Autumn Walks

I walked down a long, narrow road by a Roman Catholic cemetery. It was an old Bangalore drizzle, mildly intrusive, a part of the breeze. My forehead felt as if a child was spraying water from a toothbrush. To my left, I could see the stone heads of graves, ordinary names, some with pictures on them. It was a wide, grassy field, gently sloping, and an occasional tree in between. The wall was broken in places, old injuries from a time when the long dead were alive. To my right ran a rail track, a little away, on a long, horizontal mound. I would suddenly find a train by me, as if it crept upon me in the morning dark. Between the tracks and the road was indecent shrubbery, dogs playing in the garbage.

After some rain, if that spray could be called rain, you find an exceptional clarity in the air. The colors of houses and skies become richer, dust settles to the raw earth. The green shrubs by the tracks gave way on the other side to light colored homes of unknown people. Perhaps a woman arranging books on an old shelf, staring out of the window at the tracks, an unknown stranger walking on the other side, by the green cemetery.

When the rain got a little heavier I noticed black leaves under my feet. They had fallen from the trees and tried to merge with the tar road. They were wet from rain, blackened by many feet, split in places, and covered the narrow road. A few people stood by a grave, colorful umbrellas open above them, remembering their dead. Their cars were parked outside, similar colors, some with drivers sitting inside. Even the rich feel pain. It is normal though, to discount their loss, which is compensated by an undignified privilege. As always, you would find the cemetery dogs stretching about if it weren't raining. If you walk by the cemetery at night, you will find them providing some unconditional company to the dead.

I don’t remember the color of the sky now. It had, at times, the diffused tone of Kieslowski’s films. But there was a richness of color no movie can communicate. It glowed over the mounds of garbage the educated needed the scavenging castes to remove. Of all the ingredients that make our arid utopias, a complete absence of dirt and garbage is surely one of the foremost. Yet, our reality has mountains of it. Our waste lives longer than us.

Walking yesterday, in Calcutta, down the Thana connector, from the eternal bypass to the university, I remembered my Bangalore walks. I remembered how the long cemetery walk would end with the dusty constructions of Old Madras road. It is a wide road now. I have known that road a long time. Now, it is a construction beach with visions of oceanic cement. The metro rail extends above, blocking the reddening sky. Stones and mud line the sides, with an occasional girl in color tiptoeing across them on her way to work at a metal–glass office. As I walked down the Calcutta connector, at one end bearing the burgeoning ugly suburbs, and at the other end the older homes of the elite, I saw remnants of an older time, kept still by the larger city’s stagnancy. We would like to think of these little huts by the small green ponds as ruins. They are ruins of negligence. Yet, they are far superior to our inadequate visions of modernity.

At one point, the street heaving under me, I found to one side, straw figures of mythical characters. Perhaps Goddesses, their hips in an eternal dance, undressed and discarded after the festival. The bodies were incomplete, heads and torsos here and there. The straw strings wrapping the limbs sat there by the dusty street, among vegetable peels. They lay there, before the oncoming winter, far more beautiful than when displayed, and suddenly possessed of life.