A Voice in the Dark | Shubhodeep Pal

What if you realize people will never understand you as you are? What if you realize that people don't realize? That sometimes they don't care. Sometimes they don't think. And sometimes they don't know what they they say. Sometimes people don't appreciate you for not being the things that you can be. For not being what you don't need to be. Should you act hurt? Surprised? Disappointed? Or at the end, should you just carry on without giving it a thought? Sometimes you don't need to tell people everything about yourself. Should you tell? And whom should you tell? But what if those things inside you begin to suffocate you? How do you release them without becoming an object of pity? What if thinking about certain things make you want to weep? Should you weep? Should you carry on? It's not easy to make a distinction between the necessary and the extraneous at most times. Sometimes, it's impossible... Sometimes you sit down and think of how you have faced ...

strange, white pigeons lurking under dead skies and vultures wheeling- devouring thoughts with myopic eagerness. residual habits dying under the dull pressure of anticipated relief- and somewhere under less dead skies, knowingly macabre thoughts curdle and become less grotesque

piano notes under the greyness of a wet sky and within warped walls of a room, the mustiness of yellowed paper, and glazed eyes on the whiteness of cement; and somewhere on a scratched, faded wall, tired hands resting in the hope of regaining hope.

The clock has stopped. But then, it had broken a somnolent decade ago. Time has stopped— it was supposed to continue unimpeded: ad infinitum, ad nauseam. The cat does not stir on the thornless hedge— It’s frozen midway through an unfinished yawn of shattered semi-expectation: its blackness scares wheeling birds in their already hesitant flight. The half-melted sun is stationary in the gelid rain— rain that turned to sleet last summer… The gutters are still overflowing since the fetid, burning rains this monsoon— the last rains ever…

Prologue: It was once 1757. After years, this year will also have been a year . After many years, many years would have been many years. And yet the cycle would continue.Because rules do not exist to exist, they exist to rule. And death is inevitable. ~ Rain is crashing down portentously on the tin roof of the outhouse... Rain and sleet have become indistinguishable in the little light that still remains. Dusk is long past: Twilight is dwindling with traces of dark uncertainty. The smell of death is in the air: musty, yet unnervingly fresh as always … Suddenly, as it always happens, a scream rends the fabric of the mad night. Almost quite as sudden is the appearance of the hulking man dragging his legs as if they had been recently broken. Without halting the man looks down at his broken watch. “Yes, it’s time.” He utters clearly and continues limping ahead. As an afterthought, he stops for a moment and unfastens the worn leather strap of his watch and flips it over in his palm. On th...