Dibyendu's WallScript

"To bear all naked truths, and to envisage circumstance, all calm— That is the top of sovereignty." — John Keats, Hyperion   In the year of our Lord, sixteen hundred and forty-three, on the fourteenth day of June, the Lords of Parliament in England did place the realm of printing under Crown regulation. In righteous defiance of such tyrannical injunction, the poet and polemicist John Milton composed his immortal tract Areopagitica , a thunderous defence of liberty in expression. So potent were its words, they reverberated across the continent of Europe.   From the days of Socrates in the third century before Christ, to Galileo in the Middle Ages, to Sister Joan, to Émile Zola, to Voltaire, and onward into the modern century with Upton Sinclair, Solzhenitsyn, and Márquez—voices of truth have dared speak, and dared suffer. Some were exiled, others scourged, but all stood upright, champions of that unfashionable virtue called truth.   And now, standing upon the threshold o...

The moment Jayanta awoke, he felt there was no longer any need to go to the office. Last night had been restless. Two reasons for that: first, the oppressive summer heat at the very mouth of the season; second, a nightmare. The heat was a daily affair in this city, not something that troubled him much anymore. But the dream—that haunted him.   He could not recall whether he had dreamt it while asleep or half-awake. Perhaps, in the midst of it, he had opened his eyes once. He remembered clutching the bolster in both arms, even kissing it. That was his nightly habit.   Now, rising from bed, he began to brood over those broken fragments of dream. Grinding his teeth, twisting his face in an expression of torment, he tried to recall every detail.   The first act of the dream unfolded thus: Jayanta, chasing after a girl, managed to catch a bus. But as soon as he boarded, a crowd of men surrounded him. They demanded his identity card. Panic-stricken, Jayanta searched his whol...

You will never know why your crimson lips drive me mad! How strange the curve of your slender hips, the sharp ridge of your nose, the dark kohl-drowned eyes. On your body a thousand stars seem to scatter, and why I loved you in the unconscious depths will remain forever unknown.   I do not seek truth; the mind is hesitant. In the premature blossoming of love, I am like Mahishasura, ready to fall prey to your trident— my wounded heart cast at your feet, my unconditional surrender.   Let the address of your body remain unknown. I have spent long years loving the shadow alone, rushing across the earth with ruthless force, consumed by unnameable fury, gazing with cunning eyes, murdering morality in the courts of men.   Adrija, if I could love the world as I loved you, would I not receive, in return, a crust of bread, a morsel of butter? Could not a single kiss of yours have turned me back toward the path of truth? But in place of a kiss you gave the trident, in place of love ...

Afternoon sun, and suddenly the returning prisoner scratching at the old lover’s door, the one he left behind in the half-shadow, half-light, dragging his years of sin and memory up the veranda steps like a sack of bricks, asking in a low voice—are the children sleeping, or still marching into the schoolyard dream? The air thick with gossip already, the servants leaning in from the kitchen, the neighbors crouched at their windows, the film-people with their cameras and hungry tongues— scandal always splattered across page one, charity and blood hidden in the classifieds, as though the truth itself were embarrassed to breathe. This is the time for stories, not the tidy ones, but the clumsy, the overheated, the interrupted, the kind that break open when someone whispers come closer and the characters refuse to speak unless you touch their skin. What is love in middle age but money, property, children’s faces flickering between appointments, health insurance files stacked like ...

Afternoon light entered the room, for a moment — that was enough. The day, unknown, drenched in sin. An open book sprawled across the table, certain, careless, with its witness of time. History widened itself, page after page scarred with red lines, a strange inventory of life— secrets hidden in black ink, sliding under the weight of pride. The south window lost its way, the room collapsing into darkness. And then, I turned the page again. In that darkness, alone, I searched for light. I leaned inward, peered into the heart, and saw the window— the sorrowful day pausing, as if it stopped, just once, before dissolving. Light called: Come, come. Beneath the sky, what remains of knowledge is here. Then suddenly— darkness fell, the body trapped in the lust of four walls.

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...