d empty it there, thinking maybe you’d find a drop and recognise it as mine. Sometimes I planted chairs in the dirt, hoping one would grow into a table for two. Nothing ever sprouted, but I kept sitting anyway, waiting for the feast.

    The birds stitched holes in the clouds with threads of melted snow, and the ground became soft enough to write names in with my bare feet. I wrote yours until the letters got tired of standing straight and lay down to sleep. I didn’t mind. I kept walking.

    There are rooms in my heart where the windows are stuck half-open and the rain drips inside when it wants. I never fix them. Maybe one day, you’ll come and sit inside, knees tucked, shoulders warm, holding an orange between us, peeling it slowly, the juice running down our thumbs like tiny suns.

    And I will wait. Through every crooked hour, every river that forgets where it’s going, every chair that refuses to bloom, every letter that collapses into dirt.  

    It’s my 5th April, waiting for you. I will wait.  

    Just to share an orange with you.

    -aaditya

  • The Lamppost

    There is a lamppost on the corner of a road no one remembers being built.

    It stands with a spine bent slightly backward as if surprised to still be standing. The light it casts isn’t gold, not quite. It’s that color just before a dream ends but before you know you’re waking up. It doesn’t flicker but you imagine it would if you blinked at the wrong time. And it does blink, with the wind maybe or with the memory of someone once leaning on it, half drunk with hope or half sure it wouldn’t last.

    The evening folds in around it, the kind that doesn’t quite settle. That blue which still believes in the sun though the sun has long walked off. And in that bruise-colored hush, the lamppost is alone but not lonely. There’s a difference.

    Sometimes, you find yourself staring at it as if it might explain something. The way it holds light as though it’s been entrusted with warmth it didn’t ask for. As though someone once whispered to it, hold this, just for a little while, and forgot to return. You think maybe that’s what love is, the holding of something bright without knowing if anyone will come back for it.

    You walk past and it doesn’t call, not in words, but in a hum low enough to miss if you’re too sure of yourself. It hums like old lullabies in languages that didn’t survive. Grief maybe. Or memory. Which are not always different things.

    It never moves. Never grows. But still, somehow, it changes. And in that change, you see yourself, heart first and blurred. Because love leaves footprints. And grief walks in them barefoot.

    You don’t know why it matters. But the lamppost knows. And it keeps burning. Because to stop would mean admitting that some things don’t return. And maybe it still believes.

    Maybe so do you.

    -aaditya

  • Spilled Water and Chopsticks

    The glow of neon catches your skin—
    pink and purple painting shadows on the curve of your cheek.
    We are haloed in “good vibes only,”
    but the way you look at me is the only gospel I believe.

    You wrestle with chopsticks,
    a clumsy dance of wood and slick noodles.
    Every spicy mouthful steals a blink,
    your lashes flutter twice like a nervous spell—
    and I am enchanted.

    My food cools, untouched.
    Yours vanishes, each bite disappearing
    into the story of your hunger.
    When I offer you more,
    you laugh,
    slide your plate too far,
    topple the glass of water between us.

    “Why didn’t I drink this?” you mutter,
    grabbing napkins like they’re answers.
    I want to ask if you are always this messy
    with things you care for.
    But I only watch
    as you swipe at the spill,
    as though it’s urgent.

    When it’s cleaned,
    I pull my plate between us,
    a quiet offering,
    a bridge.
    You lean forward,
    foreheads grazing—
    a fragile hello.

    “Don’t move,” you whisper,
    your breath pooling in the air between us.
    “Stay like this. Close.
    Like elephants. Did you know they do this?
    Heads together, a greeting.”

    I don’t tell you
    I already knew.
    I don’t tell you
    I want every moment with you
    to feel like this—
    strange, and full,
    and alive.

    aaditya.

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