Anantakshar

  They had killed her by the time I reached. She always had a hard-boiled kind of blood. She never understood that to speak sharply, one must first learn to listen. But she always chose to talk, even when no one was listening. With me, though, she was different. Unlike the version of her the world knew, she would stare at my lips in the middle of conversations, unknowingly, unblinking. At first, I thought it was romantic. Then, sometimes, it unnerved me. How could someone so unyielding, so jagged with the world, be so tender with me? "What are you looking at?" I had asked her once. "Words." "What words?" "The unspoken ones." She must have had a magnifying glass glued to her eye because no one else could see unspoken words that easily. We met at a soft rock concert. She was on the management team; I was there with a musician friend. It wasn’t her but her friend who approached me first, asking if I was a musician. I was nursing a heartbreak at the ...