Narcissism.

Each moment an insane excess. Each vision a fleeting attachment. Each gust of wind like love.

I was standing on the side of the Rabindrasadan Platform, kneeling into the dark alleyway from which the train beckoned. Its funny how at the back of each and every person waiting for the train at a particular instant in time, in one particular place, there is that one common concrete anticipation for the rushing sound of the train. For the sudden blinding lights to break through the darkness that we look into. And when the train arrives, wooing its beckoners with a gust of wind, and the familiar smell of damp metal on a rainy night(light rain, not heavy rain), everyone there takes a moment. They take a moment to see the many faces within the train rush past them like an illusion of life, like a fleeting moving dream, until in one sickening thud, the magic thins away and grants you the relief of your everyday life. You bathe in the wind, and while you do so, your mind is blank and bliss, noise is gone. And then you step in. To life as you know it, and as you grasp the firm metal contours of the metro, it really is a reaffirmation of the truth, of the only option we have, of the slow motion of a train, of your own identity, of you.

As I look up at the sky, I seem to be lead into a belief that my memory bears the colour of the sky. It is crimson, but strangely mordant and harmless, stretching aimlessly. As I look straight up at the sky, suddenly I see a ray of silver. It is only an unassuming drop of water. And before I can think, the drop of water must take advantage of my slow reflexes and seep into my eyes.

And suddenly, I prise myself out from this strange Tarkovskian melancholy. I choose to look at the Volvo bus that struts majestically through the road. It is the new prince of the road, and everybody gapes at it, admiring its gentle grandour, its wild silence, its control of life. He is a prince of high demand, and must thus bear the irk of those not so well off. His lowly colleage, an auto driver, shrugs him off as an irksome fly and moves on. Such are the travesties of life, I presume. One must learn to accept defeat.

But Volvo doesn't care. The winner takes it all, after all. He has too many detractors to be bothered by them and so he flatters his admirers. He promises them the many wonders of a roadtrip. People gaze and dream. A silent dream.

What is beauty? Does it depend on how you perceive it? Does it last long? I found beauty in a drab grey lampost tonight when I was meandering outside in my campus. I touched it, and it had wrought in itself a coldness. A frightening coldness. But it was remarkably beautiful as well. It amazed the hell out of me.

And finally, just on the brink of night, my hands on the dirty creased railings of karunamoyee bridge, I stared as far as I could into the narrow, slim expanse of Tolly Nullah. For those not in the know, throughout the years, Tollynullah is the river where human waste of a thousand years have been dumped. Strangely enough though, on this night, while the rest of the sky was a still red, devoid of purpose, the sky above this wasteland was a shock. Was it red at all? I can't tell. And beyond it, the horizon was breathing softly into the day's end, quietly amidst the insane flapping of wings and screeching of birds, all in a rush to go home. It faded away slowly. Deep in my mind, from where the silly questions arise, I asked myself what this place might have been a good two hundred years ago, when the late British engineer(er, Mr Tolly was an engineer and tollyguange and tollynullah are named after him), had stood here and had taken a long last look at the waters that would soon submerge beneath all of history's dung. If indeed he had any idea about the gravity of his own decisions, of the manner in which time would account for it all in its own inexorable way. And the other silly thought that presented itself was if he really wanted to do it. After all, he must have had a whole world of choices. Why this one?

As night fell, I turned around and moved away.

It was only later that I realized I had lost my mind for a while.