A few steps short

Throw together a bunch of overworked, underfed, stressed twenty- something year olds on a Friday night in Mumbai, and things are headed the wild way. Psychedelic music and the smell of nicotine in the air. Well, things take a slight turn and you find yourself carefully treading the city streets at 3 a.m. with a couple of close buddies.
Empty streets can be an eye cooler in a city with no place for immigrant ants.
Silent orange lamps glow down at you, while you mindlessly sip tea and munch biscuits.
And then it happens.
He stops.
You look back.
He looks you in the eye. A strange, weird, sublime smile takes over his face.
Three little words.
" We got engaged".
Hugs, laughter and many hours later, both of you go back home. Him to his new love, his woman.
You to your apartment, airconditioner cranked up too high and thoughts screaming too loud.
It takes so little to be humpty, dumpty, smiley, wiley happy.
As you make coffee, you also muse and watch these couple. Can't help but wonder how the story will go ahead.
What brings people together? Two entirely different people, as different as chalk and cheese. Differnt backgrounds, different cultures, different likes, different this, different that. Different, different, different.
During darker moods, it also makes you think about people who haven't had it so lucky. Or easy.
Of love that was, of love that isn't. Of dreams that were, of dreams that aren't. Of times when one of the two falls out of love, leaving the other hanging there.
Like a lone orange leaf that clings to the brown of a trunk, refusing to let go, as the autumn sun sets in a dark magenta goodbye.
Its like what Shoba De says in her book spouse.
" People feel what they feel- you can't talk them out of an emotion even if it sounds absurd to you" .
You continue with your journey through lonely streets, lamps still glowing down softly at you. One buddy less, one couple happier.
One observer more, spending minutes, hours, days, nights looking in. From outside.