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Time is Running Away
I look at the horizon
It is a starlit horizon
The fine gravelly quartz balls trickle down by gravity monotonously from the upper cone of the hour-clock
An allergic hissing sound creeps inside your eardrums telling you: Time is running away
You feel three crimson balloons leave your soul up in the air
They float; you look at them
Your wife plays rummy with her lovers at Cafe Kali
Your kids are cool dudes: They watch Kanan Gill and Trevor Noah on Netflix and laugh their hearts out in their star-lit rooms
You have wasted your life to an extent where you have lost the capacity to love and be loved
It is not the strangeness of loneliness
It is the inertia and peace of a dimensionless numbness
That you are at peace with yourself
You feel no anxiety, no agony or do not feel any pain
You remember your days of youth when you would take small shots of morphine
From Neelanjan’s collections, who studied at the Calcutta Medical College
For happy bursts of sleep
You now wish you had some morphine with you so that you could dive inside an unending blackness
To avoid the starlit horizon
To avoid the allergic hissing sound of the hour-clock
To avoid looking at balloons leaving your soul
The fever shoots up and you sweat
As your eyelids meet, your ears echo with crooning screams of Monisha reaching you from miles away
Who blamed you for writing hopeless trash of loathing and self-pity
And left you to marry Neelanjan who would end up becoming the city’s top-most gynecologist and obstetrician
Monisha herself ended up becoming a top-class anesthetist
The fever shoots up and you sweat
What you have lost is a zest for life, as Abani da, your mentor, would tell you
Who would also warn you at times that you were born with a feeble heart and a weak zest for life
Possibly because you were born two months ahead of time
The fever shoots up and you sweat
You look at the starlit horizon with hope
For Abani da advised you to live with slivers of hope
As a man should never allow despair to win over hope in times of personal and public calamity
You try to remember the time-ravaged face of Abani da
Who adorned a mystic smile
Like those inflated crimson balloons that left your soul
The fever shoots up and you sweat
I look at the horizon
It is a starlit horizon
The fine gravelly quartz balls trickle down by gravity monotonously from the upper cone of the hour-clock
An allergic hissing sound creeps inside your eardrums telling you: Time is running away
2. Childhood
The rains, nowadays, remind me of the grasslands of childhood
The unending water-logged fields spread across the horizon
The beauty of nakedness of adolescent boys
Nascent muscular torsos entwined in motion
Pacing and swerving a wretched football
Against the friction of water and blades of uneven grassy growth
Pools of mud
Streams of water falling from the sky
Speeding drenched cheetahs as if inside a choreographed wild opera
In slow motion
The last move and then a shooting volley inside the goal
Hands were thrown in joy
Applause rocking and roaring as a streak of massive lightning
Divides the universe into two teams
One that wins and the other that is defeated
The drenched cheetahs run again for another goal
Images ravaged by time float through my mind like ancient cinema
Aging is reaching tranquillity
Aging is getting plundered by the pain of memories of other worlds
3. Sandy’s Last Journey
Sandy got up inside his dungeon: smelly riff-raff
Another dawn
Shining darkness on broken stones
Tired
Thirsty
Loveless
Another dawn
Sandy crawls out and makes an attempt to stand up
To look at the strange sky
This sky
And, the arid road has been with him for a lifetime
He lost his mother
His father
His brother
On the road
Sandy cries all of a sudden
The salt in his teardrops on his tongue reminds him of an ocean:
Of his childhood
Sandy starts his day walk
The agility returning to his warped skeleton gradually:
With his sack at his hunchback
He is driven by a dream of a field blooming with pumpkins
That he wants to irrigate, own and eat
And sleep among pumpkins and die while the wind blows through him
