He kept thinking. He could not understand. He crossed the road and went over to a paan shop. He got himself a paan and after eating it, he went back to the same sea wall where he had sat with Hina a while back. The light from a distant boat cast a line on the waves of the sea. He looked at that line for a while. He kept wondering what he wished to think about. He did not want to think anything at all. There was no particular issue, no particular thought or specific thing that was in his mind. He was just happy. In that state of bliss everything else seized to matter. It was him and his heartbeats. He felt the vibrations in his heart. He could feel the rush of blood in his veins and the catalyst which was responsible for it.

He kept his right hand on his chest and thought, ‘If I exist in my heartbeats, then today I write down Hina’s name on them. Hina is my heart. She has created a storm in my heart.’ He introspected for a while and said, ‘Love is no less than a storm.’

He kept looking at the relatively noiseless waves of the sea. He had a childhood habit of conversing with the waves. The sea had disconnected from his life since the time he had come to Mumbai. He did not get enough leisure time to sit on the shores of the sea and converse with the waves. Today, his heart was brimming with the zeal of love. Amid the chaos of the city, the hustle and bustle, the garbage piles and dirt, Mumbai had finally placed on his palm a moment of eternal happiness. A moment that encapsulated the pleasures of a thousand years. In the last month of the tenth grade, nature had given him a chance to explore the intoxication of sexual pleasures and desires, but he had not experienced the self-forgetfulness and the passion of love.

Then it was sexual pleasure which had taken over his consciousness and his subconscious. Many a time, undoubtedly, sexual pleasure seemed a rather powerful emotion than that of love and it was so too. Love was a gentler emotion than sex, but in this gentleness there was the possibility of ferociousness. The simple emotion of love carried such sparks that it could turn the body, heart, mind and soul to ashes at one strike, especially if the sparks had the same intensity in both the hearts. These sparks could be seen in the eyes of Hina and Asrar at the same time and both had felt the intensity of the flames that day.