Dibyendu's WallScript

Of clouds, nothing can be said— what becomes storm, what passes. They lift the sand, scattering it across the river’s shoal. The brick chimney stares at the sky, motionless, unblinking. I pressed my strength into the soft clay beneath my feet. In the crushing heat the fire shudders, racing along both banks. Mud-caked feet, lifted, sink into dirty pools, where dreams gather by the river’s edge. By the dam, in the cucumber field, outcasts wander; in the wide green meadow people search, hurling clods of earth. Water bursts, spilling, the embankment breaking— earth and river mingling, drifting toward the estuary, passing through the sieve into the hoarder’s storehouse. And I walked, water at my feet, over the cucumber field, where dense stillness lay, and the sky was painted in silver light.

This body coils within the mind’s black maze, A spiral trembling, naked, without grace; I wandered blind, in shame, in nameless dread, Where twilight’s sorrow crowned the path I tread. I sought the secret, veiled in dusk’s decay, A ridge of fire, a night that would not stay; And knew too well its claims, its helpless art— The cursed painter sketching from the heart. A path without a pole, a crooked will, With talons sharpened, hungering to kill; No love abides—only disbelief and pain, Regret concealed, yet flowing without chain. Those ruthless eyes stare cold, devoid of plea, While tears unwanted wash the dust from me; They drive me onward, toward the oath infernal, Where music swells, unpitied and nocturnal. Here in Birbhum, vice ascends the throne, Knowledge swells, and shadows flesh to bone; For it is my wound, my knife, my red-stained hand, That flares across the heavens, vast, unmanned. My eyes—two torches, fierce, unquenched, aflame, Burn through the cosmos, beari...

This kind of love, this delusion, is neither of night nor of day; not in half-drowned hours of labour, but in a walk together, upon this path, in this silent night. Such an ending feels holy, though yesterday’s deeds were stained. Shall devotion be wasted for want of the opposite sex? Or is it instead a proposal to break innocence? A girl, lifting her hand, answered the call of the storm and surrendered— and still life clung on. The coloured hem of her sari glimmered with borrowed splendour, but it was illusion, betrayal, a fraud against a life, a severing from a household. The poor girl laughed, “All I want is a single plate of rice. Love would have been enough.” Thus she revealed how some lives dwell in the false flame of love, caught in the shimmer of delusion, surviving only on the hope that someone will come, bringing light— whether it be love or bread. And so life drifts forward, ever waiting, gazing toward the horizon line, where the ghost-fire tremb...