amrita sher-gil and boris taslitzky in paris

I am haunted by a city that doesn’t exist, she said to him in the café, her breath plumed with ash. It was 1930 and the lamp posts were shivering on the banks of the Seine. Winter whiter than jasmine. She signed the city’s name onto a napkin so that he might find her again, lost in its charcoal cabarets, its glass ghost choirs, its fountains of absinthe and musk. She slid the napkin across the table and he folded it over his stopwatch heart. All around them lovers were dancing like figurines from music boxes, spinning slow to a song inside a hidden radio. Imagine how dizzy they must be, she whispered, romancing a city like that. On the radio, the singer sighed as if they were announcing the end of a long long war. I could never be so devoted. She sipped her bittercream coffee, and when she took his hand he heard her city humming in his chest: waking, whispering, distant and not yet ruined.