Dibyendu's WallScript

Krishna Angelina, I will leave— wherever my eyes decide to wander. The same eyes that found you once beneath the martyrs’ monument, where a single word could cost a life, where desire bled into dream, and pain returned like an old lover.   No! I come back, pressing my eyes against yours, sharpening memory like an unused, rusted sword. I will strike— somewhere, in rage. Or perhaps, briefly, I will only lose myself.   Krishna Angelina, I will leave— wherever my eyes decide to wander. Because here, in this country of place and time and choice, I have already lost too much.   Your eyes— their call was a theft. Jealousy carried off my heart. And you— you spoke with an unfamiliar boy, closer than a whisper, while the astonished earth pretended not to watch.   Krishna Angelina, I will leave— wherever my eyes decide to wander. A sharp blade hidden, in Othello’s fury, I may lay it down somewhere, or keep it swinging from my side— my ancient Kurukshetra.   Or in some othe...

You did not choose me. On the riverbank, the young ascetic gathered, and you walked away with him. I remain— alone, inside this vast solitude of city and survival, bread and cloth and burden. At times, I wish— perhaps we might meet again, perhaps your shameless eyes will signal love once more. Behind your gaze, society guards its suspicion. You, the nun of your own vows, will surely understand. Your heart— a startled Vidura’s eyes reached it once. But those eyes turned me selfish, proud. Still I dared to look into yours, to hold them with mine, and in that glance—sin was born. You read the language of my eyes and drifted away. Through subtle gestures, elusive and cruel, I tried to convince myself— and in this way I have been deceived for what feels like eternity. You left, hand in hand, with the frank ascetic youth. I remained by the shore, my fading mind thick with conspiracy, my eyes fierce with pain, my soul captive to waiting. I will see you again, in thi...

So many more days will pass in this weariness, in sorrow. The eyes with which I search for you, with which I have scoured the world, hide so many tears— thirteen hundred million seas would seem smaller.   I have not walked to the Bodhi tree of Sarnath, nor the birthplace of Ram. In the depths of your eyes ideals rest immovable— ancient, severe, hard as scripture.   And still the chest burns, blood spilling upon the barren dunes of sorrow, storms scattering like endless lines of sand. In the dense shade of the banyan, in a tired afternoon, are you still as beautiful as I once saw you, in the city of Janaka?   Here I live, in this city of decay and fire. Your gentle smile— a serene hermit by a silver lake. I have forgotten when I last knew if I was alive, or simply entombed inside my own corpse.   This corpse I will drag like Parthasarathi with his chariot, like the arrows that rose from the belly of Bhishma, toward the shameless cremation grounds of night. Or like Kar...

     Friedrich Hayek, in his prophetic work The Road to Serfdom ( 1944) , cautioned us about the perils of socialism. He warned that when governments, under the guise of progress, deliberately transform scientific distinctions into economic divisions, the path to the communist state is already underway.[ 1] Why must society intimidate its wise and wealthy, those who build and innovate, in the name of creating a better order? And why is it treated as a sacred duty to glorify those who foolishly believe that central socialist planning can architect the perfection of society? For socialism, in truth, is built upon this very act of deception and coercion.   Communism is a paradoxical creed — it both terrifies and seduces. And when it falls into the hands of the corrupt, the disaster becomes “gilded ruin,” suffering wrapped in shining slogans. It is a boundless Atlantic of misery without horizon or shore. The naïve utopians who once believed soon collapse into despair, an...

In the forest of penance, immersed in meditation, with the entire scripture of life within him— sits an old ascetic.   Those who do not believe in reverence look upon him as a fraud, passing by with the eyes of mockery: a naked man in the woods, a hermit in a mountain cave, madness, hypocrisy.   Yet he is a height unreachable, from whom nothing may be gained— and in this, our human failure turns into a theater of deceit. Who receives, and who must bear the weight of faith?   In our unbelieving hearts the darkness is fierce. We take vegetarians as weak, and bow, united, to the carnivorous strong.   Now penance is gone. The forest of austerity burns in lust. Wherever the eyes turn there are only dwellings, cities, relentless advertisement.   A home without walls, a life without defense— like an unguarded tree its character lies bare, bearing no weight of the world.   Sometimes, he removes his armor and gathers close to the lap of nature. The sage’s feelings— ...

I never learned to think of relationships as temporary. In the ashes of the household the wound of responsibility is tied with ribbons, a world too skilled in repairing what is broken. I turn inward, carrying myself within myself, and from this solitude a strange comfort arises. In prayers I fear to call you back, for from Nilpukur to the bus road the path made me realize: a relationship is never one’s own. From the grasp of private thought the world must be saved. Let us hold the hand of God, let us step back from this road. Breathe once, deeply, and let me live in solitude. Or else let us embrace the turbulence of the crowd. The walls still standing between us— let us call them our own, or gather our factions, march to the border, and build the walls of civilization. Let hands remain clasped in hands, even in these futile spring days. But in the hollow chest of one— the broken bond was never repaired. So we keep on living, clenching teeth against teeth, ...

At Dusk   In the dimming dusk a garland still breathes perfume, hanging for days around the throat of some unknown god.   The fragrance of its youth still lingers. A firefly drifts in to settle upon the blind god’s eyes.   Here in the city, I sit among the ruins of a nineteenth-century riverside, where scars mark the chest and there is no path left to turn back upon.   Crowds upon crowds have filled the way, endless travelers cover every trace of home. No one knows the address of this headless heart.   At the beginning of night I find myself again, in the soft wind that encircles, in a body divided from its own existence.   Between the thighs no further direction is known— does such a path still exist upon this earth? I do not know.   And so I walk along the body’s passage, towards the flickering dusk, as one mind slips away, seeking another dream.

The heart brims with nectar, while steady eyes watch as the great tree slowly descends, crossing mountains no one may surpass.   Weariness spreads across the mind— the strength to walk remains, but not the strength to think.   The heart, scented with lemon, fills and overflows as the tree lowers itself, slowly, slowly, into the earth’s deep silence.   Down into the soil it goes, drawing sap upward into the chest, where the frail heart aches with blood, or breaks into a stream of tears.   Before thought can gather, the gaze rises to a sky lit in red and blue, its light playing with a weary mind.   Yet the body finds again its will to move.   The roots fall into gravel, searching the soft silt, and the heart, in its longing, fails, again and again— throughout a whole life, unceasingly.

In the grip of pride, pain climbs scar by scar, along the failed inscriptions I follow forward— a dust-choked path, a worn-out sky, the nectar of painted dreams etched into blood and flesh, into their fragile reflection. Thousands of pages turn, lines of words marching ahead toward a tradition without meaning, toward the path of infinity. It feels as if years ago, perhaps from the very birth, the wings of knowledge began to spread. Yet still, so much pain remains, and pride lingers, speaking with the erased souls in the language of a wise poem. After so much knowing, I find myself hungry. Knowledge has not yet arrived. The body cannot be separated from its science of living, however much I wished it. Instead, it is easier— to play the fool, to laugh as an idiot, ignoring morality, staying alone in silence. The heart, erased from the road, does not wait for wisdom— not even for the honesty of the body. And I cannot even laugh with purity anymore. The weight...

Silence has its pain. Silence carries fatigue. Silence knows loneliness within its own existence.   To think in silence, one must first be silent. To shape silence as formless, in the spontaneous mind, one must enter silence.   Silence can be fierce, or still as stone. Even storms, even rage can reach silence.   Silence can be made one’s own, sharpened even through noise.   A life folded within itself, an unbroken silence— like the cemetery, day and night.

The heart rages— and so comes fear, true fear. Every day I turn the page of words, never thinking, as long as I live, that these pages would carry the weight of living itself. The thoughts that once made me forget, drowned me in the net of illusion, in the flood of speech— now leave me exhausted, silent, motionless. I fall away from the grandeur of nature, into the indifference of Dostoevsky. Is this what it means to live— wordless letters rushing endlessly, carrying dreams of a new day, promising to save the world from the hands of the ignorant? They go to seek shelter in a certain sage— one Karl Marx, sir . And fear—only fear— that in thirty-four years on the soil of Bengal, these pages have fallen, and still I never thought this would be called life. With the civilization of man we must decorate the white pages of Das Kapital , leaving behind whatever is human— feeling, in the afterlife of moral emptiness. And so the scholars return, filtering...