For a second I was almost jealous of the clouds. Why was he looking to them for an escape when I was right here beside him?

Why do you have to be so annoying sometimes?" "Cant help it. It's the company I keep.

I still hear the world spinning.

I'll fall.' 'You wont fall.' 'I'll fall. I'll fall and I'll die.' As I said it, I could see it happening. The foot stepping on air, pulling the rest of my body with it, tree limbs breaking as I plummeted down. 'No,' he said, his voice assured, 'You'd never do that to me.

There is no mystery-- that's the beauty of it. We are entirely explicable to each other, and yet we stay. What a miracle that is.

Her definition of romance was absentminded intimacy, the way someone else's hand stray to your plate of food. I replied: no, that's just friendship; romance is always knowing exactly where that someone else's hands are. She smiled and said, there was a time I thought that way, too. But at the heart of the romance is the knowledge that those hands may wander off elsewhere, but somehow through luck or destiny or plain blind groping they'll find a way back to you, and maybe you'll be smart enough then to be grateful for everything that's still possible, in spit of your own weaknesses- and his.

Pride! In English it is a Deadly Sin. But in Urdu it is fakhr and nazish - both names that you can find more than once on our family tree.