Intoxication of Literature

(Soused Dream)

I.

A house has been built
on the borders of my heart—
its doors warped by the monsoon,
its windows glazed with the frost
of sleepless nights.

A child’s cry echoes
in the hollows of my mind.
This is the price of creation:
blood, sweat, and the weight
of a first breath.

REVOLT, the word hums,
lodged in the throat of POETRY.

Will this ache ever end?
Or will the soused dream—
this chariot of ink and longing—
shatter mid-flight?

II.

After a year’s silence, Swapnanil returns to his desk. A poem whispers to him, insistent as a bumblebee trapped in glass. It murmurs in the cadence of Urmimala Mahanta—her verses, which he once loved like a second heartbeat.

In childhood, he dreamed of eclipses—that moment when the moon fights free of the sun’s shadow.

Today, the past sings. It lifts the gauze of his weariness, and for the first time in months, the pen trembles in his hand.

The study door slams shut. Outside, the Luit River snarls against the banks, its currents thick with silt and forgotten myths. Through the window, Swapnanil watches the water twist into eddies, each whirlpool a stanza from Urmimala’s unfinished elegy.

His pen moves without him.

III. The Fairy Tale (As Grandmother Told It)

A king named his daughter Full Moon—born under the whitest night. Her shadow was Full Eclipse, the minister’s son, whose name was scribbled in the dark of an astrologer’s ledger.

At the swayamvar, Full Eclipse refused to compete. "Love is not a tournament," he said. The king struck him. Ten years’ exile.

But the boy knelt by a banyan tree, prayed to Shiva until his knees split stone. The god laughed, erased a decade in ten days, and the lovers reunited.

(When Swapnanil was born at dusk—that liminal hour when Narasimha slew Hiranyakashipu—the village priests debated: Was it an omen of devotion, or a curse of unrest?)

IV. The Unraveling

Valentine’s Day. The tempo to college reeks of sweat and marigolds. Urmimala sits beside him, her shoulder a centimeter from his. Her cheeks flush tomato-red when the conductor leers: "Dhaba trip, miss? The night’s young."

A shopkeeper cackles: "Life needs spice—liquor, lust, a little sin!"

Urmimala flees. The classroom door cracks like a spine.

Swapnanil learns the truth from Anuj the bookseller: "They broadcast it on TV. A girl in a college uniform—caught at the dhaba. Wasn’t her? Looked just like—"

Beneath the Poinciana tree, Swapnanil’s ribs become a cage. Was love ever real? The fairy tale taunts him: Full Eclipse got a miracle. You get rumors.

Yet the pen still itches in his pocket.

V. Negative Capability

At home, he opens Facebook. Urmimala’s status:
"They pixelated my face but not my shame. Let them watch—I’ll write myself clean."

The news scrolls: "False allegation—TRP stunt. Girl’s identity forged."

The page exhales. Swapnanil writes until dawn, the words clotting and unclotting like the Luit in flood.

The revolt was literature. The literature, revolt. Between them, he drowned sober.

Footnotes:

Luit River: Brahmaputra’s tributary, a symbol of erosion and renewal in Assamese lore.

Narasimha: Vishnu’s avatar, slain the demon at twilight—a metaphor for Swapnanil’s liminal existence.

Negative Capability: Keats’ term for embracing doubt; here, Swapnanil’s acceptance of love’s ambiguity.