Goddess

It starts well over a half moon and a full before. The Goddess opens her eyelids through sharp glass and crumbling concrete. Through coloured paper plastered all over the city. Billboards stand up, as if by their own accord, and blow the verbal conch shell to passers by. There is something in the wind, as it sweeps by gray figures of clay and seems to imbue it with divinity and makes them sparkle and open their eyes. Wooden skeletons begin to rise over the ground, reaching for the pink clouds of twilight.

Then Calcutta begins to bring down its shutters. Footsteps echo for a while on lanes cut off by stick and rope barricades, and then get lost in the thundering landscape of reverberating drums and many million footsteps falling around all the shrines in the city. Strings upon strings of light are thrown across building like confetti, and they transform brick and paint into luminous, phantasmal life for four nights. There is a lane above which magnificent, large orbs of electric fireflies float. The lights make endless dazzling boulevards of the typically dark alleys, ending only in the spread out, intricate, abode of the Goddess.

The skeletons have transformed into unimaginably elaborate castles for a celestial queen. Hung with tassles, sparkle powder glued to every visible surface, panels carved into ancient, medivel and modern patterns. An entire history of architecture expressed in four scores, a dozen and four hours.

to be continued....