A night of smog, cold, and darkness, stars hidden, left people shut inside under quilts and rags in an old town on the river Hooghly, opposite of Calcutta, the city of palaces, processions, of film makers, artists, artistes, and poets. This town experienced in its innumerable, snaky, sleazy, lanes, the trilling of draughts, drifted from the North. No dogs, no drunks, there in the streets, dimly lit with streetlamps in great gaps between one and the other, just looked a place, derelict, as after a battle fought and lost, and as if surreal. At the bank of the river, on the extreme east, the sprawled vast stretch looked the most uncaring for, with a mass of trees, some of which deciduous, some still green, and thick with foliage, having underneath, …show more content…
Not alone he, his two colleagues would have to suffer the same fate, not present right then. Between the two one was an old priest, ninety years old, bald, toothless, and skinny, and go home as the cold became irresistible in the evening, but his home nearby, rather a din, stretched from an exterior wall of highly walled grounds. The other, a young guy, bovine in nature, dark, curly, robust, left this place between dog and wolf for his shanty nearby, whereupon into his gable room in bed, perhaps now with his wife, a paper like white, bony, but a tigress to become, if her hubby left her suddenly to join his duty, and that cost the guy to have nailing, and bites that brought out blood, and after clotting, blobs looked as if tiny rubies assembled on his chest, nape and smalls of the back. Still, he looked a sailor in the sea of fire in his lower clothes terminating at the knees; hands held a punt; and a hair band to check cowlicks. It happened before a lit pyre, but the three just now were with cedars, ashes, dry white petalled flowers woven as a wreath with dark green cedar leaves, and lit with a dim lamp on the lone lamp-post in the grounds at the back of that 10 ft by 10 ft room, the exterior of which was coloured with