Prithu Sanyal

Category: Writings

All Writings will be posted under this category.

  • When Night Falls

    When Night Falls

    I know,
    when night falls over your city
    the doors of memory open, one by one.
    Over the threshold seeps out
    the sorrow drowned in memory.
    You sink
    into memory’s mournful sea.
    Down with you sink
    your boats of happiness.
    You keep yourselves afloat
    in drink, or in the tavern.
    Or,
    whoever has no tavern
    wants to drown instead
    in that other torment called the inbox,
    hoping for some small release.
    I know,
    when night falls over your city
    you go on writhing
    in the pain of having and not having.

  • Friends of the Pyre

    After the last pyre at the burning ground turns to ash
    we take the road home.
    The dead one’s kin block our way.
    We eat the sweets held out to us.
    Eating those sweets, our heavy faces
    fill with smiles.
    After the last pyre turns to ash
    we take the road home.
    The sadhus of the burning ground block our way,
    we take a sudden pull on the sadhu’s pipe.
    When smoke fills our lungs, our minds
    grow light.
    We forget about death.
    We forget the dead.
    After the last pyre turns to ash
    we take the road home.
    We go home.
    We wait
    for the invitation to the funeral feast.
    We are friends of the pyre.
    We eat our fill at the funeral feast.
    Death, to us, is another word for feasting.
    Death, to us, is sweets in the mouth, a pull on the pipe.

  • Mrinmoyee’s Lovers

    Mrinmoyee’s Lovers

    I only
    keep looking
    into Mrinmoyee’s eyes.
    She tells me
    she loves me.
    Says
    the lover whose bed
    she was just in
    knows how to love too.
    And yet
    Mrinmoyee loves me,
    because
    that lover is not like me.

  • Hope

    Hope

    On the sandbar of confusion have nested
    so many faded mynahs.
    Yet the comet-dreams
    still send word.
    They say, keep your eyes
    on the boundless sky,
    on the open window.
    If the dreams, turning true,
    should ever
    come to pass!

  • The Throttled Scream

    The Throttled Scream

    Sometimes I ache to detonate,
    to scream.

    To scream across this whole wide cosmos
    that no one is well:
    not the newborn,
    not the old man, already half a corpse.
    No one is well.

    I long to climb some mountain peak,
    on silent feet, like a solitary traveller,
    and tear the four directions open with a scream,
    screaming
    that no human belongs to another.

     

    I long, like the madman at the crossroads,
    to beat my chest, again and again,
    and cry:
    every human being on this earth
    is a bastard.

    I can’t.
    I cannot scream.
    From every side
    they seize me by the throat,
    these brokers of belonging.

    From the whore in another quarter
    to the bride at home,
    to the gentleman of the house,
    every one of them
    has me by the throat.
    They say,
    “Shut it, you son of a bitch.”

     And I shut up.
    Like a stray dog
    asleep on the pavement,
    I doze,
    muttering to myself:
    no one is well,
    no one belongs to anyone,
    every human being
    is a bastard through and through,

     and I—
    I am a living, breathing
    son of a bitch.

  • I Stood on God’s Side

    I stood on God’s side,
    I stood on humanity’s side.
    Humanity is my God.
    They stood on Muhammad’s side.
    And as always
    the formidable Muhammad and his followers
    win.
    I lose,
    we lose.
    Yet
    I am not defeated, I will not be.
    In the history of the world
    humanity has never
    been defeated by the devil.