///Colour///

There is colours for everything

For you and for me,

we have separated ourselves

into colours

like size, height and creed,

my colour discriminated your

whole being from mine

under the force of social mathematics

we call it love

as I cannot obtain your’s

nor can I obtain yours

what we call colours

but call it love. Colourless,

nonexistence, co-existence

in my loneliness

or sheltered under your many sighs

we exercise

with our painting each other

at the weekend

or whenever the world

doesn’t look at us

but separately

amongst many whistles

and panting machines

we cook our picture

in the outline of colours

I tried with many streaks

Drawn visible as your name

as you

invisibly divide me to wrinkles and expressions

I try to paint you in me,

and you too paint me in you

on the broad canvas of time

in the spectrum of a company

make my brush colour a time

a space created within

amongst the tress brushing over the sky

amongst the sea rubbing the muzzle on the earth

as I do

inside the foggy arena

of your wanted needs.

Between odds and evens

you are always lost

when I am in you.

//Wound//

When Nandu reached at his home after waking up from a three days death, his family members were astonished for all of the family members knew his death excepting him. He didn’t know even that he was dead and trying to reason out why he found himself lying in this deserted land. When he opened his eyes it was horrible experience for him:



Nandu opened his eyes with a pain. The pain was somewhere form his neck side that made him opened his eyes wide although the heavy light of the sky did not allow him widening his eyes. No objects seemed visible to him other than the illuminated blue sky where he could imagine the moving black spots could be flying birds. But his pain due to the frozen wound around his neck could not allow him to watch the broad canvas of the sky painted colorfully which he never allowed to escape from him until this time.

It was a different pain than other pains running throughout the body starting form the neck curve through shoulder. He tried to read, lying down as before, in order to know where actually the pain centers. He found, after deeply introspecting him that the pain comes out of the neck area due to fermentation of a wound. He lifted his hand thereby in order to touch the feelings that clustered at the area. His fingers touched a deeper than a normal wound due to a division at the folding area of his right neck at a span’s length. He felt two small mounds have been found installed around a thick hole, which had become rough with dry blood and dust pasted with sands. He tried to get up being surprised with the kind of the wound and how such wound could found on his body.

His whole body was agonizing like an old machine rumbling to function. He did not hear the noises though he was sure that his membranes are dried up due to some reasons unknown to him. Some how he pulled himself up to the sitting position. And made himself capable of looking at the big circle known to him as world.

The world, he found was extended up to horizon’s extreme that appeared to him like a radius of the huge circle, which had made him its center. He swept his eyes around him and saw the circle flat due to his sitting position. The scar of his wound didn’t allow him to locate this beautiful world. He wanted to know why he came to this place and how the wound could be found around him.

He thought introspection in to the memory could take him to the past world where he could get his answers of all the questions cropping up in him. But the psychological travel could at best take him to his domestic horizon. He remembered his house, his family and everything. He thought, returning to his family might get him back to his reasons.

He tried to lift himself like lifting a sack stuffed with heavy stones inside. Some how he could gather himself to his standing position and shook it thinking to move towards his home. He appeared to himself like an old ox driven cart that makes more noise than it s motion. His dragging could fetch him to the adjacent road, which he could manage locating soon after his moving in a particular direction and helped him identifying it along with the direction that leads him for his homestead.

This was a kind of experience he never had during his lifetime. He had never felt that he has a body and that needs to be carried always. This time his body gave him utmost pain hanging like the pinching nails piercing through out his body and expected to be out of its nailed area. But he dragged and dragged him until he could see a picture that resembled him with the picture if his home he had remembered a while ago.

He recognized his home and his compound that square his home and the plants that he had planed in the sapling form to yield him fruits and flowers for he years. He reached his gate that he himself had hung in order to protect the yard from the cows and other trespassers, which he opened slowly without any noise and reached at his door. His urge to open the door made his heartbeat quicker that he did with vain care due to his sole focused concentrated on what would be happening inside the house until he reached there and found normal.

The normalcy in the outlook of his home kept him in happiness until he found a gathering of clustered surprises seeing his presence at the house. The natural faces of his family glow suddenly went pale and dim. He couldn’t get rid of the fading away lights from those faces and thought of that its reasons might have some connections with his wound. Even his wife whom he found her coming out of the kitchen with a speed got stuck at her legs having him found with his accidental presence. He found her trying to conceal her face wrinkles that could bring her surprise seeing him. She somehow made the whole situation dramatized and adjusted the matter asking him when he came and were had he been!

He couldn’t answer her questions for he hadn’t found any of reason that could suffice his or her answer. He was thinking that she could have supplied some information on his wound or finding himself amidst the ground. But her hopeless question multiplied into many anxious folds on his face and he was thrown out to another world like thing purely unknown to him. He satisfied her first question answering with a simple word ‘now’. But her second question was more a dilemma for him and he joined with his family for skipping off the whole matter and the dilemma to be answered later, silently.

They all struggled to normalize the situation although their whole focus was not descending from the wound. His only son and wife showed much attention by cleaning him and giving him his clean dresses. His wife even went to the extent of cleaning his wound and asking him how he was wounded to which he only expressed his fruitless blinking as her answer until he was served with food to his hunger and left in a room for rest.

But soon his in coming slumber turned to painful disturbance as search for the cause and effects have not been reason out yet. The closed eyes brought many moving pictures related to his wound that just had stared itching and oozing. He wanted his wife to do the needful rub. But to his astonishment his wife did not turn up to provide him her company to his loneliness and help him to his relief. She instead of sharing with her husband preferred another room with her son.

Nandu waiting for some time emerged in his itching wound. He felt the remembrance of a few incidents that could have caused him the wound. He heard his wife chatting with her grown up son about something that he never had thought of before. She was asking her son for why he threw the man in the open field instead of burring him after his death. He had the jolt of a heavy shock shirring through his nerves that shook him. He did not know that he was dead which he came to know from his wife and son’s talk. They even were found discussing them regarding his lying in the open field for three day might have brought him breathing to life. From their conversation he got confirmed that during the last three days he was lying dead in the open field where he found himself.

He cold not imagine the truth that whether he could survive for three days even after his death. He wanted to leave. Leave everything that he thought as his own. His wife and son no longer remained as his own. They had already left him and resumed to their lives deducting him from their relation.

He was dead since last three days. But why? How? He thought of and thought of until he found the beginning of his wound. It happened once, long ago; form a rose thorn the thorn pricked him while plucking from its stem. And was that the reason for which he had been carrying the wound! It appeared to him illogical He still traveled further back to the memory.

Initially it was difficult for him to reach at its end where the thing began. But later he could churn out the exact picture. The picture of that lonely woman who had actually wounded him or he was wounded by the woman for a rose.

Did she it badly or he found her wanting from her eyes?





( to be continued )

//friend//

What is our end?

You are always in my bag
along with other papers like

identity proof
bank papers and
other important papers
which I hardly
recognize and remember

I acclaim I carry you
always
in my impressive cells of memory
and in fact I do
pushing you in the dark hole
of the bag
important as my life
and tie you
within a fold,
zip up for security.

Believe me,
You are as important as my bag
that much resembles with
a waste paper basket
where I placed you carefully
along the spectacle cover
and the old pen
for my signature.

neither you nor my bag
will ever leave me
until my successor takes up the
flag for its new government
until I am reduces to a
squire inside an album
or a sound for them.

A promise I made to carry you
neither your face nor your body
neither your memory nor your name
but you, only you
till tomorrow
before a sunrise.

//SPIDER//

The spider always webs its net

for me

everywhere

 

includes the woman

 

who only presented pain

in a box

whom I too presented pain

in a box

that looked like mind.

 

the spider

included the woman

in its net

that netted me  since

child lisped

first time a vowel

until the vowel lisped out

from the toothless mounds

continue to claw my time

along with the woman

webbed with me

clattering love.

 

 

The woman whispered a pain

into me

 

the very day

that spider followed the woman

before the  last’s last’s last winter

knitting her child’s knickers

spinning  round and around me

a fence was made out

barring me from mine

my affair

included the woman

suffering

the suffocations of life

 

she nailed a sigh

somewhere

below the bosom

 

smiled bemoaning her

like the nail stuck her as struggle.

 

 

The spider webbed me

and webbing me

with woman

in every corner

where it hatches its

household geometry

for a generation’s

unsolved dilemma

in the dart and dust

called family

 

//you//

With sincerity
I can’t express my love for you


May Be I could never let you feel
How much I store my desire for you.
How much shrills my body stored for you.
How many beats my heart can drum seeing you.
How much silences can chaos the noisy world of yours.

Who am I?
Who are you to me?
My body reacts a pleasurable pain
My chemistry reacts to a painful pleasure

In your name
With your being
For it would take a decade to say
My love for you

//Beyond//

I do sit to write up
my future
with a few strokes on the white
and over leaf 
where you always descend upon
as a distorting image
questioning a faith
over mind 
over matter
over the year long exercise
over an image
I’m n’t able to draw as mine

you always 
crawl at my faithful essence.

then my clock tickles 
in your throbbing heart
sickening whatever 
as my tranquility


I don’t rely on my words
Which once promised me a pyramid?
I don’t rely on my pen or my fingers
Who always drag me towards you.
 

Are they all made to serve you?

The Third Wish

(Translated from Oriya story "Trutiya Ichha" by Abhash Kumar Boral)

A certain beautiful nymph was granted with a boon by an invisible source of power to fulfill any of her three wishes in her life span. And was also applied with a condition that her wishes could be fulfilled if she asked for them only looking at the sky. 

One day while drifting out the sea-beach, the nymph came across a blind. She felt as if the blind had been unhappy for years. Over a question to know the reason for his melancholy she came to know that the blind was sincerely searching a girl like her to make his life-partner and promised her to show the things, which were discovered at all. Pleased with this declaration, the nymph wished him a beautiful pair of eyes. 
The next day she, in the same place, encountered a dumb sitting all-alone in a pensive mood. When asked the reason for his sadness the girl came to know that the dumb was unsettled due to the absence of a mate in his life. Making some wild gesticulations, he clarified that if he got a beautiful spouse like her he would make her listen the most surprising sound of the world. Being happy with this assurance, the girl returned home and prayed for the activation of his speech organ. 
Time flew away like anything. The nymph was in search of these two anticipating any one of them to make her repository. And one day she met the first man(the blind) sitting in the same familiar place and asked him why he sat there. The man attested that he had been blind the previous days and had promised a girl who had once come to him to make his better half. The girl revealed her identity and claimed to be the girl whom he desired for. Interestingly the man cancelled the claim with a note of refusal asserting that she could never be the heroine of his imagination. The nymph returned with a heavy head and met the second man for the same. 
As usual she asked him the cause of his sadness. The man depicted the fact that he had come across a girl with a sweet-sounding voice and had assured her to make his life-partner .Now her absence made him sad. 
Interestingly enough, the man did not agree with the girl when she published her identity laying down the history happened some days back with a view to being the girl the man wanted. She was then put with a doubt questioning her credibility and was asked to refrain from comparing her with his would-be mate as they were drastically different. 
The nymph returned with an agonized anger; looking at the sky, opted for the fulfillment of the third but the last wish which was aimed at making the first man into blind and the second into dumb simultaneously. Suddenly she felt a strange spell over her body; she herself failed to see and to speak. The world around her became black and silent. 
Since then perhaps certain beautiful females react like the blind and the dumb. 

(Translated by Susanta Mahapatra from original Odia)