Amrendra Pandey
​​​Autumn 2017

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Dark Corners
 
This is the beginning of the 7th century. The night when I felt a draught coming from
the mountains. And in it, the pages of an ancient anthology are fluttering and
hovering in the moonlight.
At the end of an empire, I watch a desert fox digging a hole and the wind howls. The
silvery mirage of silence dancing and rambling at the far flat end.

This is the six decades of repetitions and riddles. The hexagon. A library containing
books in unknown language sinks slowly in the marsh.
But its white reflection on the lake-water grows larger and larger in time.

And in it grows another world. Or many worlds. With the whirls, with many shapes
of clouds, with boomerangs which are thrown again and again into the sky.

Where I walk in the evening March wind, I walk in the September nights when the
moon comes up, rises above the window glasses of this colony. Dogs sit near grocery
stores. Peddlers and shopkeepers barter food and tea with unknown travelers. Shout
names which drift and vanish in the squares, roads, balconies. Ladies dress for the
dance, sweet sound of rustling stays among the boughs, and a man crosses the road
for attending the cinema. Or many men and women did.

It feels incredible that it happened. Any of it. The appearance of scenes one after
another. Every person is coming from the past, and yet appears simple without
contradictions -

Like the presence of nothingness, obvious and unverifiable.

Like the time when I was going to the office in the placidity of trees and sky, and I
was left with an image of myself as a boy,
who is standing still on the ground, who is surrounded by other boys and above him a
swarm of dragonflies.
They are saying to this child - you will remember us one day,
you will remember this wetness of the wind, this whiteness of sky through our wings.

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Pencils

In the evening Ivory gulls rest on the rocks and dream. In their dreams, they see a
sailor who drowned with his ship in a storm. A day in the third week of November.
After a long sleep, waves are hitting the shore asking about the hour, about the year.

On the East-road, a lady strides in a thin human current. An orange kite moves
upward and makes a translucent arc in the sky. Two girls, one in a yellow frock and
other in a brown coat, recede along the coast, each carrying the coloring books of
Geography.

It is six thirty-five in Marine Drive. (You hear the waves, the land, the air. They are
saying something, spieling, stammering. You rush through the streets hearing a story,
descriptions of the characters. And suddenly you stop by the thought of muteness of
everything. In the midway. At the end. There is a visible reality in outlines of the
maps, colors of the posters, tracks. And then there is none.)

The white lights are turned on in 2nd street shops. Roads are filled with glowing neon
lamps at a constant separation, as a soft guide. Today the wind is strong, and boys are
running swiftly without slippage. The evening is gradually becoming more clear in
the waning light.

On the roads, cries of birds, traces of dulcet sound of forest river, rasping sounds of
leaves, papers, metals, where every two things batter each other. Inside the glass
doors, glasses in cold hands slide smoothly on the silk tables, eyes listen to the soft
steps and pauses behind.

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