The Outside

The webs settled down and opened their tentacles in the dark, drying the tears in the

process. When they evaporated, I got into my own. I was sitting in a place where two

circles of light had intersected. And yet, the torso was dark...darker still. I belonged to

both the circles, but perhaps to none. ‘One always finds one's sack in the end’,

someone had whispered into my ears long back. Did I love him or was I the only one

and all the rest, a figment, never to be the same again? Perhaps there was a sack for

me too, in a third circle of light, yet to be seen. But was I not prohibited to enter a third

circle? What was mine was this rigmarole of inside and outside. No, I was not even the

partition. The two circles had intersected clearly. I felt as if I could change forms and

become one and all...all this and all that. And all of a sudden, I felt as if I was lifted into

thin air like the half-empty syllables of some inane murmur.

He had picked up his sack from the intersection of the two circles of light. A soggy

impression of the torso still remained. Faint were the footfalls and he moved out of the

two circles, into a third, intractably dark. Could there be tears in the dark? Somebody

had said to him that tears were nothing but 'liquefied brain'. Did he ever love that

person? A spider slipped through the mouth of the sack, as if to silence it!

[A Text written for a set of photographs by Swapan Nayak ]