Visit Ahmedabad and your mind gets entangled with perfection.

You might also wander aimlessly and find your soul

AHMEDABAD was a pure ace of hearts, but still you lost the game. She was more beautiful than my hopes could have had. She lifted me to the skies where love strikes at once. I am grateful she is a face I remember, and she wore black like nobody had.

I stayed on Ellis Bridge, which is not the same anymore. It has become fragile. My host was my hero then. He had many conquests and still does, but he lied, and I have dropped him.

Now the love story... The girl was about fifteen and I was seventeen, like the old song from The Beatles. She was sitting in a dark room with her elder sister by her side. That jacket is vivid in my memory, with black and white stripes. Unforgettable! And a handwriting like a child. The days of cards and nights of photos are gone with love letters at the back.

She was a Punjabi brought up in Gujarat. Punjabi looks; healthy and fair, with an aquiline nose, which is a quintessential for the "beauteous", pink lips and brown soft silky hair and brown beautiful eyes. Visit Ahmedabad and your mind get entangled with perfection. You might wander aimlessly and find your soul.

Ahmedabad and me were like something of the old that is renewed. I was there to study at the NID (National Institute of Design). My mother really wanted me to get admission into this school. She was right. If I had, my life would have settled down and moved upstream to marriage and kids in Ahmedabad. I will only say, go and study in Ahmedabad at the NID. Thereafter, getting a job is piece of cake, but I did not get in.

I was more interested in the chicks, in the parties, in realm of love and bit of vanity going from grey eye to grey eye. Now, for that I would shatter open my skull and pour in the madness, and that is what I might have to do, but sorry Ahmedabad, you are not the lucky one. She was true to the magical reality.

We went to a place called Vaishali, where you sit on the floor and eat a multitude of very appetizing, essentially Gujarati food on palm leaves. The place is a shack, with rows of people seated, waiting to be served. And the place is very clean as you can imagine. The place is made of bamboos or wooden poles I am not clear. It was twenty-three years ago. I was still on with her.

Vaishali is a place you would like to visit again and it would feel nostalgic every time we went for a walk there. I have a faint etching in my memory, there is a forest around and there is green grass.

We had walks in the evenings coming from disbelief into the radiance of wondrous love. There was no Barista. It was a simple place where we had cold coffee.

We had days in the afternoon like nights of mercurial pleasure, we had parties and on that terrace we looked at the stars -fun was an easy ride or a walk in the park.

Try the Calico museum. I stepped in for a while years later, when I still had life in me. There is a decrepit step well which is unkempt but worth a visit.

Ahmedabad is in many ways the axis of the world, the latitude of gory pain and also has great taste in clothes, colour, fabric, design, dying fabrics, interiors that plumb the heart, even furniture, dance, rhythm (Dandia) and photography.

Henri Cartier Bresson, the greatest photographer since Ansel Adams, made Ahmedabad his point of departure for his black and whites of women dying clothes extending the longitude of the SLR35 mm camera over endless vacant abandoned spaces and into aesthetics that Ahmedabad is known best for.

Also the greatest single figure in modern world history hailed from here. I went to his ashram on the Sabarmati river. The Sabarmati ashram is tranquil and clean, no guesses why because Mahatma Gandhi was clean. I had heard his voice on a tape.

This was on the second trip. Then the mosque with an exquisite carving of the "tree of life" on lattice work.

I recommend this five star place, which has a restaurant on the rooftop called Patang. It was a chilly evening and I had been through a lot to get there. It was my second trip in a span of three weeks. It was Christmas and what happened was this; blown by attraction and infatuations, I hustled up some dough and got an airline ticket to Ahmedabad from Delhi. It was a morning flight and we stayed up all night partying in Sundar Nagar. By dawn I was groggy and I got onto the jet plane to Srinagar.

Then I was offloaded and loaded with weeping and acting.

I was tragically informed that they are no seats on the next and only flight to Ahmedabad. What do you expect? It was 1987.

I howled and wept and acted and got lucky. I wonder who the person was at the Indian Airlines counter. Who was it that handed me the ticket and a flight to the happiest moment in my life?

I think there was a cancellation. Fly Indian Airlines it is a lucky aeroplane.

They played `carless whispers' that night and that love song from The Beatles, about love in the sky.

It was a refrain in those days.

Now I say, go there with the recommendation of the New York night flight Manhattan skyline pipe dream and the Bombay starling flight dream, with the marine drive queen's necklace as a part of your vision night after night. A reverie with my parents I would like to be again a child. The remains of the ghosts and languid spirits of me you may find them hovering around.