Monsoon Mutations

Sometimes, They turn down the lights over this city. At 11:30 in the morning – some might scorn and say ‘Afternoon!’- the sky is the colour of unpolished steel. Tubelights become conspicuous within grocery stores and music shops, just as they do at night. Kolkata is enveloped in a mist of dense water and cloud.

Drops of water drip across my car window, molten and heavy, dissolving everything beyond. Magnificent fern-like leaves drip their green onto a wavy fence holding them in. The red of buses drips onto the roads. The soft sky melts into and mixes into the yellow arcs of taxi roofs. The mime academy dissolves silently afar, without a whisper. Bags of garbage are transformed into grotesque bulbuous masses of wasted colour.

The blue buses flow into the mud, and for a moment, the gray city mutates into only chocolate and blue. Bricks of silver emerge from within golden puddles of soil on footpaths. Umbrellas – black, platinum, fuschia, red and azure suddenly seem to blossom. Broken footwear, the thick sheet of water on my window and balconies swirl. An orange God with a beard and four hands stands solitary against barbed wire stretched along a deserted green street.

The blue lines across yellow taxis become spattered till I fear they will turn green. A dove behind a bus flies into this amalgam of elements.

Thunder cracks and explodes somewhere, and rumbles into the landscape. Vision and sound cease to exist and become a liquid whole.

Where the sheet of water breaks into droplets, everything in the landscape is magnified and condensed at the same time through each of them. Only one spell of rainfall and the city has become fantasy.

If I’m not high on Kolkata, I must be drunk on vintage Cal.