Some evenings, I tell you the stories
I gather from the streets of Paris
how the city itself leans in to listen,
each cobblestone carrying
the hush of someone’s tenderness.
At Kléber, in the crush of evening,
a couple tangled in farewell
clung to the threshold of the metro gates.
The boy walked backward,
his eyes fixed on her face
as if it were the only compass he had,
his retreat echoing
all the departures,
all the nights that ache toward return.
On Boulevard Saint-Germain,
an old pair drifted beneath the rain,
their umbrella tilted like a wing.
The awnings wept, pavements puddled,
yet their shoulders brushed
with the calm certainty of promise fulfilled.
They moved as if tomorrow
were already folded into today.
Love leaves its traces on everyone.
But in these streets
I see how we choose, daily, perhaps
to let scars lie silent,
or to build again
from the ash’s fragile flicker.
You told me once of your old boss.
I pictured him on Pont Neuf at dusk,
the Seine glittering like scattered coins beneath him,
leaving tokens of devotion on his phone
for the wife who wrestled each dawn
with the stubbornness of her own body.
Perhaps a ritual, perhaps vanity.
But what steadied him
was gratitude for her breath,
for her bare feet across kitchen tiles,
for her insistence on staying.
As steady as the baker in Belleville
brushing flour into the street at dawn,
as patient as the waiter in Montparnasse
stacking chairs long past midnight.
And I remembered
the love stories we inherit
centuries carved in epic stone,
gilded halls and painted ceilings,
where love meant kingdoms fallen,
wars kindled, lives consumed
at the altar of passion.
Where devotion burned itself to ruin,
and nothing remained but ash.
But here, in Paris, In Mumbai
in the stories we gather for each other,
love is not empire but reminder.
It is the bell of Kanchipuram
it’s soft insistence repeating:
I am glad you are here.
You told me too of another,
a friend with a camera
who framed his wife’s face
through the shadow of cancer.
I saw him in Montmartre,
where the streets slope skyward
and painters lift their canvases to the light.
Each photograph was a vow remade,
his tenderness as unshaken
as the musicians beneath the Métro,
filling the tunnels with song
whether anyone listened or not.
And again, love was not vow,
but practice. a choosing,
again and again:
at a café table on Rue de l’Odéon,
in the line at the boulangerie,
at Pont Alexandre III at twilight.
this person. this hour, again
Still, the old myths murmur.
They crouch in the gargoyles of Notre-Dame,
in the sandstone vignettes of Beluru
whispering that love must be grand
a spectacle, a battlefield.
That to endure,
it must leave ruins.
But perhaps truer courage
is in the smaller act:
to stay, to notice, to speak even when
words don’t come freely
And then you said the words
that broke me open:
I know the mistakes I made.
The shutting down.
The clamming shut.
And in the silence that followed
I thought again of Paris and Chennai
the boy backing into the crowd at Kleber,
the old couple dissolving in Saint-Germain rain,
Jasmines, temples, words, plentiful words
Just shadows, just echoes. Perhaps of a room
with a sacred key to unlock
an entire city
a place of ruins and restorations,
boulevards scarred and rebuilt,
light returning each morning
to find the shutters
opening once again, perhaps
