MISSING MIST

 

MISSING MIST

Bangalore, November.

In the old stories, the mist arrived early—
long before milkmen, long before birds,
tiptoeing over red-oxide terraces,
folding herself into the arms of plants and trees.

She was the city’s first prayer—
a pale hymn that rose from the grass
and kissed every window awake.

Now she stands at the threshold of Bangalore,
holding her breath like an uninvited guest.
She peers in, confused—
Wasn’t it November? Wasn’t I once welcome here?

But the city hums with sleepless electricity—
Glass towers blinking like restless eyes,
Roads buzzing with machines that never learned to whisper.
The morning now begins with horns, not hope.

Mist once believed that silence was still sacred.
That people would come out wrapped in shawls,
Hands curled around steel tumblers of filter coffee,
Waiting to see what the world looked like
before it remembered its own name.

Now no one wakes early enough
to notice her absence.
Screens flicker blue behind curtains drawn tight,
And every dawn is postponed.

She tries—some nights—to gather herself
from the last puddles,
the last patient blades of grass.
But the land is too busy being something else—
a parking lot, a construction site,
a someday-soon mall.

She misses the emptiness—
For mist is a poet of empty spaces.
She needs a quiet plain, a breathing lake,
A place where earth can sigh into sky,
and not be interrupted.

She wanders past factories
where smoke is louder than silence.
How do I form when everything is already full?
she wonders.
Where do I settle when the ground never sleeps?

In her soft grief, she remembers
the time Bangalore was a half-hill station—
a city that smelled of moss and monsoon,
vine-covered walls and terracotta dreams.
Back then, even the sun rose gently,
as if afraid of waking the sleeping jacarandas.

Now the trees stand like tired elders—
guardians of a memory no one asks about.
Mist kneels at their roots, unnoticed,
and leaves before anyone can feel her.

One day—perhaps—someone will look up
from their calendared existence,
step out before dawn without a reason,
and stand barefoot on cool stone
just to listen.

And the mist, alert as a startled deer,
will return—not as nostalgia,
but as forgiveness—
folding the city once again
in her silver, shimmering,
wordless embrace.

Until then—
she waits at the edge of the morning,
carrying with her the quiet sorrow
of a dream that still remembers us,
long after we stopped remembering her.