The Ruins of My City
I visited an old factory the other day.
As I grow more decrepit (and senile!) by the day, I guess my seduction towards things which lay decaying grows stronger. I gravitate towards what is crumbling, lies damaged. But. It could also be the city I stay in. Because Calcutta is the ultimate collapse of a city as an idea (or of an idea as a city!), it is the black hole created for self-perdition by the most intelligent people in the planet, it is the orgasmic death-wish of a populace which just doesn’t seem to understand or care.
Calcutta celebrates its decrepitude - the poets lose themselves over morose rhymes of past glories, singers break their voices over inequality in society, shiny cafés hold soirées full of indignant voices cursing religious extremities. Everybody in Calcutta believes they can change the world - even as their own house is burning.
But I digress.
I was in this completely uninhabited piece of decaying heaven, rotting elegantly beside the river, which had already eaten away acres of its land. It seemed to revel in its wasting - bracketed appropriately, as it was, by a famous Shiva temple on one end and a candy-coloured dargah on the other. In-between lay its geography of moss-covered ceilings, cracked walls, tree-infringed verandahs, shattered glasses, and steel ladders rusting in deep shame.
There was an old Maruti 800 ( the kind I’d driven for the longest of times) with a plant coming out in full pulchritude from one of its smashed windows. Symbolically, it lay with a majestic demeanour, rotting but not without dignity.Â
I could have laid on these grounds, and let the weeds and the tendrils encircle me, and pull me into the ground. Just the way this city I loved was being pulled into its slow extinguishment. In its demise, I could feel the romance of its people, who deliberately refused to leave it. Love can so easily be suicidal.
These ruins were symbolically the final resolution and reconciliation. Because we finally become what we desire to be.
Here’s a poem on Calcutta, which has got immense love - and which I love dearly. Read it here!
Beyond tragic! The Calcutta of the late 60s when I was a college student, was vibrant. The atmosphere was charged, the students driven... to preserve a space that had so much character and possibilities. Today, I do dread the city... which I haven't visited since over four years. It's lost in a morass of indifference.
"Everybody in Kolkata believes they can change the world. Even when their own house is burning." Perfectly expressed.