If I am on the road, happen to be discussing with someone the merits of a book I have just read and liked, I often lose sight of obstructions and bump into people. One of the books that made me forget which side of the street I was on is The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho.
I read The Alchemist long after it was first published in 1988. I heard about it making waves, found it in every bookshop I visited, but somehow looking at the cover page and the blurbs, found nothing that appealed to me. I often wondered what lay within this slim volume that had the world at its feet.

He was accelerating down the left flank, toeing the ball forward exactly the same length each time, as though there’s a hidden magnet controlling his touch with the ball.

Ridiculing
Is the first part
Of their strategy.
Their remarks
Like barbed arrows
Will target
The very core
Of your being.
But you must steel yourself
Against such hurts.

“What am I doing, bursting into paint? I am a writer; I ought to stick to ink. I have found my medium of expression; why at the age of forty, should I want to try another?” D H Lawrence, contrary to what he says here, had taken to painting much earlier in life, when he was at the fringe of adolescence.

The writer and I met at Victoria Memorial during a lit-fest. I waited till he finished with the autograph hunters. He’s a coffee-man. We sneaked into Flurys.
You often speak to ruins and they speak back. Is that true?

Along the once-much-too-familiar
But now skidding-into-oblivion route,
That reeked of scenes
Emblazoned on the gateway of my heart,
I beat on my hooves,
After eons of time, it seemed.

A little patch of red white and pink plant fronting a shanty made me stop in my tracks.
Do you tend to this plant? I asked the shack-dweller, a recluse.

Do you always record your dream as soon as you wake up, even if it’s at dead of night? I ask my writer-friend.
Yes, otherwise they vanish never to return. The unresolved ideas I hit the sack with often get sorted out in my dreams.

Alone on the lonely bridge
Where the river chortles under eternally
I ran into a Scottish lady.
She was recording
The gurgling sound
Of the running water.

A good hour into the interview
She was still not in a mood
To let the audience have
A peep into her heart.
Then took the Rendezvous
The longed-for turn
With this shot from the talk show host:
“What’s the secret
Of graduating from rustic Rekha
To where you stand now
Oozing confidence through every fibre—
A complete transformation?”