# More Revered Than Mother Herself
Lay your salutation here, before this crumbling ruin, at the threshold of this broken temple. In the dense shade of the banyan and the peepul, let your weary self rest awhile. With each breath, make the air resonate as if silence itself becomes a profound worship.
This land is yours, mother-like, yet worthy of even greater reverence, more hallowed. Its fields, its sky, its light, its sorrows, its poverty, its sickness, its grief—with all of these you are inseparably bound. This earth’s pain is yours too; this expanse’s joy is also your share.
This is no narrow sanctuary carved from divided geography; with all its fragments, all its regions, all its histories, all its anguish and glory, it stands as one undivided maternal form. The Padma, the Meghna, the Yamuna, the Karnaphuli. As many shores, as many belonging; as many hearths, as vast the reach of brotherhood.
So lay your silent salutation in the luminous inner chamber of your heart. Day and night, ceaselessly, in the same mantra, the same love, the same devotion, keep it in remembrance.
# The Rented Spinning Cloud
Everywhere now seems wrapped in the dense darkness of deception; in poetry too, in art everywhere, the furtive footsteps of the clever thief. Words return again and again, change their form, shift their guise, yet in the end everything feels like merely another arrangement of falsehood.
Now nowhere is there the certainty of love, no deep resonance of the heart, the pure truth of affection itself seems absent. Upon humanity’s sleeve now flutter vulture wings, yet shadowless, ominous, unspeakable. Outside, appearance dressed entirely in happiness; within, some contrived fragrance, some perfumed conversation, some counterfeit brightness.
To live nowadays seems no longer the authentic experience of life; rather, a hired spinning cloud, a counterfeit play performed from beginning to end. And when the stage lights finally die, you realize there was no audience at all, no one to applaud.
# The Philosophy of the Hunt
Petals fall tick-tack, wind moves through scattered leaves, the sky holds clouds like endless longing itself, yet nothing brings me joy anymore. This intimate enchantment of nature, this silent ravishment of beauty—somewhere it all comes to rest at the doorway of my feeling and goes no further.
Yet when some dove or green pigeon, pierced by my own shot, spirals downward, or when some hare collapses in its own blood, an strange fierce joy floods through me. The larger the prey, the more alive, the more clamorous, the greater the exultation seems.
But in the end, the most terrible, the most thrilling prey is man himself. That is why one must learn the geography of left and right, black and white, division and identity; otherwise, even the taste of such great, such supposedly noble quarry remains incomplete.
Yet blood too has no permanence. It dries upon the grass. And the next day, fresh grass grows in that very place.
# The Secret Spring of the Factory
In this small assistant’s meager office at the factory, there is hardly room even to breathe facing one another. Over the keys of the perpetually busy typewriter, fingers press on without cease. Dictation, drafts, accounts, errorless arithmetic, the indifferent reckoning of profit and loss. The endless pressure to be faster, more careful, more attentive.
All day long, the dead weight of files piles across the desk. There are days when there is not even time to look up at the face of some sahib.
In the midst of this mechanization, suddenly one day I see with wonder: that daring pair from the section, Sahana and Sagnik, have stepped forward. In their hands, an invitation envelope touched with yellow. The thirteenth of Phalgun.
At once, as if a swarm of butterflies rises into the air, the surroundings fill silently with the fragrance of moonlight, and each breath becomes full of spring.
Just beyond the gate, the karabi flowers suddenly burst into such exuberant bloom that you feel life, even in this stern, weary, calculated world, still arrives in its own tender, radiant, unexpected form.
This is life itself.
Even with the door closed
They say slaves are no longer sold in any marketplace of the world. But the truth is this: the enslaved have not vanished; rather, they have become more accessible, more widespread. Only their faces have changed. Where chains once were, they now wear uniforms.
The bondage of old was upon the body; today’s bondage circles the mind. They speak in words like parrots taught by rote, their bodies draped in garments of varied colors; outside, all glitter; within, the deep habit of obedience.
They will come to your doorstep. Not from emotion, not drawn by intimacy, but by their own interest, to set their own affairs in order. They will search for an entry, because that is what they need.
If you close the door, they will turn toward the window. For bondage does not merely suffer restraint; it also seeks opportunity.
What Sarat Chandra gave
From you alone did I learn, so completely, that a life without outward show, without pomp and ceremony—a life that to the passing eye seems bitter, weary, worm-eaten, even contemptible—may harbour within it a luminous inquiry. As the mud and clay conceal the lotus’s secret desire to bloom, so too the neglected darkness of life sometimes bears the possibility of beauty.
Before you, no one had descended into that heap of refuse, warmed it with their own unbroken heat, and transmuted it into something precious. You saw possibility even in decay, you recognized in degradation the glimmer of an undefeated radiance.
Yet across the world came accusations, and they come still. People judged, drew back, pointed their fingers. But you—setting aside all those accusations, you brought the reflection of a clear sky even into murky, opaque, inarticulate waters.
That humans are multivocal, multidimensional, complex—this is true. But perhaps the greater truth is this: the gaze of love with which you beheld them made them ever more true, ever more profound, ever more human.
Death and forgetting in motion
Looking through the window of a moving train, it seems all around is receding. Fields, villages, ponds shrouded in dense red leaves, bamboo groves swaying at the horizon, a dog curled by the wayside, lying half-asleep in the dust. The scenes pass one by one, fade, disappear into distance.
Is it only they who recede? I myself am far more restless than they—an unceasing thirst, perpetually rushing backward toward the love I have left behind.
Moving thus, I seem to advance not forward but backward. I cross the threshold of day’s end and return to youth’s absorbed full moon, to nights full of sleepless embrace; further back still to adolescence, then to the gentle childhood before that, the unsullied shelter of a mother’s tender presence.
The more I move, the more I fall behind. The day grows long, and with it grows the inner anguish.
If days exhaust themselves in this way, then at the end I shall hold only the dust of shattered dreams in my hollow palm; and at journey’s close will descend the curtain of darkness.
Night—another form
Yet though death remains at last the inescapable truth, and that fierce creator of life one day shatters, crumbles, and erases all; though the sky heavy with affectionate sunlight is veiled in destruction’s indifferent dust, though the horizon’s lamp grows dim—though all that was luminous, intimate, pulsing seems once to become shrouded in the veil of oblivion—
Still, marvel of marvels: from the interstices of that concluded dialogue a new beginning is born again; from the very dimming emerges another germination, another radiant, another expanded opening. As if the ending itself secretly carries the seed of what comes next.
Though the curtain falls, it is not merely the final name of sorrow.
Because night, too, in its depths holds another manifestation of dawn. This secret law the sun knows, the birds know, the earth itself knows.
**New Men in the Abundance of Power**
The year ends in the final hour of Chaitra, and the moment the thirtieth passes, the threshold of Baisakh fills with countless new desires, with resolutions yet unborn. How many times I tell myself in silence: I shall be better, purer in vigor, brighter in learning; humble in modesty, cleansed in soul—I shall wash away all shame, all stain, and remake the world anew.
There shall be no jealousy, no conflict, no blindness that pierces one another with the knife of hatred. There shall be only boundless love, deep affection, such a fearless coexistence where you and I, mingling together, can expand like the sky itself.
In the heart awakens a faith in some new dawn, that one day this world—stained by plunder and bondage and the silent weeping of helpless men—can be broken free. As if every prison will crumble one by one, every barrier will vanish.
On the first morning of the new year, the grass still glistens with dew. Then, slowly, the sun rises. And in that light, again begins a new chapter of life.
**Returning to Jibanananda**
That beautiful Bengal is nowhere to be found anymore; that intimacy, that deep shelter no longer remains. The weariness of Satbhangi’s unemployed days falls even from the silk-cotton branches. Life is turbid, wrapped in despair; even the ocean’s foam tastes bitter. A silence deep as the solitary Banolata Sen spreads in all directions. Even bright emotion seems to have vanished. One wonders: where have you been all this time?
Yet how strange—even now, in that quieted Natore, dawn comes through the mist. Bats’ wings flutter through the darkness all night, and deep within nature’s breast settles an odd thirst, an inexpressible longing.
However much you break and remake the hidden beauty into new idols, the face that finally emerges is utterly your own. All forms, all creation, all seeking seem to arrive and halt in your radiance alone.
So the vigil each day is the same: come. For you too, once, had promised to return—again.
**Beyond the Sensitive Plant**
A day of rest. No pressing work. In the idle noon of leisure, one can only lie and gaze. Fields of harvest on either side, the unmixed green of crops—as if some quiet happiness settled deep within memory. Far away, the river too becomes still as a picture.
Life is not really so incomprehensible; happiness, comfort, the mahogany-colored sleep of an ordered world—all are merely the skin of simplicity. Yet behind that very plainness I sometimes see myself exhausted, a carrion vulture, utterly spent. And yet in the very heart of this silence, suddenly a golden-faced, shy girl comes to stand in the courtyard of my chest.
Then much time flows away; endless, uncounted, and deep in the heart accumulates, drop by drop, so much unknown joy. I do not know why, but again and again that face returns, the flush of color dust lingers in her eyes; it seems, from beyond some trembling pond of youth, she still calls to me today.