Sensitive Musings and Journal Entries of a Lazy Author – Sabarna Roy

Sabarna Roy is a much awarded, critically acclaimed bestselling author of 6 literary books: Pentacles; Frosted Glass; Abyss; Winter Poems; Random Subterranean Mosaic: 2012 – 2018, and Etchings of the First Quarter of 2020. He is the lead author of a technical book, which has been published from the European Union and has been translated into 8 major European languages.

He has been awarded the Literoma Laureate Award in 2019, Literoma Star Achiever Award 2020, Random Subterranean Mosaic: 2012 – 2018 won the best book of the year 2019, the A List Award for excellence in fiction by the NewsX Media House, Certificate for The Real Super Heroes for spreading a spirit of positivity and hope during the COVID-19 Pandemic from Forever Star India Award 2020, the Certificate for Participation in the Indo Russian Friendship Celebration 2020, and the Literoma Golden Star Award 2020: Lifetime Achievement.

Part-A

This ordinary poem (although very dear to my heart) was written on November 23, 2014. I read this poem today after 6 years, and it caused some emotion in my soul. I do not love anybody more than Debjani, Bholu, Tista, my father, and my sister. My relationship with my mother was very complex. Maybe because of which I have become a permanent cynic. As a son, I wanted to be like Michael K (in The Life and Times of Michael K by J M Coetzee) who carried his sick mother on his back to the countryside from Cape Town but ended up becoming Meursault (in The Outside by Albert Camus) who did not cry at his mother’s death. I don’t know whether this poem conveys anything at all.

My children

Sometimes I love you like my own sister

Sometimes I love you like my dearest friend

Sometimes I love you like my beloved

Oh stepsister! I do not know the boundaries of my love

Sometimes I love you like my own brother

Sometimes I love you like my dearest friend

Sometimes I love you like my beloved

Oh stepbrother! I do not know the boundaries of my love, too

Oh stepsister! I hate you too when you avoid me and gang up with your university friends

Oh stepbrother! As if I do not hate you so strongly when you do the same

My children, love has no boundaries, after all

My children, love is mysterious and yet to be understood in spite of all the human inventions

Sometimes I am fearful of the futures of both of you – the separate ways you will have to traverse finally in your not-so-distant lives

I told you the stories of my children – my anxieties and my fears

You comforted me by saying:

Children will be children, and,

Love will be love, be that of any kind

Instead you told me the story of a man who to beat his agonies of the uncertainties of his life

Amassed enormous wealth and real estate and ornaments

Yet he could not get over his agonies, rather became a depressed wreck in the long run

In the end you said: Take some rest and let some things take shape as they are destined to be

Part-B

Where are you

You had said:

Some of the saddest moments of our lives are also some of most illuminating moments of our lives

But the flicker of the light goes unseen

Some of the most beautiful faces that we see are also some of the most sinister masks of hideous minds

But we rarely understand the interplay of shadows lurking behind the floating layers of beauty

These are the words that you had said when we had met last

Playing hide-and-seek inside the frozen ambience of the Government morgue

We counted faces, navels and fingers immersed in shiny flakes of ice

We spent innumerable days and nights inside the morgue

Hiding and finding

Hiding and finding

Hiding and finding

Whenever we came across each other in the darkness – was there a sparkle in our eyes – for we kissed each other – deep and ferocious kisses – breathless kisses

And then you got lost amongst the din of the universe

I remember our childhood years

Played with stones, pencils and erasers, dry leaves, cheap jewellery and aromas

Where are those days when adolescence got morphed into quivering years of longing and lust – all of a sudden followed by deathly silence and stillness of years as if nothing moved in the universe

You remember the night – that moonlit, smoky, windy night – when we went out on a slim boat on the river Hooghly

The night I tasted your darkness

The night I longed for my life to end

For I mistook myself to be the master of the universe

Now I am dead

I am dead forever

My mind has turned into an indecipherable rock

My soul has turned into an indecipherable rock

My body has turned into an indecipherable rock

But where are you

Are you gone forever?

Source: theauthornews.com