Ghosts of the Ganga

Ghosts of the Ganga

-I-

The Ganga is your feline ghost lover

slicing through the heart of the city

caressing and culminating existence.

The Ganga is your blood-mother,

dressed in her widowed veil.

Translucent,

transgressing,

fleeting,

transforming lives.

Ferrying tidings of the sleepy sun

dissolving his orange petals in death,

as the dots in the city murmur on her banks;

halogen evenings on clay

and the vibration of rails,

a city conjured up in the white mist,

as she protects her banks with her flapping shroud

and the lights in the city twinkle;

the mercury lamps of a ghost city,

the stadium towers, the floating noise,

the soft halo of the marble dust palace the breeze

refracting life; unreal in the movement

of the swaying bridge in the winds.

Those moments of light, life, unity,

staring at the cityscape like a speechless assassin

and watching the buildings rise and melt

like Illion’s flute,

conjugating the matter and spirit.

The river is your flowing Goddess,

stopping at the land of death,

and carrying the ashes beyond life.

The river is the metropolitan blood of the city,

purifying the crystal ghosts

and ghosts of time,

ghosts of the blood wedding,

ghosts of the violet princess,

ghosts of the orange cat,

ghosts of the sleepy sun.

Ghosts of you and me.

Driving insane through the haunted streets,

the Bypass swerves like a ghost tongue

vanishing beyond headlights;

or the little violet figure,

transparent in the wind on Dhakuria Bridge;

the little ghost-seller blowing out his oil lamp

at Gariahat Market as he walks towards Golpark,

sleep-walking almost, beyond an earthly destination;

they all feel this strange presence,

all a part of this strange dance of ghosts

that flow within a river through the city.

Strangeness her mask,

strangeness her face and flow;

the Ganga is your ghost lover

raging in her sacred tumult

through the nerves of the city.

-II-

Jelly nerves of the city

throbbing at her synapse

with nitrate grins,

post-modern, post-colonial, post-structuralist

problems of existence,

post-temporal blues,

political ghosts of killing,

wherever you look

there’s no left, right or centre;

just a ghost-land of struggle

for the crystal noose.

Red is no longer green,

Green is no longer red,

(what happened to crystal blue?)

just the elegy of crystals

with their viole(n)t descendant

to violate beauty.

Yet the metro gushes in the underworld

carrying semi-dead walkers

like a blood demon.

I can’t care less, sitting with you

in this tiny café

and staring into the ghosts,

form and un-form

in the hollow of your eyes.

-III-

The secret of Time

is to travel like crystal impulses,

transmitting the sky-ghost,

the night-car, the radio and cold pendulum ash;

the secret of time is the happiness of the walrus,

the violet smile, the orange cat, the blood wedding

and the little yellow cab at Landsdowne

beneath the dissolving sun

and the love-making of crystals

beside the Ganges;

the post-colonial ghosts of the nitrate grin

with the metro rushing in her night-dress

when you fiddle with the safety-pin in bed.

Everything then dissolves like the sun

when you dissolve into me;

arm in arm,

lips on lips,

breath in breath,

a single static reality

sans time, sans crystals, sans ghosts.

Transmission of truth,

telepathy of the ghost city.

In the name of Time, Crystals

and the Holy Ghost,

the trilogy of truth,

triangle of existence

and transcendence,

oblique madness.

To be mad is to see the truth,

when the green walls of the asylum

and the fluorescent lights

and crystal vapours dissolve

in isolation and depression,

the syringe fiddles with the blood veins of the city,

and you dream up the trinity of harmony;

the ghosts, the river, the crystals, the love-making

are then mere spectral dots of existence

like the murmuring ghost-lights over the Ganges,

twinkling, throbbing with life

in synchrony with the swaying bridge.

Even the moon sways then

and shines on the violet crystal,

the clock-desert records super-truth



The city drenched in her quinine grin

is then a secret flux of fading light,

floating in and out of your consciousness.