17 January 2023
Foreword: Years after the novella has been finished, I still struggle to get a complete clear picture regarding what Lux Populi is about. Is it a landscape of surreal decay or an account of moribund psychosis of a serial killer? Something else entirely? But as I'm writing the foreword 3 years later, I'm inclined to think it's an impossible romance played out in a theatre of cruelty.
The narrator is an old man in his deathbed, recalling his years through an interdimensional lens darkly. Having passed his whole life as a hitman, he resorts to find the symbols within in ensuing delirium. Hence, personal history turns into a myth; situations and circumstances turn into a black field of cosmic indifference. At the core of it, is his longing for connection and meaning. People in his history appear as symbols and mutate into images of himself. And the profound longing for connection culminates with the second narrator of the novella- the nameless girl with turbulent familial history who died from an automobile accident. Ultimately, no resolution is found but the most primal of all truths: death.
Even though there are different perspectives / characters here such as the material old man himself at present time, the symbolic old man as an immortal stranger whose walks never stopped, the second old man at the shore as paternal anchor of history, the beach mother as decaying maternal compassion, the general as crestfallen authority, the hoodlum leader as challenger of authority, and finally, the nameless girl as the tragic fate of beauty; although there are all these characters here, there is intentionally nothing separating the first person perspectives (or otherwise) of the different characters, as the novella is meant to be a feverish recall of a man who is dying alone.
Both works are very different, between themselves and in relation to mine, but the two inspirations behind Lux Populi was Leo Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" and Jibanananda Das' "গোধূলীসন্ধ্যার নৃত্য". I feel like what both these two and mine have in common, regardless of their differences across form and content, is that one thing is very essential in them all: the transience of personal and impersonal universe.
I.
"No summaries or their scriptures;
Over this worn plum table,
And its resinous twilight
Drips: candle's molten white blood!"
Funtitled #48
Affairs Mk. 3 XII / বীর চট্টলা