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‘It’s so normal’, you said under the bend of that bridge and I thought, ‘No, it’s not’. The murals around us saw that but they don’t make a good witness, I know. When we stayed together on the island that doled out its beaches to oil magnates and built the urban canyons only, you told me you’d visit. There, I didn’t tell you but I had been jealous of your passport. That baked wanderlust. That frozen nostalgia. That little soiled, exhausted passbook desecrated by finger-spits and infested with immigration stamps and the machine gaze you never bothered. I was jealous, yeah! I realized that whatever I said out of my racial angst had already been told by Aimé Césaire. You were always patient. And years later, I recall being pissed off at my ordinariness. Not because of my passport but on why Aimé Césaire said all that stuff before me. So with one final stamp you landed here. And checked into my paranoia in the days when white skin made a good bounty in this country. You wore local clothes to look like people from the North and learnt cuss words from the Center. We sent insults to the Center together. You met mullahs, bureaucrats, bootleggers, artists, novelists and homosexuals. All in a state of denial. Or with a strange logic of being. Nothing made sense to you. We roamed around the streets and sat in cafes all day. You asked me, ‘It looks like India but where are the women?' and I had no answer. And in the evening when the national faith dissolved into the darkness, we drank and drove. We don’t have clubs, the cars do the job for us. Our-stupor-on-the-wheels. You were scared of the law in the beginning but later realized you didn’t really belong there if you have that fear. The hungover circle of life went from town to town. Cities whispering stories after stories from the past. Wars, mutinies, loot and plunder. Coups, conflicts, corruption, fratricides and betrayals. And wars. Scattered everywhere. Shrines. Epics. Troubadours. ‘You guys adore poets so much, I have noticed, right?’ you asked and I thought ‘That’s why everything around you feels like a free verse; chaotic and frustrating’. Sometimes, you were at peace with yourself as if your questions about this place got their answers. Remember the day you got stoned with the fakirs at a shrine and made a wish for this Mayan girl? Of course you don’t. Neither did the Saint buried there. Didn’t even matter for that ignorant young man who detonated his vest and killed himself with eighty others at the same place. I really wanted to write to you about what happened on the third day after the blast. The stoned fakirs came back. The drums and shehnai returned. The songs and dhamal resumed. I am not sure about the wish you made there. Do you even care about that anymore? Like we don’t care when they say ‘You are a resilient nation. You have fought back and saved this beautiful land’. We know there is a long way to go. Way to go, we know. Back then when you said, ‘it’s normal’, we were in the midst of a nightmare. Now that it’s over. Now that the foreigners don’t have to wear local to look like the northerners. Now that the tourist advisories are not that hard on us. Now that it feels like a break here, we get horrific news from across the border - lynchings, arson, torture, conversions and public trials on (dis)loyalty. All with impunity. Back then when you said, ‘It looks like India’, I doubted. Ten years later when it feels like calm here, you can come back again and see we are the same. Green or Saffron.