Dibyendu's WallScript

Your tears bleeding inside the heart, your sandalwood drop of ritual, your fog, your shame-stained body, your tenderness, your pleasure of possession, your hips sculpted in desire, your careful silence, your mouth brimming with seed, your kiss collapsing the world, your love—safe as a locked door, your rape, your trembling fear, your excuse for being lost.   Your house, your outside, your self I take, your bed I throw you on, your separation signed in paper, your advertisement spread across the paper’s gray columns, your beauty demanded like a commodity.   Your dream I will inhabit, your naked night I will lie beside, your pain I will carry like an inheritance, your silence sealed at the mouth, your breasts pouring milk, your child of love, your treasure hoarded like myth, your rain-soaked skin, your scent of earth and hunger, your heart unlocked at last.   Your love, your hand in mine, your search for the one who lives inside your mind. ...

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...

Silent, secret, the shadowed light of an unknown maiden drifts into the mist-wrapped yellow dawn, her hands scattering coloured dreams, clasping them close in sudden passion. Behind her lies the weary yesterday, blue scraped raw from a lover’s breast, time torn and hollowed, trembling with frail humanity, while upon the world’s unsheathed sword the body falls in bloodied fragments. When the hour is spent, when all must cease, the beginning and the end are but one.   Yet before that last stillness, she returns, bearing a thousand dying hopes— hopes that yearned only for death. Rootless leaves scatter in the winter’s touch, tattered cold, on the edge of spring, burdened with storm. The frozen floes stir: you came— through abysses of sleep, unknown maiden, adrift upon the stream of unmeasured time, to the heart that remembers nothing.   Your skin, layer upon layer, shines with doubtful glances, a mind steeped in disbelief— and yet, in the luxury of new-born war, you gazed upon it...

In this blistering season, when men hardened by suffering release molten fire from their smooth dark skins, Sukhiram lies upon the wooden cot embracing his middle-aged wife. Defying every law of summer heat, their two bodies remain strangely cold—cold like ice itself. As if not a single fragment of the millions of thoughts in this vast universe could find shelter in their brains. Even the hostile forces that normally prowl in the crevices of life never surge here. Such is their peaceful and simple coexistence—like two sin-weary children asleep beside each other. And truly, those who in shape are children were lying too—around the back of Sukhiram’s beloved wife, Kunti. Just beneath the cot, separated from the earth by a thin quilt. Three in number. Between nine and one and a half years of age. In their thin skeletal bodies the bellies bulged monstrously forward. The youngest still clung to his mother’s breast. Apart from feeding and sleep, he did nothing but cry. But now, all their bo...