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It Takes a Hundred Years to Love
Outlook
|June 21, 2023
This creative non-fiction essay is about creating memories throughout our lives so that after we die, it becomes less heavy, difficult and empty for the ones whom we are leaving behind. Filmmaker Rituparno Ghosh has written a very simple, beautiful and profound line in the screenplay of the film Memories in March in which he has acted too). He said: If have to go away, can leave a bit of me with you?” This short essay centres around creating memories, many of them

This how a man surrenders to the night, hanging his flesh on the arch of his shoulders-swaying, yawning, THIS falling, smelling, and, turning decay. He carries home the weight of his bread with all other things exhausted under Frankenstein's coat. His chromosome tames the shadow into a recluse-pre-climax, post-climax, and everything else which occupies him in the absence of touch.
The body gradually learns to become immune to the routine of its aloneness-allowing the stubborn night to consume the landmass beneath the underwear. His fingers migrate like a refugee across the generation of bougainvilleas reciprocating his ancestor's sins, birthmark, and last name.
The head turns to the other side of the pillow and bends towards the chest making the body a semicolon. By now it has already adopted the method of revising the secret heaviness within the territory until the neighbour of the body sleeping beside reminds of her face.
Sleep is an elegy on the eyes of a night like this, moonless, starless, loveless-emptying a palm filled with thunder and pride.
This story is from the June 21, 2023 edition of Outlook.
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