Rose

By Sanjay Singh

When Sanit chanced upon what he thought was the most attractive woman he had ever seen; he just made a mental note and moved on. Little did he know that their lives were going to intertwine in ways that he could never have contemplated. Their passionate love must face the cruel twists of fate and the uncertainties that life throws without warning. To remain unscathed would have been impossible.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sanjay Singh
• Release date: Oct 24, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310854477

Book preview

ROSE

SANJAY SINGH

The right of Sanjay Singh to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

To that beautiful truth,

who inspired this fiction

Did you write this? she asks, holding the sheet of paper with his blue fountain pen writing on it.

He looks at his words and then its human form and winces at his own shortcomings.

No, I did not, he says.

Okay.

It was not your looks that froze my heart for those few seconds,

I could have resisted them on my own.

It was your laughter that undid me

Like a hundred tiny tinkling bells, mischievous in joyous rhythm

Your voice, the final nail; husk and honey.

melting ecstasy into my ears.

Then suddenly you had turned and smiled at me,

Perhaps out of kindness or pity.

I did not flinch, did I,

I couldn't.

The next few days we played hide and seek,

Nor sleep would come, nor dreams could take hold.

And then you came briefly back to me

More vivid, more beautiful, more mine than ever before.

You could not be in my life as that would be a travesty

So forgive me for holding you a bit longer in my dreams

But be kind and gentle to the tender soul

Who holds your hands, as no one could truly deserve you.

As for me, my memories and dreams will linger for a little longer

Your sunshine smile, my wordless love; that came and went.

*****

"It was not the quality of the poetry that made me agree to this date," Rosie had told him.

I am not offended. This random assortment of emotions was not meant to fall into a linear poem, he replied.

I am still surprised that you wrote this. Why?

Closure. But how beautifully it had opened up.

Sanit had looked at her intently, trying to form words in his mind to explain the unexplainable.

Life had been good, predictable and stable until then. It had been two long years since he came to England to do his Masters at the London school of Economics. He had settled finally into the incongruity of the British weather and a new country that at first had felt strange before it felt better. The absolute loneliness in this frenetic city would grip him at times with the physical ferocity of a malarial shiver in his one bedroom studio in Clapham. Working deliberately for long hours helped but his first breakthrough came when he made his first acquaintance from his apartment block a few weeks later at the local grocery.

His name was Michael. There was mutual empathy as Michael evidentially was suffering from even greater relocation pains, having moved down from Yorkshire to London to work in the civil service. He lived in the flat just below him. They had soon become good friends and in the absence of many other acquaintances in a foreign land, Sanit had clung to him like a life raft.

Though it was always assumed by him and his family that he would go back to India after doing his Masters, he had always kept within himself a flicker of doubt alive and well nursed. He had started applying for jobs in earnest, midway through his Masters degree and after a larger than a fair share of rejections, had managed to get a graduate trainee post in the City with UBS bank. When his family in India