In Lake Market, a man’s reputation could be weighed in mustard seeds, measured in fish scales, or, in exceptional circumstances, judged by the length of hair growing from the back of his head. The bazaar woke each morning to a symphony that no orchestra could reproduce. Fishmongers bellowed the virtues of their rohu, vegetable sellers…
Tag: philosophy
Throw My Body in the Gutter
“Throw my body in the gutter,” were the words that kept on throbbing inside Kabir’s head as he stared at the lifeless body of his father. The room was not that small, yet it seemed impossibly claustrophobic considering the hundreds of people who had gathered there to pay their last respects to Shomoresh. The ceiling…
Bagha
At four in the morning, the Ganga does not speak. She breathes. Mist hangs low over her patient waters. The air tastes faintly of wet clay and incense long extinguished. Somewhere in the distance, a conch has already surrendered its cry to the dawn. The Math still sleeps, wrapped in saffron shadows and the smell…
Elephants Beyond The Horizon
It was a smouldering dawn in May over a battlefield strewn with thunder and ruin, 326 years before the birth of Christ on the banks of the river Jhelum, which the Greeks called Hydaspes. The plain was littered with shattered armour and half-buried bodies, the metallic stench of blood heavy in the humid air. In…
The Inverted Ashvattha
Not so long ago, in a pretty little village quaintly nestled in the bosom of nature, occurred a phenomenon most extraordinaire. Back in the day, ‘Sonarpur,’ literally meaning the ‘land of gold,’ was just another unassuming farming coterie in the rural hinterlands of the South 24 Parganas district of the state of West Bengal in…
