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

  • The Geography of Almost

    There are nights I wake up in the middle of a sentence I never started. My tongue remembers a name my mouth refuses to say. I sit at the edge of my bed, elbows to knees, and trace shadows on the floor like they’re maps to a place I never had the courage to go. Sometimes I think love is just muscle memory, your body turning back even when your mind has made peace. Or maybe that’s grief, I’m not sure. The two have started blending like colours in a storm, and I can’t tell whether I’m drowning in longing or being reborn by it.

    There are people you never stop writing letters to, even when they’re not reading. People who haunt your poems not as ghosts, but as punctuation, showing up as commas when you try to move on, ellipses when you almost do, and a question mark every time you think you’ve stopped feeling. I laugh too loud now, like I’m trying to echo into a version of myself that once made someone feel safe. But it’s strange, isn’t it? How safety can feel like a shiver in your spine and danger can feel like coming home. I don’t trust what feels like comfort anymore.

    I think I’ve been chasing the version of love I imagined before I ever knew what it was. Not the kind they sing about or the kind they leave you with in movies, but the kind that sits quietly in your throat when you’re pretending to be fine. The kind that slips out when you overexplain your silence or apologize for being too much. I’ve loved in metaphors and been left in parentheses. I’ve waited in doorways that were never mine to walk through. I’ve been both the echo and the mouth that started it all.

    Someone once told me I romanticize everything about her. But tell me, what else do you do when reality doesn’t fit your heart? I’ve built cities out of glances and entire galaxies out of half-meant sentences, all for her. I’ve survived more on imagined tomorrows than remembered yesterdays.

    I don’t know if I want to be loved or just understood. I don’t know if I’m healing or rehearsing. There’s a difference between moving on and pretending you have. I keep confusing the two.

    So tell me, is this what you call the space in between being a hopeless romantic and a hopeful lover?

    –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

  • Have I Gone Gray?

    I Often wonder what it would be like if the world had no colors?

    Without blue to mark the sky, how would I even know where the ground ends or begins? The sky wouldn’t care; it never does. It’s me—I need the blue, the reassurance. But without color, would I even need reassurance? It would all be the same. A shapeless, blank thing, indifferent to whether I saw it or not.

    No. If there were no colors, would I still feel anything? Would love still have a place in this strange, hollow space? Colors bleed into everything—maybe feelings are just the shades I wear inside. A soft red for love, a cold blue for sadness. If they disappeared, what would that leave me with? Could I still feel love without the red? Would I even know if she was next to me?

    Maybe I wouldn’t need to feel her anymore. Maybe warmth would exist without the red to dress it. Maybe it’s all just a glow, like two moons caught in orbit. But even moons need light. Without the sun, they’re nothing. Am I nothing? Am I just a reflection, existing only because of something else? Something that isn’t there?

    But… maybe that’s not emptiness. Maybe it’s the beginning of something else, something beyond the colors that have fooled me into believing they mattered. Perhaps the love remains, even when I can’t see it.

    What if color is love? What if red isn’t just a hue, but the pulse in my chest? If I lose that red, what happens to love? Would I even be able to touch her in a colorless world? Can touch exist without the proof of color? Without the feel of warmth against skin?

    Maybe I wouldn’t need hands anymore. Maybe I wouldn’t need to touch. I could just exist, like a thought floating in endless gray, sensing without seeing. Knowing without proof. A love that doesn’t ask for evidence. But… can love survive without proof? Wouldn’t it all fade, blur into the same endless shade, like a flat line on a blank canvas?

    Hasn’t it already?

    Maybe life itself is just nothing layered on nothing, a story told through colors I never even chose. If I stripped it all away, what would remain? Would I recognize what’s beneath? Or maybe I’ve already seen it—and I’ve forgotten. Maybe that’s why I keep coming back to this same thought, the same question. What if there are no colors? What if there never were?

    I think I’ve already had this conversation with myself. Over and over. Like an echo trapped inside my mind, circling back to the same point.

    A thousand times, and yet, here I am. Still searching for color in a world that might have never had any. Or maybe… the world never lost its color. Maybe it’s just me. Maybe I’m the one who’s gone gray. And I don’t even realize it.

    (Aaditya, 2:00 AM, 26/09/24)

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