23/01/2022
*The Day he Wrote His Exit*
Bose : 23rd Jan, 1897 - 18th September, 1985
[Backdrop: Somewhere near the cremation grounds in Faizabad, India, a closure unlike any was self drawn. The Sarayu river had become one with the greatest enigma that once rose from the very soil of this land where she fed several vigorous deities and demons, but unlike no man could fathom, a part of this land's treasured future sank with the red dust from his pyre.
Every rising and ebbing wave that evening, rhymed to remember her forgotten son and later that evening, when the clouds came to mourn, rain washed out the banks and left behind a few puddles, tear drops and a silent red sickle like crescent in the sky.]
Summer‘d end soon,
He knew.
Befallen leaves that
Floored the garden,
A pale melting yellow,
Were in ruins;
And so were the yarns
That smelled
The spill again,
In the broken sterile farms,
Where young astronauts tilled till dusk.
Their star hunts
Were delusional,
Not what this generation needed
Unlike a rising urban class,
Who wore the mantle
Of humanity
Who had to be fed,
With wheat and bread
And their blood;
And obedience,
Had to be decked up
Upon a pedestal so high
That it’d kiss the sky
And back;
Upon a heap
Of star gazing
Hungry rats,
Crushed and crumbled
Beneath the husk
Of their own yield;
His bold letters to the federal fathers
Could for once fetch a new history;
Through civil disobedience;
Through those fingers that
Have many a kings ruled out,
And bent many a tyrants to abide
The law of the divine,
The law that held all alike,
All and perhaps only
That their eyes could see.
But all He saw now
Were the turquoise grey clouds,
All wafting eerily under
The monsoon squall, where
The skies would descend
To the crevices below;
Like he did once
After mocking his death.
How woefully vast
Was the stretch of freedom,
He thought.
That not nine horizons put together
Could hold such a specter in frame;
It was not the rain
That kept Him and the farms alive,
It was hope.
The hope for life!
For a better harvest
Not with the bullets
That shred the rule of law;
All His brothers could wield
Was a sickle,
That left a crescent
Of the red moon;
And only a piece
Of their dreams
They once fought for
Beneath an open starry sky,
Where He wished
To perch.
The star studded blue yonder,
Would soon be behind the clouds;
Truth for once shall rest,
Hiding in mournful showers
That will bless their battered farms.
Truth for once shall
Be about the freedom they need
Not the one they were given.
The farms will breathe life soon,
He knew,
And so did the ministry
Who were raised again, from turbines
Crushing turbaned heads;
Swiping red and reeking filth
Into the tranquil lakes
Of a Golden sage.
Behind the curtains of
A prosperous realm,
His heavy heart,
Had sunk into cold silence.
Feeble eyes could see no more
But filter twilight
Through those spherical frames
As they, would at the starry specks
Gaze and graze and chew upon forever;
"No peasant would
Ever walk the moon, would they?"
But at least
Rain was to come soon,
He knew.
(A story about the immortal Shri S.C. Bose)
