Dibyendu's WallScript

You have come anew, ending the old dream with a fresher one. The breasts—when did they bloom? The middle-aged hairs upon the chest declare themselves in pride. Do you know, in the joy of hips, what peace in the heart, what ease in the flesh may dwell?   Upon your lips— the scars of bites. I know the pain, ancient and returning, that once came upon this road with monsoon rains. Mine was that historic face, where once you kissed, in absolute delight.   Do you remember still? Why then does your chin tremble? The body, lush with signals, was never burdened by you with the dignity of embrace. You told me to forget.   So I never sought, in the body of a middle-aged woman, the vanished girl within. The bamboo-stick figure, like a stalk of tuberose, remains eternal, hidden deep. Do not ask me to search for her through this crowd of flesh and fat.   Now sex may be— yes, I could see you with a lustful gaze, could you endure it, as all those others endured, the hands that press...

It was not long ago—barely nine years—that Margaret Thatcher, then Prime Minister of Britain, stood in the House of Commons and dismissed the African National Congress as nothing more than a terrorist outfit. She declared with her unflinching certainty that those who dreamt of an ANC-led South Africa would wake only to the ashes of illusion.   History, however, is a mischievous playwright. Nine years later, in the same Westminster Hall, Nelson Mandela, the first black President of South Africa, rose to appeal for British investment to rebuild his nation. And among the attentive listeners was Thatcher herself. Whose defeat was it—the iron lady’s disbelief, or the revolutionary’s dream reduced to a plea? It is difficult to say.   For Mandela, who had wrested freedom from the jaws of apartheid, the reality of governance was sobering. Revolution had been one thing; the daily business of feeding a nation was another. He soon discovered that independence without capital was but anot...