When every February comes,
it carries a fragrance of its own.

I remember—
at the end of a beautiful evening,
Chandrika arrived
to dance alone upon the sea.

It was February.
Unhurried at first,
she moved into the dance
slowly.

I, an onlooker; and then,
a little away,
rows of rose plants in full bloom
stood in the sand
before a tea house
with a roof of withered palm leaves,
swaying,
its sides wrapped in rusted tin.
Beyond them,
deserted spectators
and beach vendors.

I watched without witty,
but amused,
as the hurried waves came greedily
to lick and erase
the name I had written
again and again in the sand.
I too was ready
to bid the sea farewell.

Like oars paddling out of tune,
her hands began to row in haste
against the waves striking the shore,
and I joined her dance.
When the lifeguard’s shrill whistles
floated toward us from afar,
She turned and saw me.

When I joined her,
I wore a stolen coat
that smelled of salt and sea breeze.

Our separate dances
slowly entwined our hands,
and the singers of the sky
fell silent.

The deep eyes of the stars
and the fishing boats far out,
watched us
as if saying something meaningful.

We kept dancing.
A lifeguard’s whistle drew near,
murmured an unclear sound,
winked,
and drifted away.

After a while, suddenly,
with the blare of a moored ship
from somewhere close,
I heard the sound
of something upon my chest
splitting apart.

In that moment,
as the shards of the heart
pierced through my salt-scented coat
and blossomed into flowers,
spring rang around me,
and I became a hummingbird
in the revelry of the chilly night wind.

Softly, into her right ear, I whispered,
“The depth of these eyes
can be measured
by the depth of the sea.”

She glanced at me
with her left eye,
parted the waves and me,
pressed her footprints into the sand,
and walked away
without heeding the call to return.

In the absence
of the unwritten beauty
of a poem that had found me unawares,
as I reached the shuttered palm-leaf door
of the tea shop,
the delicate fragrance
of roses—
laughing in pink, red, yellow, and white—
breathed itself into me.

And though every February passes,
the fragrance
of the Roses of February
never fades.