Above the horizon, the evening’s purple contains immeasurable structures. Forms whose difficult translations are believed to be captured in images such as —the washers on the tiger hills, trees of the winding curves, the intruders, horses of the night, ontological whales, the illumined pauses, the false starts. The purple, in steps, turns into blue clouds at larger angles. Beneath it, September finding its expression between two hours—in the street, chat about the day, news. Birds of the last grove, last hill, last land swim in the higher wind. Red-flowering trees, exclusively found in this part of the world, darken. Their branches—floating. The common white flowers gather on the timid road. But past it—sudden unexpected silence. I am with someone. Either a stranger or a person I have always known. We are near a large water body. Its water is black either because of the evening or it is intrinsically black. And its stillness— more real than the details of the place. More real than us. A great iron tower stands in the middle. A stone monument? ( Mysterious inscriptions on its wall that, it seems, can never be understood upon reading.) Its much inkier shadow reaches us, touches the rim before us. Being there, we begin to gesture about something clear, clear like a pair of ducks on an ancient lake, but untraceable now, and in an amicable manner so as not to disturb the quietness. Maybe we were noticing the weather there (to remember?) Perhaps, instructing ourselves to listen to our lives. In our articulations, though, at one point, for some reason, I could not figure out why the shadows in the water shivered. The shivering felt purer than anything present. Next, with a crackling, the tower began to fall toward us. Instinctively, we tried to run away, but in the same breath, we realized that the tower was too tumultuous to run away from. This is the only expression of nothing I know. Inscrutable expression of nothing. So, it is not evident how it ends. Everything screeches? Everything stays silent? Full of words? Thoughtless, like desert night? The balance of the contradictory views always withstands towering above the meaning. But, it is different here between two hours of this evening. Red, white flowers, yellow shrubs in the breeze. Houses, roofs, in whatever I see, whatever is here, the explicit predilection perseveres everything. Advancing the validation as a kicked football in the field, the susurrating dark further thickens on the roads, in the empty corners. With shadows growing resolute under the city’s streetlamps, children on the porch steps do their homework.

…

Amrendra Pandey’s prose poems have appeared in the Ethos Literary Journal, The Bombay Literary Magazine, VAYAVYA, The Bangalore Review, Best Indian Poetry 2018, and others. He received his Ph.D. in molecular physics from Physical Research Laboratory, Ahmedabad, India, in 2015. He worked at the Raman Research Institute, Bangalore, for three years as a Postdoctoral fellow from 2016-19 before moving to Paris for a research position at the Université Paris-Saclay, France. He grew up in a small town in Uttar Pradesh, India.