# The Men With No Name They came like fog at dawn, faceless, voiceless, bearing no letters, no history, no mother's prayer stitched into their collar. They took the streets by storm— silent as smoke, they swallowed the light from the lampposts, wrote their names in ash on the foreheads of the forgotten. No one asked them why. No one asked them who. They simply were— like death, like hunger, like the ache that lives in the bone. The old woman at the corner offered them tea. They did not drink. The children traced their shadows on the wall. The shadows did not move. They built their kingdom on the rubble of questions, ruled with the fist of the unremembered, spoke in the language of the disappeared. And we—we gave them what we had: our silence, our complicity, our fear dressed up as indifference. For what is a name, after all, but a small rebellion against oblivion? And these men— these men needed no rebellion. They were oblivion. They came like fog at dawn and never left. Now we cannot tell where they end and we begin.

January 4, 2021 1 min read By Sushanta Paul

Without memory or name
those poor men walk
in the twilight of their lives,
already longing for their departure.

They see their days spent
stranded on the platforms,
they have thrown themselves on the tracks
but trains no longer pass.

They no longer feel hate or love,
they have lost their hearts
in their chest there is an engine
that works for no reason.

And every day they calmly think to
break the stained glass window of their souls,
cut that red thread from their fingers
and knot it around their necks.

That ravine whispers to them
to fly away from the past,
their lives are blank canvases
that were never painted.

But they can't paint
the end point yet.
They ignore that what moves mountains
is not faith, but the scythe.

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