Pilani at 5 AM in Winter

5 AM, Pilani, December.

The cold here is a specific cold,

desert cold, the kind that has no water in it,

that dries while it freezes.

The BITS campus is a planet at this hour.

Everything that will happen today has not happened yet.

The Audi is dark. The Meera Bhawan corridors are quiet.

Even Connaught has put its shutters down.

I have been awake since 2.

Not because of work, for once.

Because Pilani at 5 AM is a thing you should see

at least once before you leave,

and I am in my final semester

and I keep forgetting to go to sleep

when I remember this.

The stars here.

No city light for a hundred kilometres.

The sky the way it looked before we decided to illuminate everything.

Somewhere, a train is moving through Rajasthan

in the particular direction of somewhere else.

I watch it from outside Meera Bhawan,

my tea already cold,

my last semester already more than half over,

and I think: I have loved it here.

I have been lonely and brilliant and ridiculous here.

I have failed things and built things and lost sleep over

questions that may not have answers.

The cold is just the cold.

The love is something else.