Aritra Chakrabarti

While you run and you try to hide Plug your ears and chew down your pride While the bell keeps tolling and reaches you still Piercing your ears. Oh! So shrill! Oblivious to your pain, deaf to that noise The world sees your life at a brilliant poise. Eyes hide envy, eyes hide gall Waiting to see your glorious fall. Thousands of ‘friends’ with faces in a book Where your perennial smile they all mistook For the happy heart that you wish you could be Shutting out the noise, the light to see. But your heart is always lonely and the noise tires you out And out of that emptiness happy pictures sprout Like a bed of flowers hiding roots so dry Yet they’d all look brighter the louder they’d cry. Aritra Charkrabarti

Out on the busy road You live in your lonely dream. Walking among the frantic rats You can’t hear them scream. Far away in a good old town Life is still at ease. In the world of fretting souls Your time’s but on lease. Humming to your favourite tune You dream of that old town. While bumping into busy men You’re greeted with a frown. Walking on for a few more steps You trample on a zebra’s face. It hasn’t got any eyebrows yet. You may pass with grace. In that town they sing old songs, They eat and drink and make merry. While you cling on to the few more steps Before the walk gets weary. Another block before you stop And look at the building ahead.   Where they dig up new stones with digital drills And pile them up on your head. A few more walks and internal talks And the walks too will lose their worth When you will carry the weight along And the burden’s what you’ll carry forth. Right beside you there are a head

Up there in the mountains You will find another world Where a chosen few may reach. The path is fraught with perils And the mind is put to test One step at a time. But there’s always a choice: To move on or to turn back. But there’s also a call That one needs to answer Once it finds him In his land of comfort Where the mind is lulled to sleep Till it wakes up to the call- Soft yet steady, ringing in one’s ears That others cannot hear. A chosen pair of ears at a time. It gets frequent. It gets loud. Each passing night And then during the days. It begins to beckon The feet towards the higher lands But there’s always a choice: To move or to drift, to hide or to shift. From known terrain to the new. He too had heard a voice Deep in his sleep On one of the lazy nights After a lazy day. First, he thought it was a dream. Then it grew louder Stronger, deeper. Until he couldn’t ignore it. Wherever he went whatever he did It