2023—Even though the calendar proclaimed the coming of spring, the burning heat pricked our skin. It was a season of seminars in our department, and the bright scholars with their bright students were organizing these glamorous festivals of knowledge. Naturally the seminar without the glitz of a foreign language fell on those students far removed from academic glitterati, a handful of scholars, and one cool professor with a can-do attitude. So we thought, if there must be a seminar, then we must come with a play, and if there is a play, there must be a song. After much cajoling, one of our scholars conceded and composed the lyrics for us. After days of editing, rewriting that delicate dough of literature, and rehearsing with a guitar on one of our friends' rooftops, the song that we now know gradually emerged. A scrappy song for our scratchy play. And yet when the song was performed, we could see tears rolling and heads swaying.

Breathing time: There is no time to breathe in this era of fast-paced reels and polluted air. News, incidents, and accidents. Who would have thought that anyone would remember this song from a play that is less than thirty minutes long with a mere hundred people for its audience?

The remnants of that performance lingered fragmentedly in shaky camera phones. And yet often in the corridors of our university, in gatherings of friends and colleagues, and in half-empty classrooms, we have heard this tune floating again and again. People were asking for those recordings, students were singing along, and the song simply went on being sung. A year went by, and in a gathering after yet another academic festival, one of our alumni, from the same department, from the same university, heard this song and finally dropped the proposal—let us record this song.

A lot of time has passed since then, and a lot of people joined us in singing this song. The tune that was once a streamlet now flows with delight like a fountain. The years have passed, and the seasons have changed. After a long, long, and arduous journey, it is time again for the song to reach the people. In the battle of remembrance and forgetting, as the cross of remembering passed on to the shoulders of technology, memory was lost forever. This song has the gift of memory and melody.

~ Sarbajit Ghosh

translated by Sagnik Saha (2025)

Long before the market recognized eco-consciousness, eco-friendly products, and the profitable habits of advertising, the relationship between humans and nature was being destroyed in the hands of the powerful. Whether it is for the king's garden or on the pretext of drowning in the tide of development, land is being taken away, and people are being displaced from their natural habitat. The fact that Natura  Naturata, the very basis of our life on earth, is not a mere provider of utilities but a totality within which we find ourselves and beyond our physical selves, will return as a metaphysical imagination when we are severed from it and is quite obvious. Even though thunder does not strike at the moment of this severance, even though the trees and the birds and the bees do not scream and rise up in revolt, it is assured that retribution for this violence, for this severance, is stored, and the day of judgement will arrive!

Where there was once a river, there is now a lake with a dam. Across the concrete wall, water is leaking into the sky at the command of that impeccable machine. Tourism and Instagram, syndicates and permits, merchandise and pride of the country are beaming. From Narmada to Kaptai, from Teesta to Sindhu, from Brahmaputra to Damodar, water is not only life but also the pincers that tighten the life out of humans, and these humans have been washed away; their kinsmen and the land have returned like ghosts from exile, holding on to their memories. And those who have complained found the Lord Himself fading in front of the ruins, in the line for khichdi. Is it possible to redeem ourselves by planting trees in front of the media? What can and should be done? Do you think it is impossible to sing this song in such grief and anger?

~ Sarbajit Ghosh

translated by Sagnik Saha (2025)

March'24. The songs.

In one of those drunken gatherings, at the  parking lot, after the completion of an academic seminar, I heard the two songs. The setting was much like the ones, we used to have, when I was a student. The guy who was singing, I knew him only quite faintly, from my time when I used to teach. Only as someone I smiled at, if we crossed our paths. Nothing more.

I asked him to sing them again. The songs had that melancholy feeling. It could well be the intoxication, but there was something to those two songs. In his scrappy voice, Zidan sang as I listened like a ‘small kid with his elder brother’s walkman’. Completely mesmerised.

The tunes were not very unique. But the words were so well stitched through them that it created the magic. So I asked him, naïvely, “Where can I listen to them? YouTube? Spotify?” He nodded with an embarrassed smile. So, I questioned him, being as formal as I could, “Is it the motivation or the lack of funding?” Zidan smiled further, with a sense of shy.

November'24. The studio.

The chorus was ready, after several months of backyard rehearsals. Calculating the cost, I had secretly scaled down the production, from a broken theatre to a recording studio. They did not question. But the

moment it was planted in their heads that it was to be recorded in a studio, the question of easy short-cuts came into consideration. After all, studio recordings can hide a lot of your flaws.

It was a failure. The recording session. And I was disheartened. But so were a few, from the group that I had already become quite well acquainted with. Mehuli met me one day and said, “Let’s give it another try.”

I realised that ‘the same process of getting things done’, might not be the right approach.

April'25. The paraphernalia.

Finally, we recorded the first song in a really silent apartment, near Jodhpur Park. The format of an FNO-styled video was long abandoned. We just wanted to get the song recorded.

Sagnik came up with the idea of a video. He would ask Kashada to paint, on a really long piece of cloth, and then video the painting. He had ideated a paraphernalia which would control the movement of the cloth and the whole story can be seen in a continuum shot. It’s difficult to say what he felt, but it is safe to state that it did not work out that way. I knew how it could be done. I could imagine it. I did not tell him.

~Durjoy (2025)

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Water flowed above earth, earth flowed below water

Life flowed afresh, like fish in the river

Forest shaded the trees, the trees shadowed the forest

Oh Deyo! Your breeze, Your trees, where are they now?

Marching came the city rats, with rollers and drills

Gnawing on the soils and bringing down the hills

Walling up the rivers, drying up the rills

Oh Deyo! Your breeze, Your trees, where are they now?

If there's someone untouched by waters

Who carves out the path from clouds of trouble

Whose words, unuttered, swell a wave in our hearts

Oh Deyo! Your path, Your wave, where are they now?

~ translated by Shreyasi Dasgupta (2025)