It was one of those long Mumbai  nights, the kind that always made Tara
yearn. She had done everything she could think of. She had taken a
long, languorous drive across all the sea fronts, appreciating the
soothing quiet of the sea and the city just falling asleep. She'd
tried reading, working and watching TV. Nothing sustained her interest
and the wobbly restlessness she was trying to repress spewed out
involuntarily

It got to her. The long stretch of time, of unlimited opportunities.
She felt boxed, trapped in an invisible cage where it was chance and
luck guiding her not will. She laughed as the minutes inched by and
the unease grew. It wasn't a 3-am-friend- night- the angst wasn't
definable or clear. Instead a generalized feeling of doom and
helplessness assailed her. It was a nightto be comforted by a warm
body, holding her, allaying this nameless, faceless dread. Was it a
man that she sought? It would be easy to believe that and for Tara,
men were never difficult to get, so it would be convenient. But hers
was a seeking of more than the physical, the ordinary. Hers was a
quest for answers, though even the questions remained unclear.

Hers was a soul that required brutal honesty. The most challenging
thing in her life was her. Understanding- her own myriad moods and
mood swings; the incredible contradictions that made her exist never
in the black or white but always in the amorphous gray and most that
generous, wayward heart of hers. It was in these long, starlit nights


that she yearned to find herself.  And she yearned for the light to be
mirrored within her.