The Red Insignia

There many things which piss people off but me nothing pisses me off, you know why because I was pissed off.", a usual statement for Dipnarayan or Dip as the people preferred calling him. He was the usual Bengali intellectual, long panjabi and jeans pant. His side bag trawling behind him and his head and imagination in the clouds. The fool was so busy feeling sorry for himself that he had already gone on a step of self-degeneration, lost his talent of poetry and become just another half-drunkard Government clerk who tried to act as an individual intellectual and all he had become was an afficonado of art which he did not understand and drank country liquor for reasons he did not know and took smoking to show his over-filled brain. Yakked and yakked about art and politics he did not realise or know and basically had become a brainless imitator with the age old quarrel of who is better Nazrul or Rabindranath and tried to show a knowledge of acting which he had lost. However, he truthfully did feel a melancholy and depression in his bachelorhood and that was the reason for his pseudo-intellectualism for he was a true intellectual in a forgotten age and had talent which he himself no longer remembered. He was on the footsteps of greatness in poetic world and had published two volumes to rave reviews to supplement his great collection of short stories but he lost his pen and to know the reason for it we all need to see the last story he published, "The Red Insignia". The cause that racked his life was the most foolish lie we tell to ourselves, the greatest delusion "Love" which but deludes us from the ultimate truth whether we like it or not, "Lust" but enough Bengali romantics every day fall prey to this their own delusion and some thankfully take their lives and remove a load from Mother Earth but others like Dipnarayan become even more the cumbersome and useless load of the society and Mother Earth but lets forget all this and read the story as he had penned it. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Surkumar was born of the pagan race. He loved the pomp and fervour of his religion. He loved the colours and the enthusiasm of his festivals. He certainly loved each second that he spent in decorating the red vermillion powder on his black mother made of stone. He loved all people and in college was well known as the poet-in-town. Why did you have to break this colour with the grey confines? Why did you have to give birth to the red bird in his heart which would never fly? Why did you have to be his life when you would only take it away? Oh! Why did you think of your soul when you burnt his own to live but ashes? Ahhh Shaharzad, why did you have to fleece him alive? He was a man often told not to be born in this world for his grey and chrome confines had he coloured to the colour of his soul. He cared not for love to one of flesh when the Greens and the Blue and the Yellow were for him to love. He loved the black of the asphalt mundane, the blue-grey of the smoke fatal often to be found. He loved so much that to Love he had not learned and yet you such fertile ground found. Shaharzadddddddddd those black gazelle eyes that burned his soul, why did you possess them, can you tell? Your black garb that only allowed that red fire in those smouldered black eyes did expose and the baying hunt that in them seemed to burn as the gazelle that tears apart the delicate bush when chased of the baying race. So did you burn the defense of intellect and studied disdain and desire for desire to rule. You burned amok the saffron cloak and in it put the red of love. Surkumar's world seemed to take flight on the red wings of the flaming bird that screamed amok its call to race and challenge to the world as it rose over the confines of frey barb and the brown brown earth that seemed to real to reality know. The tongue of flame burnt Surkumar's throat as out shot the long suppressed words. The family who had long he forsook rejoiced their son's return as the red bird burnt words on his page with its flaming wing being his pen. The exultation, the joy he had never known warbled as his tongue flew into words he could hardly comprehend and plots that he hardly knew. The world stood stunned as the Golden Giant rose long in the brown Earth conceived. The burning ectasy of seeing nothing but those pair of eyes every moment of the day and the soul that burned produced the ash of the letters that every day did suceed. Surkumar was not desirous of this Shaharzad, why then did you burnt his soul? Why soil the burning flame and go after it had burnt to an inferno that consumed its own source? Ahh! Shaharzad, Surkumar could not forget your gazelle grace or your slippery loss. For your name was imprinted on his sanguine flow and he burned in the flame that you started but left to lose. He had not thought but you were of the race of submission. Submitted you did to the curs that had hounded your life. You submitted, oh! you did to that degenerate septugenerian on your patriarch's call. You remember the grey cell where Surkumar was put to the black bars for requesting that grey populace of your blood for you. You remember those purple spots that for you he endured. Do you remember him on his knees in the market in front of the Grey beard that had brought you to this world? Do you remember offering to him his soul's religion to abandon and submit and be of the submission's race for the grace of your life to him? And then came those black shadows that pierced and broke his body apart and tore him to the white sheets and green walls for days but yet he lived. He did see you again on the day you and your groom saw each other's face. You showed for the first time ever your expectant ever haunting face and he burned ever more to remember that red draped gold trussed phase. Today Surkumar did float on the black gimlet boat on the pagan goddess at hand and he but wondered what was life when life had flown out of hand. The face that would ever haunt his open or closed penthouse lid as the Avonian bard had said, had come with him to haunt him ever, his failed immortal damsel in distress. Those haunting eyes his soul had burnt and left him to burn alone while she seemed to wait beyond Baitarani and beyond Styx to wait for him to alone. What is left of ravaged life when life itself chooses to escape.............................................. Shaharzad. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dipnarayan's this story burnt a wave of criticism as some literally claimed that he had mistakenly written a story but was attempting to write a poetry while some tried to ban it feeling that he was insulting a race of people. He just never managed to explain to the people to treat the story as story and not to get all insulted or overtly critical about his narration of a fiction that he described to be enigmatically fact and yet a fiction. This too was overtly criticised that he was trying to sell his mystique and here the poor fool had tried to write a story on the stuppidest concept of love or the lady-eternal-in-her-wait for she truly waited eternally for the appreciation, the knight-in-arms, which never came. Fate indeed. The fool was possibly forever discouraged of the idea of writing that would gain so much infamy and chose to simply quit his pain and wallow in self pity untill one day he mercifully reduced the Earth of its useless load and with a cerebral stroke just rolled over and died.There was no hulla-ballo and no press till seven days after his death and atleast he had some peace in death, no critic came with his piercing needles to divide his pain atleast. Nobody knows why he had left writing but he certainly wrote one word on one paper while dying..."Shaharzad".