While much has been philosophized, poeticised and practicalised about "truth" and while we have tried to truthify it further by adding "only but the truth" to it, turns out it is mostly bland -- no, not bitter, nor beautiful. If India were ever to wear a necklace formed of its most darling states, Bengal would certainly be somewhere around centrepiece -- the artistic, intellectual ornament.
Well, it is the truth! Bengal could not have been Bengal without Tagore and without Teresa, two surnames that brought it to global prominence, which were now the cause of regional shame. Love stories belonged between the ageing pages of novels stacked in College Street, and in the Page 3 of newspapers, to the trashy cinema which provoked the wrong message and of course, in the dying rate of interest at banks. Two people, at the helm of their respective careers -- Tagore, a billboard painter, and Teresa, a governess, could never have allowed their local train's general compartment love to reach a routine of togetherness.
Their surnames held the legacy of liberal humanity, their names -- nothing. They were fish caught on hooks, fluttering, flapping, hopelessly trying to fly. They had nowhere to go. They were dawn flowers -- unappreciated, mostly -- dried by the noon time there were visitors. They ached to be elsewhere.
Mourning was never a choice for those who had to earn their dinner daily. People mourned at Tagore's death and at Teresa's, not one at their's. There are no monuments erected for them, and that is the truth, sometimes people paid with their names, their religions, their cowardice and their conditioning. It is that blatant. They end forgetfully.
If only truth were not a true story.
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