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 ]

I saw a window last night in my dream. The same from which Deleuze had jumped to his death. Does the window remember him still?

Faceless

How people like to laugh

Point to a point and laugh

Face to face, face on face

And laugh.

I only create a face

Where all laughs can be contained

They think themselves out of laughter

I am the thought in their laughter

I laugh too in their laughter

Like Yorick's skull

I am no melancholy jester

But I will never stop ridiculing myself

PING PONG GONDHO

The title-story from my book of short-stories

Requisition

The most basic thing to ask---

Is it yours or everyone else's'?

Does it toy with you or everyone else?

The questions bounce back from

The surface of the hairy wall

Tagore's king is silent

Beyond the unruffled flow of sensations

When you ask

The most basic thing

You get the most basic answer

Silence in between the whitened bricks

Loss

She tells me,

Things are lost:

Once lost,

Lost for ever.

For good.

The night of light

And the rains

Starlit.

Lost for Good.

She tells me,

All good lost.

Torn petals

Seal my lips.

Moonlight on hers.

For ever lost,

In all that good.

Days of loss

To be lost again

In nights of good

For good be lost!

Till the window-smell

Loses itself in the fog.

Since our ways are lost,

Let us hold hands again.

Once more,

One last time,

For good and ever.

Some thoughts on life...mine...mine?

When she had gone away, he had seen her last in a mirror with tears hidden under the pupils. Years passed and he had shunned her in all possible traces until the last when she reappeared again to disappear again. He felt dangerous bubbles filling in the long abandoned water-pipe of his mind. An old kite fell into it. He had lost control over it before she had gone away. The kite revived the teardrop, long lost behind the pupils. He could see his eye through the crystal of the drop once again after a long long time.