End of the Marigold

Time moves, leaving nothing behind; a heartless caravan on an endless journey. Our offerings decay at the altar while we wear our slippers outside. 

Is that how Time consummates? Is rot its only offspring? How can it be? Time promises more if we let go. But this is the world of attachments.

And how long do we hold? Time prods us gently, blooms the summer flower, serves the watermelon, telling us to move, but we ignore. Our memories are bright, and trust fragile.

The music of stress, the aroma of trouble, the extravagance of inconvenience attracts us. They fulfil our need to fiddle and correct. We volunteer enslavement to imperfection. What have we touched, if the bolts of life do not singe and blacken our fingers?

What good the nectar, we say, undefended by the bee? What good a path, not lived by thorn and thicket? A sail is smooth in a lifeless ocean.

Not the temple door or its vast halls give us joy; nor your entreating incantations. We owe it to the marigold flower waiting in our reverent hands.

And the flower colours our love. It sees what we feel and feels what we desire. Our hearts sing together on the long roll of hot tar to the wet steps of the camphor shrine.

Our torso be of rust flakes and our path, the reptile’s skin. We walk unflinchingly, heeding not the crushing day, wearing not the drawn night.

Be it the soundless drift of rising smoke or the howling of a visiting storm, our promise is to colour your grey as the sun promises to make a dawn.

To the chittering squirrel, the snipping blade or the long cast of a tree’s shadow, we give each a gift, passing them by.

Twisted rhymes of ominous past, bruised knuckles, battered knees lean on us, crying their heart. We listen. They heard us too, when we were forlorn.

Pillars of the iron roof thump softly, arriving, leaving. Our rolling scape smear light on pallid dribbles of the ancient creature.

Piles and piles of life, stashed in an armpit or a pocket of fortune. What would it be without colour? A basket of coal to burn?

We stand in a queue, waiting our turn of fate, like many around us. Some believe it’s a futile expectation. It has to come. Where will it go? Who else will it embrace?

Yes, you will walk by. One day you’ll walk past someone else. You’ll walk with the shadow and sun, and I wish you a wonderful fortune, my friend. You are my memory and I hope I am yours. We cannot let time steal everything. So you be you and me, me.

Remember that cup of tea.

Or our wading the unstoppable rain.

Remember the conversations in winter’s dark.

Remember you said, you loved the city because of me.

Do you know why? Because I am the city. I am its hour; I am its second; I am its days; I am its seasons; I am its years. 

I am its icon, I am its deity, I am its mirror and I am its image.

But time, we know, is a heartless caravan.

A horde of miscible, function driven boring creatures will soon replace the Kolkata yellow taxi. I prefer its oil stained gaberdine sofas to the cramped interiors of a Hyundai or a Maruti. If only someone retrofits these stately Ambassadors with less polluting engines, and the administration allows them to ply thereafter.