By: Suman Mondal

Dear readers, I would certainly like to draw your attention to the previous three days. Those were timid days marked by shyness and affliction of my stringing mind. As though circumstances had led me to glimpse her every now and then in terror-stricken eyes, but I knew clearly that some detective eyes surrounded me with their underrated responsibility. Let me remind you of the first day.

It was a hopeful day. It was a buoyant day. I was waiting for her before the dawn had spread its kaleidoscopic colours into the sky and into my mind as well. My tears of optimism swelled in my shimmery eyes. I woke up from bed at 7 a.m., but my eyes had never closed all through the night. I throbbed in a bittersweet excitement about what was waiting for me in serendipity. I tried and tried and wore a maroon shirt. I was caught in a speculative imagination that she would arrive in a yellow lehenga decorated with tiny spangles and twinkling stars of my sleepless nights. She would collect the fresh gulmohar petals from the nearby tree to embellish her murky hair.

“Take your bath.” “Take your bath.” “Take your bath.”

My mother shouted. I bathed in lukewarm water like a monsoon deluge, with sonríe a la vida, a luminous hope, a rumbling imagination, and a voluptuous desire. I had to go, with tenderness, into the long, stretched lane, like a penumbra of the musical sensitivity, remnants of my bygone joy. But why? In my twenty-two years of onerous life, my insipid gesture, my scanty love, my insanity of mind, all conjectured my future in an intangible path. Pardon me. I had already been late, and the paragon of my beloved manqué, her flurry features were whirling before my eyes like qui vivra verra; so I must say tout va bien, and c’est la vie to myself.

I arrived at my relative’s house. Saturday.

8 a.m.

It was highly unlikely that she would come early. I lumbered toward her house into the narrow lane to have a capacious glance at the veranda. Nobody was there except the phantoms of her past memories, tinged with melancholy and despair of my speculated imagination, haunting me like a strangulated timid creature.

I waited in engorged afflictions having her luscious image in my squandered heart. At noon, when the unfamiliar faces gathered around the slender house, she arrived with doting beauty, ma chère, her reclusiveness hiding a secret amity.

She said, “Hello!”

My mouth was clenched with the brimming euphoria, and I replied, “Hello! What’s up?”

She smiled for a moment, and disappeared before my eyes. Oh when? I didn’t know. I sat on the bed in residue of hope that she would notice my grimaced face with her reticent gesture. It was the time when we went to have our lunch. My mind had been rummaging her that the yellow lehenga would sit perfectly beside my empty chair like a crooner palliating my downcast mind with sterling voices. That’s life. She came and sat before me. I was waiting to have a conversation. But, her father surrounded her. She asked for more

potatoes. At that specific moment, in a peculiar way, in a mystifying sense, my mind accumulated a weird afterimage.

“Oh what? She eats potatoes.” “She chews them.”

“Oh how? She lives in hope that one day she would tie a knot?” “She has a life too. Just like I have a life, a life manqué.”

“Her life is full of dreams! Impregnated dreams have meaning!”

As I was pondering over these questions, a deep breath of sonder brimmed with a hundred more, innumerable questions, in the hollowness of my mind. I finished my plate, and went to sleep.

Afternoon. It was a clattered afternoon. She wasn’t there. Oh where? I don’t know. The slender room was swirling before my eyes. My profound realisation about her was marked by a confrontation between my desire and the reality. I sat alone to chew the potatoes at dinner. While I was returning home, her voice reverberated at the door. I noticed her yellow lehenga, her beauty of eternity, her vermilion lips, smiling at me. I was a namby-pamby whose reclusiveness bent like a weakling introvert, who didn’t smile her back. It was unintentionally a nauseating incident from my part. I was a lover manqué.

Second day. Nothing happened.

Third day. I reached my relative’s house at 9 a.m., in tender hope, that she would come and talk to me this time. Not today. She arrived at 1 p.m., and smiled at me with her miraged beauty. My ardent eyes looked at her like a concoction of verisimilitude emotions. I thought she would come and talk to me like a quintessential composure. It was five seconds. Five seconds. I didn’t know why her nocturnus eyes looked at me for five seconds. Morning abated into crimson darkness. This time, I was unable to look into her. She was dancing with tenderness. I was drenched with the thoughts of her.

Fourth day. I noticed certain layers of iridescent hope dispersing into the vacuum of my mind. Her father wore a blue shirt with white dotted print. He was roaming around her as though keeping his austere eyes on every pit of my glimpses. I hoped for one minute, perhaps less than a minute, that her father would vanish into the crowd. I would then ask her to come and sit beside me on the white sofa.

We would talk about how I had spent three relentless nights absorbed in her tender thoughts. Perhaps she was intimidated, but I waited for every animated moment to take her with me. If time had permitted me to freeze those around us, we would have certainly flown towards an ethereal lane under the blackboard tree, where we could faint and sleep with serene dreams.

My nightmare could’ve been less scary. She vanished before my eyes again, her presence, her light blue lehenga – nothing remained, but her fragments I cherished with a futile hope that someday, on a certain winter night, we might meet again. Under the half-glowing-moon night, where the lane stretched its hollowness, I would behold her, half-visible, half-approachable, in tenderness.

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Suman Mondal is a poet and student from West Bengal, India. His philosophical poems have been featured in The Statesman, a well-respected Indian newspaper, and most recently in its prestigious festival issues (2024 & 2025). His other works have been published in Lekh Magazine, Faith Hope & Fiction, Spillwords, Brief Wilderness, Literary Yard, Apotheca Journal, Bharat Patriotism Magazine, Exclamation Mark Literary Journal, DoubleSpeak Magazine, and Ultramarine Literary Review. He was shortlisted for the Young Writers’ Journal Weekly Prize (2025).