Walking home from New Alipore

At a certain hour at night all public transportation formal and informal has given way to a sleeping city save for the taxis that continue to lumber across the nearly barren streets, the heavy gleaming carcasses of the anachronistic ambassadors heaving their bellies across the ruddy asphalt. They are a bit like the young born into a funny noble reincarnation. A new model seems to better belong 70 years ago if only its seats weren't still sheathed in plastic wrap proudly announcing a protracted youth, emblazoned with the words 'gulab' or 'shanto' and the appropriate Indian symbolic imagery of roses or docile elephants.  

Construction workers and occasional crazies set up their ephemeral camps beneath bridges and embankments, their tents either wholly imagined or feigned with a few scraps of newspaper and corrugate, a gampcha draped transparently overhead from a dead tree branch now resigned to its cement encasement, long having quit its slow regurgitation of the bricks of its imprisonment. The radiance of an incandescent light bulb overhead suddenly rejuvenates the muddied colors in the cloth, red and green madras now infused by a yellow light that simultaneously shows the fabric's age and gauzy shoddiness. This is the a flag of a bearer who has foisted it aloft without much thought of imagery of semiotics, of a nation which sleeps beneath crumbling infrastructure perhaps of their own toil, the dirt of perhaps another state still deeply embedded in fingernails stained by dirt and bleached by days. Their dreams, if anyone makes conversation, are definitely not filled the jauntily dancing bears of Bengali, more likely the swift jabs of Hindi. Birds shaking the dust from their wings, shrieking.

Dogs trail behind for a block or a kilometer, sometimes noising hopefully with snouts singed by car exhaust or radiator grills, sometimes barking relentlessly, nipping on the cuffs of my pants. Eventually, reaching the delineation of their territories, the dogs freeze under the glow of the bulbs overhead. They ascribe to a whole set of borders scratched through the streets without thought of the barriers of religion and money that materialize themselves more readily and profusely in apartment buildings shuttered behind endless sets of gates and shanty villages congealing along these perimeters and dividing walls. The dogs stare half distracted, senseless anger rimmed in fluorescence. A pile of rice in the gutter, a prolonged honk in the distance, and the shuffle of lungis in the sticky sweetness of the night, propped knees being reorganized, the gentle nudge of a bedmate.