A Dream - That Is What Love Is!

Love has a way of weaving its magic, doesn’t it? One moment, you’re living life as usual; the next, you’re walking hand in hand with someone who feels like poetry personified. That’s how I found myself at a quaint hill station, cradled between icy hill caps and endless meadows, where the sky flirted with the horizon and the air carried whispers of unspoken love.

She was with me.

We began our mornings on a hilltop, watching the sun rise slowly, as if it too was reluctant to leave the embrace of the horizon. The golden light caressed her face, highlighting the curve of her smile—a smile that held something more beautiful than the stars. Her laughter melted the frost under our feet, turning every breath into a shared secret. “Dekho na,” she whispered, pointing to the sunlight dancing on the icy peaks, “it’s like the mountains are wearing jewels.”

I nodded, unable to tear my gaze away from her. How could I, when she was the poetry the sunrise tried to write?

Afternoons were a symphony of footsteps through pine forests. The sunlight filtered through the trees, painting the ground in dapples of gold and green. She ran ahead, her hair trailing like a comet, and turned back with eyes that held the promise of a thousand untold stories. We found a meadow where the grass swayed like it was humming an old love song. Lying there, with the sky stretching endlessly above us, she traced constellations with her fingers, and I traced her silhouette with my eyes.

Evenings were our favorite—the sunsets. The sky would burst into hues of orange, pink, and crimson, as if it too was in love and couldn’t contain its joy. “Every sunset is a love letter,” she said, resting her head on my shoulder. “The sun writes it, and the night carries it away.”

I smiled at her words, feeling a warmth in my chest that even the chill of the approaching night couldn’t touch.

But as the stars began to light up the velvet sky, the enchantment started to unravel. I reached out to hold her hand, only to grasp the emptiness of the cold mountain air. Her hair—that I had watched flutter in the wind—were nowhere to be found.

And then it hit me. She wasn’t there. She had never been there.

The girl who had turned the icy peaks into a canvas of jewels, who had made the pine forests sing, who had given meaning to the sunsets, was nothing but a fragment of my imagination. She was the ghost of a past love, a love so deep that its shadow still walked beside me.

Her smile, the one I had carried in my heart for years, was the real poetry—a memory that could outshine the stars.

As I stood alone on that hilltop under a canopy of stars, I realized that love is not always about the person standing next to you. Sometimes, it’s about the pieces of them you carry within you—in your dreams, in your thoughts, in the way you see the world. Love, I learned, is the sunrise and the sunset within you.

The hills whispered their goodbyes as I began my descent, but I wasn’t sad. After all, her presence—real or imagined—had turned an ordinary hill station into a dream.

What is Love?

What is love? A question whispered under moonlit skies, penned into diaries, and sung in melodies that outlast time. Love is the hero of every story, the muse of every poem, and the heartbeat of existence itself. But how does one describe something so vast, so ethereal? Let me try.

Love is not just a feeling; it’s an entity. It walks, it talks, it dances. It’s the rain that kisses parched earth, the sun that coaxes a shy flower to bloom. Love is Cinderella’s glass slipper, fitting only the one destined to hold it. It’s Rahul calling out “Pyar dosti hai”, and it’s Jack whispering to Rose “You jump, I jump”. Love, my friend, is a language that transcends worlds.

Sometimes, love is a quiet companion, like the warmth of a cup of freshly brewed coffee on a cold winter morning. Other times, it’s a wind, like Simran running through mustard fields to Raj’s arms. It’s both the butterflies in your stomach and the calm after the storm. Love is paradoxical that way—a chaos that soothes, a madness that heals.

Personified, love is a mischievous artist. It paints the sky with sunsets, scatters petals in spring, and sketches constellations for dreamers to trace. Love is also a poet who lingers in the silence between words, who turns ordinary glances into sonnets and mundane moments into memories.

But let’s not mistake love for perfection. It is flawed and human too. Love can be the longing in a farewell at a railway station, a tear rolling down the cheek in the middle of an argument, or the unspoken sorry buried in a hug. Love is Geet’s relentless optimism but also Aditya’s silent battles. It’s as real as it is magical.

Love wears many disguises. It’s the parent sacrificing their dreams for a child’s future. It’s the friend who saves the last piece of pizza for you, the stranger who lends a helping hand, the partner who remembers how you like your coffee. Love is omnipresent, woven into the fabric of life. You just need the eyes to see it.

And yes, love stumbles. It breaks, it bleeds, and it aches. But it also mends, grows, and learns. Love is an eternal student, forever evolving, forever hopeful. Like the phoenix, it rises from the ashes, stronger and wiser.

In the end, love is not about grand gestures or poetic declarations. It’s about showing up, holding on, and believing in the magic of two imperfect souls choosing each other every single day. It’s about finding beauty in flaws and solace in chaos. It’s a journey, not a destination.

So, what is love? It’s the courage to dream and the strength to live those dreams. It’s the smile you wear when you’re not alone, the song that plays in your heart, the hope that lingers in the darkest hours. 

Love is everything, and love is you.

The Cuddly Vampire Diaries

Part A : Chapter 01

Love at First Bite

Out of all the blues they got in touch at an odd hour.

They connected.

A vampire. A human.

He was bitten! He was smitten!

Coming Soon!

An Amateur Chef

An Amateur Chef!

Always Have, Always Will.

I don’t know if it’s the way she looks at me or the way she caresses my head that makes me fall in love with her every time. Yes, I love her. I love her a lot and I fall in love with her every morning as the sun rises and I imagine to love her, even more the next day before going off to sleep. Every love story has a different kind of plot, a different kind of setting, a different set of characters, a different kind of conflict to solve and a different kind of theme but what all the love stories have in common is the passion. Passion is apparently the most vital element of a love story. It’s not adequate for a person to merely seek and desire love; it must also seem necessary in some or the other way. Now it’s not needed to show to the world how passionate you are but you need to be honestly passionate towards the one you love. If you are passionate it will eventually be exhibited to the one you love in countless different ways. Moreover, you can’t grow passion; it develops organically.

I don’t know if I am passionate about her or not but when I think of her, I desire to have her with me for the rest of my life. I want her to be there to wish me in the mornings when I leave my bed and overwhelm me with the smile she always wears on her lips. I want to be able to give her tiny surprises that make her feel contented every day. I want her to feel that I genuinely respect her. I would never want her to feel left out for any reason and thus, I will keep her tangled in almost every moment of my life. I anticipate to make her smile every other day and to express my love towards her in the most amazing ways imaginable. 

For now, I might not tend to express my love towards her quite sincerely but deep within my heart I always have feelings for her which are unmatched. I might as well sometimes talk impolitely to her and ask her not to bug me but every night before I go to sleep, I feel a certain kind of guilt for having talked to her like that. And that is the perfect moment to postpone my sleep-time a little further and make an apology to her. She might pass a few taunts on me but she will eventually have her lips broadened into a smile in the end and might even hug me.

Expression of love can’t be always all mushed up and sugary; it can sometimes involve care and concerns leading to a certain amount of annoyance but in the big picture it’s all a part of loving someone. There are times when she admonishes me for certain things that I do and I might react to it abruptly in that very moment but it’s only after some eternities of realisation, I find out that she was right in the first place. More or less I realise that she said all those things to me only out of the care and love she contains for me in her heart. Yes, there are points when I come to realise that she would even cross the boundaries of mortality to see me happy. But then what I know about myself being happy is to have her with me, all the time. As a matter of fact she has two places of existence; one contributes to her physical existence and the other contributes to her non-physical existence – deep inside my heart.

Every person on this earth has the privilege to have this kind of love in their lives. All you have to do is to have the right insight of the income of feelings from her and I bet you will be the happiest person. And yes she’ll love you no matter what. After all, she is the lady who underwent tremendous amount of pain just to bring you to this world.

Yes, I love you mother. Always have, always will. 

Coming Soon...

"Itni shiddat se maine tumhe paane ki koshish ki hai, ki har  zarre ne mujhe tumse milane ki saazish ki hai.

Teri nazro ko gila na ho kabhi mujhse, itna toot kar maine tujhse mohabbat ki hai.

Tere ehsaas ki kabhi kami na ho mujhme, tere dil ne mere dil se kuch aisi chahat ki hai.

Har pal tera naam lu is guftagu mein, meri rooh ne meri jubaan ko itni to ijazat di hai.
Koi fariyaad meri pahunch jaye arsh tak saqi, kuch pal k liye maine teri ibaadat ki hai..."

By Anonymous

Presenting

A saga of a beautiful story.

A man.

A lady.

An angel.

Their secret.
The love they share.
And the beauty of everything.

Coming Soon

More Than Anyone Can Ever Imagine

A loud applaud greeted her in the picture. Every head in attendance at the venue turned towards her, and it didn’t look like any one of them would turn back any sooner. Yes, she was(is) that beautiful. Mesmerized by her own splendor, she was smiling exquisitely, and as it always had been, I fell in love with her. Many years had passed by, but to me, she was still the most beautiful woman on this planet. She was an angel. She was my Angel. For a moment, I ignored the people around us, and I merely looked at her. She was indeed the most beautiful woman in this entire world. Her eyes veiled amid the puffy eyelids of hers had something enticing in them that could make me keep looking into her eyes forever. When she smiled, her eyes concealed themselves from the world outside, possibly hiding the shimmer they contained. I, all the time, used to tell her that her eyes were the best feature on her face, and she used to wink at me in response. Beauty was how she always felt inside, which resonated in her eyes. That night her eyes spoke a billion words. Her eyes were beautiful. “Damn, her eyes!” I said to myself.

“Brother, I am happy for you! Finally, you are marrying the girl you have been in love with for years.” my best friend said, patting subtly on my back. Perhaps I was the happiest man alive at that moment. She was walking down the aisle, and the pace of my heartbeat was harmonized with her slow steps. She walked so gracefully that even Eos (goddess of the dawn) would have been envious of her. She wore an enviable dress, and her outfit complimented her. She looked beautiful. Her hair lay open and covered one side of her shoulders, letting her face a good view from the other side. My eyes went further down to her unquestionably flawless waist. I remember when she was concerned about her waist and complained to me that it was oversized, and I would always tell her that it was just impeccable. I told her the truth. I was always tempted to hold her by her waist while we kissed, and if I would forget doing that, she was the one to drag my hands up to her waist. I loved holding her waist, and she loved me back for that. And today, a part of her smile was for what she used to desire.

The entire banquet was romanced along with the tunes of the songs being played. It was possibly one of the finest collections of romantic songs. Every piece was somehow linked to our story and fanned the flames of our moments. Beautiful moments.

My father was standing next to me. He was looking at me with a smile on his face. I could sense that he had been observing me looking at her for quite a while now. I smiled back at him. “Your eyes look happy tonight.” He said to me. He raised his hands and rested them on my shoulder. In soft words, he said something beautiful, “Your bride looks beautiful today, and I can see that in your eyes. I have never talked to you about the feeling of love in particular, and today I think I don’t even need to. The way you look at her tells me a lot about what you apprehend of love. What you have for her contained in your eyes is a love of a different kind that can only be imagined in fairy tales. I just want to tell you that I am happy for you, son.” I could see the reflection of happiness in his wet eyes. My lips further widened into a more giant smile.

She had the face of her mother and the eyes of her father. In both of them, I could always see a part of her. Her mother clutched her hands tight, and as she climbed up on the rostrum, her hair swayed from one direction to another, which obliged her to adjust them to avoid landing them on her face. And to be honest, a girl maneuvering her hair at any hour of the day can make you feel weak in the knees. Especially if the girl is the one you are already in love with. There she was, standing right in front of me in the bridal dress, looking more beautiful than ever. She was about three feet away from me, and I could still scent the fragrance of her, which was as intoxicating as it always had been. With every breath I took, I could feel her fragrance sweep into me and remind me of the moments she had held herself close to me. I could see glimpses of all of those splendiferous moments in my head when we used to hold each other as if the next moment would be the moment of our separation. It was no less than magic. Her hair rested beautifully on her shoulders and covered her bosom further down. The black of her hair went well with the red of her blouse. Her face glowed, and a light touch of makeup complimented her. She never used to put up even the basic makeup, yet she always had me speechless just because she was herself. She was a simple girl on the outside, but she was a blend of surprises on the inside.

She looked at me with a smile, and my heart skipped a beat. I looked back at her right into the eye. They were beautiful. She looked at me for a few couples of seconds and then lowered her eyelids. For those few seconds, I felt as if we were not amidst everyone else but somewhere alone in a land of magic and love. She did this to me every time she looked at me. Flashes from the cameras were blinding me. I looked around. Everyone was busy. Her father was busy looking at her, probably figuring out when her little girl turned into a beautiful woman eligible to marry a man she loved. I could see a fatherly love and care in his eyes for her baby girl. Her mother was busy adjusting her daughter’s hair and dress at a gap of certain intervals. She held her daughter’s hand in hers. She probably wanted her daughter to be the most beautiful bride ever, and if she was to ask me, I would have told her that her daughter was indeed the most beautiful bride ever. I wish I could. Her younger sister was busy cracking mildly funny jokes and calling her weird names. She pinched her elder sister and told her to look at me. I knew she had noticed me constantly gaping at my bride.

Apart from her younger sister, one more person noticed me look at my future wife. She was standing a foot away from me yet so close to my heart. It was my younger sister. She had known her and me as us for a long time. She always admired me as a partner to a girl, and today she was busy smiling to see me marrying the lady I have been in love with for almost a decade. She winked at me. I smiled. My mother was busy adjusting her hand into the gap near my elbow joint. She was proud, and I could feel that by her touch. I looked at the lady who had given me birth and loved me the most. She was smiling. My father was busy wiping off the tears that had rolled down his cheeks. I don’t know what was going on inside his head, but he must have been thrilled seeing all of it happen. I felt an emotional choke in my throat, and everything I looked at; blurred. My eyes teared up.

A part of me was delighted to see everything happening around me. Our parents, relatives, and friends were all gathered to celebrate the day of our marriage. Everyone had a smile on their face. The golden light from the chandelier hung above us, lit her face as a dewdrop would shine in the light of dawn. I could hear ladies from the gathering around us talking about how beautiful my angel looked and how lucky I was to have her in my life. Everything happening around me, with or without any reason, was beautiful. The ceremony of Jaimala was about to start, so all our close relatives whose presence was vital to us and who were not anywhere near were being hunted. The worst thing about marriages is the wait the couple has to endure, and it eventually is the best thing as well. The situations you face on your wedding day are for the first and the last time ever. The realization of being a bachelor for the last time, and after that being attached to a person for the rest of your life. The feeling of looking at your lover who would eventually be tying a knot with you. The feeling of having your friends and relatives look at you and her as a couple. The feeling of walking around the fire seven times with the one you love. It all felt good.

I felt a hand slide into my hand very smoothly and then grip my hand firmly. I turned my head to see who it was. It was my future sister-in-law, the younger sister of the lady I would marry in a couple of hours. She was about thirteen years younger and was really sweet. A wide smile on her face was a delight to look at. “She is beautiful. Isn’t she?” she asked me in a voice as soft as the meadows during the morning. I blushed. “Yes, she is!” I replied. “But not more than you, dear.” I appended a sentence to my reply.

“Oh, come on, jiju! She looks absolutely spectacular, and anyone in this world, including me, can’t steal her thunder tonight. And moreover, I know that she is the most beautiful woman in this world for you. I have been observing you looking at her since she has arrived, and all I can see in your eyes is an immeasurable amount of love for didi. I am glad that she has found her soulmate in you.” She said. I looked at her and felt infinitely delighted to hear what she had just said. She rescued her hands from mine and fled away the next moment to stand next to her sister before I could gather my senses and talk back to her. She winked at me, and I could only pass a smile.

Our parents handed over the garlands made out of flowers for the Jaimala ceremony. I felt a positive wave travel down my spine. I looked at her. She was looking at me and smiling. I could see in her eyes that she was euphoric about the night. There was a sparkle in her eyes whenever she was happy. I always wondered how I could possibly fall in love with the same girl over and over again, and the only answer I could fathom was - her. I fell in love with her repeatedly because it was her. I was frozen with the moment, holding the garland in my hands, not realizing what was happening around me, and was looking at her smile - and in her smile, I could see something more beautiful than the stars. “Hey! Where are you lost…?” I heard a voice from behind me.

“Hey! Where are you lost…?” I heard a voice from behind me. “The couple is done with the Jaimala ceremony!” I listened to the same voice. I was looking at a deep red-colored liquid. I was staring at the wine glass I held in my right hand. It was full. Where did the garland go? Where did she go? Before any more questions popped up in my head, I looked towards the ceremonial stage. There she was in the same dress. And beside her was sitting a guy while I was far away from her standing amidst the crowd. Both of them had a garland hanging down their necks. He was her man. She was smiling, and she looked happy. And come on, who wouldn’t be pleased on the day of their marriage. A frown appeared on my face. “Are you okay?” her best friend asked me, who eventually was a friend of mine as well. I looked at her as she adjusted her spectacles and raised her eyebrows, probably demanding a response from me. I did not say a single word. “And by the way, I am glad you could attend the wedding. I know it’s tough for you, but I am happy you could make it.” She said, flashing a big smile.

“Yes, I am okay!” I replied. She looked at me without uttering a word, and I turned around. Tears flooded my eyes, and I could feel a certain kind of excruciating pain in my chest. I felt wretched. She held me by my shoulders, and before I could wipe off my tears, she turned me around. She looked at me and then looked all the way across the guests towards the girl I loved, who was sitting by the side of the man she was marrying. After a few eternities, she looked back at me and asked, “You still love her?”.

And the only reply I could give her was, “…more than anyone can ever imagine!”