Brilliant moon

by Tishani Doshi

I'll tell you what I thought when I first met Shakti. I thought — this is a woman with balls. She was beautiful, strong, opinionated, serious, talented, funny. A rare thing, in other words. I wanted to befriend her immediately. Not just because she was all of these things, and she was married to Jeet — but because I felt that we were all on the brink of something extremely beautiful, a beginning. I thought we were settling in for a long something. And so to get this news now, to confront this other reality, which contradicts everything from those first impressions — this is hard, unimaginably hard. The last time I saw her was in February in Mumbai. We were sharing an autorickshaw. It was after midnight. It does not feel like a proper goodbye.

Brilliant moon,
Is it true that you too
Must pass in a hurry.

-- Issa