Dibyendu's WallScript

The year was 2001. Forget drinking water for all, forget education for all—what Bengal wanted was Michael Jackson for all. The city was intoxicated with pop hysteria. From nine to ninety, the whole population trembled in excitement. The thermometer was rising faster than any election rhetoric. The countdown had begun.   At the earnest request of West Bengal’s grand old Marxist patriarch, Chief Minister Jyoti Basu, and through the courtesy of his London-based capitalist friend Swaraj Paul (Indira Gandhi’s biographer, no less), the world’s No. 1 pop star—singer, dancer, demi-god—Michael Joseph Jackson descended upon the City of Joy in the biting cold of January. And from the moment his jet touched down, he made the top brass of Bengal’s Left Front tap their feet to “Black or White.” Suddenly, Michael’s pop songs were no longer capitalist jingles—they were revolution.   The Revolutionary Moonwalk   By 22 January, 1:30 p.m., Jackson’s chartered plane landed at Dumdum Airpo...

To speak of stories after the story is told—can such a thing itself be literature? Today’s writer, today’s reader, perhaps will shrug and laugh. What reader now even knows that once, once upon a nearer time, stories were not only written but also discussed—with love, with argument, with an intimacy that joined author and audience in a single breath?   Now the reader lives elsewhere: in the Sunday supplement, in the half-hour television serial of the afternoon. For him or her, story is consumption, not conversation. And yet—fifty years ago—the scene was different. To imagine a literary gathering where stories were not read aloud, contested, praised, debated, would have been impossible. “ Storytelling ”— the very phrase still rings like an echo of a vanished festival. Today, one must paint its picture for the unknowing, as though it were some lost ritual of an extinct tribe.   And yet the ritual is not entirely gone. In small corners of the city, in private writerly circles, in ...

Life has become worn out through endless use. Now, at times, he feels the urge to return—to the place from where he once came. Something is missing. What exactly is missing cannot be understood. Yet its absence is felt. Fifty-seven years have passed in this way. How long does a man live anyway?  Sahadeb Mistry is not like other men. Within him burns a fire, a torment, far sharper than in others. He lives in a cramped room in Bansdroni. The room belongs to a school—a village-style secondary school. Sahadeb is its sweeper-caretaker-peon-cook, all rolled into one. His monthly pay is five hundred rupees. The school runs on government grants. Teachers draw salaries. But Sahadeb survives on money from the school fund. Despite many efforts, no government seal has ever been stamped on him.  The single-storied schoolyard is alive with the chatter of students every morning. By evening it becomes Sahadeb’s haunted house. He mixes with no one. He never leaves the school. He has no addicti...

French literature and art have always been dear to us. In the French tongue there is a word—Mystere. It means an astonishing occurrence, an inexplicable event, something beyond reason, something the eyes can hardly bear to see. An elephant flies in the sky. A horse gallops across the sea. And yet—it happened. The neon bulbs of the street all turned red. The Prime Minister’s car flew so high over the lampposts that the people standing below could not hear the sound of its siren.   “What nonsense you speak, brother! Will you drown the world in the lantern of lies?” a rickshaw puller said, with the wisdom of a philosopher.   But it was true—astonishing. Last night, in my own bed, what a leap my wife made! One moment she collapsed flat upon the mattress, the next she bounded up, touched the ceiling, and fell again. In this strange land, what stranger miracles should one not expect?   Our imagination is white, blanched, stripped bare, carrying the stamp of widowhood. Reality, ...