A poem of longing and desire, by Tirthankar, exclusively for Different Truths.

At the farthest end of a shimmering road,
vague and hardly audible
was a song sung by someone I didn’t know –
at the farthest end of a burning road.

The song was a tune afloat
in the eddying air, like the skirt
of a whirling gipsy woman,
red, blue, green, white,
all shining in a dizzying cloud.

What shimmered that day
at the farthest end of the lonely road?
Unattended and scarcely heard,
the skirt, like a gipsy’s, glowed. 

Picture design by Anumita Roy, Different Truths

Tirthankar Das Purkayastha

Tirthankar Das Purkayastha (b. 1956) is a Professor of English (retired) at Vidyasagar University, West Bengal, India. He has so far published three books of poetry in Bengali and many scholarly articles in academic journals. His translations of poems by Sunil Gangopadhyay have been published, with the poet’s approval, in South Asian Review and Indian Literature, a Sahitya Akademi journal. He has been regularly publishing poetry in all the leading journals of West Bengal.