With crestfallen eyes, the young boy then asked his father from where melancholy emanates, and the father answered: "The agonies you acquire are the children of elation. If not all, they're the nephews and nieces. 'Tis not the sun just effusing sunlight, but the same sun that draws out the elixir from the oceans and forms the clouds, and the same clouds that take the shape of storms. 'Tis not the aroma enticing the butterflies, but the same fragrance that decides which flower would be plucked first by a lover to give joyance to his cherished. 'Tis not the light just illumining your flesh to perceive yourself in the mirror, but the same light that decides the emergence of the shadow on the other side. The poor Earth has little to produce on its own. So every time you're elated, know that it is burrowed and costs someone else their own contentment, whether animate or inanimate. Every time you're enraptured, know that it's just an altered form of someone else's grief and desolation".
Shayan Das, Excerpt from Origin of Sorrow
But I've lived—thrived half my afternoons wondering whether mom would prepare my favourite dinner for the evening; put up with distances hoping it would make the brief meetings monumental; got through half my exams pondering about the things I would do the night after the last paper; fought extra hours expecting it would help me sleep better. Lord, I no longer wonder why 'tis so easy to give up when you've got nothing to hope for.
Shayan Das
I would rather cherish nightmares than dreams in life for at least the former has the power to wake me up from my sleep.
Shayan Das
Flawed Perfection by Shayan Das
Acrostic: The first letters of each line read vertically downwards spell out my mother's name.
"Your grandfather and I've been together for 56 years", said my grandma one night while showing some tattered photographs from her shabby album. Her eyes sparkled as she went by each page, narrating their first meeting and reliving her girlhood. I picked up one and asked after some time, with a thrill of stupefaction, "What held it, what helped the love between you and Grandpa last so long? ..." "What shall hold love", she chuckled, her eyes still glued on the photographs, as if trying hard to forget about the ephemerality of young romance. "What shall hold love", she continued after a pause, "when love's supposed to hold us? At first, I thought I loved him. Well, I did, perhaps not once but countless times, in a multitude of ways. In fact, he loved me with the same sincerity. But what's more essential is that each time we loved one another, we felt we were loving ourselves. When I trusted him, I felt I was trusting myself; when he promised he would make my dreams come true, he worked all night to make his dreams come true. His pains were my pains, and my insecurities his. When I thought I'd lose him, I felt I'd lose myself; every time he found I was contented, his joys would know no bounds. Throughout our lives, we were busy saving ourselves and ended up protecting each other".
Shayan Das
"Whose death are you more afraid of, my or yours?" the girl enquired and the boy replied, "Yours" whilst whispering somewhere deep within himself, "For darling, I'm the last person to die on Earth. After me none shall die".
Shayan Das
How is it that each time we fall in life we seek someone else in the same condition to console our inner self?
Shayan Das
Saying she had to be loved was an understatement; she deserved to be worshipped.
Shayan Das