Shikhar Pathak's words
Blogger, Teacher, Writer, Sports and Political analyst.
Featured post
Recent write-ups by Shikhar Pathak
Forever When I'll be in a state of zero Youth also may have changed its colour Only the last stop will remain yet to cover I w...
Tuesday, 10 June 2025
Unlived
Thursday, 29 May 2025
We Were Never Lovers, Yet Everything Was Lost
We were never lovers.
There were no midnight confessions, no trembling hands folded into each other’s palms, no declarations to the stars.
And yet, what passed between us could not be confined to friendship, nor described by the dry language of fate.
It was something ancient. Something hovering just beyond articulation—like a word trapped forever on the tip of the universe’s tongue.
To know her was to feel a quiet ache beneath the bones—an ache that resembled longing, yet never dared to bloom into it.
She and I danced on the edge of something immense.
And we never jumped.
But oh, how the world shifted in that pause.
There are some silences so loud they shape the course of things. Ours was such a silence.
A soft severing. A wound dressed in grace.
At a moment—fragile, fleeting—she wished for it.
For loss.
Not in cruelty. Not in arrogance. But in weariness.
Perhaps the weight of “what might be” became heavier than the comfort of “what is.”
Perhaps she feared the mirror I held too steadily for her to shatter.
And so, she stepped away. Not with anger. Not with goodbye.
Just… absence.
A quiet undoing of a bond that never found a name.
I bore the aftermath not like a heartbreak, but like an unspent storm.
I did not grieve the end of a love story—we never had one.
I grieved the death of a possibility.
Of a sacred union that would have asked for no performance, only presence.
She may have lost someone who would have worshipped the soil beneath her self-doubt, who would have read her silences like scripture.
But what I lost—what we lost—was something far more irreplaceable.
The world lost a softness it so desperately needed.
A tenderness that could have unfolded into poems and prayers,
Into a quiet revolution of warmth.
Our separation was not merely a personal sorrow.
It was a cosmic misstep.
A fracture in the universe’s deeper narrative.
For what we might have become—together—was not just love.
It was light.
And now, that light lies unlit—somewhere between what was felt and what was never said.
And that, I believe, is not just my loss.
It is the world’s.
Friday, 16 May 2025
To Love Her Was to Be Undone
To love her was to be undone — slowly, and with full awareness.
Not by betrayal, nor cruelty,
but by the quiet weight of being misunderstood.
She did not see the ache behind my stillness,
nor the trembling restraint in every word I never said.
She thought me unwell, obsessive perhaps —
but what she called madness was simply this:
I had no self left outside her.
She had become breath. Pulse.
My days moved as her shadow did.
And still, I asked for nothing.
Even when I was burning, I folded my pain gently
so it would not disturb her peace.
She never truly looked —
or maybe she looked through the eyes of others,
who never touched my silence,
never knew how I worshipped her in ways
that felt more like prayer than possession.
So she left — and I let her.
I bore the blame, her doubt, her silence.
If hating me made it easier for her to live,
I gave her that too.
But the wound remains.
Not because she went,
but because she never knew
that someone once loved her
so completely,
he forgot what it meant to be a person
without her.
Monday, 7 April 2025
If Ever There Were an English Mushaira...
If ever there were an English mushaira,
it wouldn’t begin with applause—
but with a silence that settles like soft dusk upon a tired city.
No spotlight, no raised hand—just a voice,
spilling like warm tea into porcelain twilight.
There’d be no declarations, no stage bravado—
only the gentle unfolding of metaphors,
like a lover untying the knot in a letter
they’ve read too many times to count.
A poet would rise not to perform,
but to confide.
And we would listen—not to respond,
but to remember something we had forgotten
in the bustle of being.
Perhaps someone would speak of grief
not as a tragedy, but a companion—
and another would turn longing into a landscape
where no country has borders, and every silence is sacred.
There’d be no winners. No final round.
Only verses—draped across hearts like shawls in December.
And somewhere in the back,
someone would whisper, “How strange... I’ve never heard English ache like this before.”