Dibyendu's WallScript

A little while ago the sun was bright everywhere. Suddenly darkness had dropped like a sack. Rain was falling upon the river. Clouds massed black across the sky. Tonight was the night of the full moon. Yet no moon would be seen, I thought.   The wind came from the river toward the fields, carrying with it large drops of rain. On the boat’s planks the riverwater splintered like waves. At noon when I boarded, I had crossed a hundred yards of mud. Now the mud was gone. The brick-paved high road’s embankment lay half submerged. The river’s waves were now vast, heaving.   Hasan Ali pressed into my hand a long country bidi. As I raised it to light, he said, “Not from here—brought from Pabna. Smoke it, it will warm the body.”   At the prow of Hasan Ali’s boat, four men could huddle together. In the afternoon, Firoz, the younger one, had stretched a plastic cover overhead. But if the prow was covered, inside it became stifling. On top of that, Sadananda’s wife had set a kettle of...

Bholanath divided his heart into three parts. On the bypass he was a trader of happiness—his business: happy homes, happy housewives, and happy households. He did not call his office an office but an akhra, a den. On the platform of that akhra, a large tin hoarding announced: “Come, cast off all the burdens of your life.” Before lifting the shutters each day, he glanced once at the board, then raised the shutter with self-satisfied calm.   In the commerce of life there is always some division of the heart. For Bholanath, it was thirty–thirty–forty. Thirty percent he lived in truth, thirty percent in the jugglery of imagination, and the remaining forty percent—what it was, even he had never quite known. His thirty percent truth was lodged in his trade, a truth he constantly tried to swell and inflate. Alongside it was his cherished household—his wife Komola, plump, the color of a ripe brinjal, soft as a boiled potato, yielding and tender. Komola was her name, but her essence was pal...

Writing is a dangerous supplement to speech. – Jacques Derrida   By the central idea of Power , I understand it as a reservoir of strength or energy. Alongside this, there is another meaning of the word Power in Bengali, which also denotes a ball —a spherical object. In outer space, under intense rotation, this spherical shape emerges as the most natural form, one that carries the least distortion. From the perspective of linguistic analysis, this can be interpreted as follows:   The above diagram is called a Saussurean Graphic System . Within the central idea of any word, each letter carries its own marginal idea, already imprisoned there.   From the perspective of linguistics, in the case of the word Power , though the two distinct meanings share a common marginal idea—the consonant “l”—there is no logical connection between their two central ideas.   That is why the title Tales of Power produces, at first encounter, a rather perplexing mental image—   All...