In the way we stay

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