There is this reckless indulgence I religiously display, during the weekends, in the river-bank boulevard between Kumartali and Ahiritola. Because, I see, in the localised ‘sinister facades of the sketches of Victor Hugo or the paintings of Monsu Desiderio’, the footprints of history and the harmony of paradoxes, as Calcutta embraces itself for another of Rudyard Kipling’s dreadful nights. I call it the paradoxical boulevard of faith. Prejudicially, winters make for the most beautiful of sojourns through it. So, I am going to walk you through a leisurely February stroll. Typically an hour shy of dusk, I make my way past the rows of tongue-less Kalis staring into space. The scent of clay, incense, dried flowers, winter, and dusk infuse a beautiful saudade in the February air above the narrow alleys in the hamlet of the god-makers. The scent persists to the famous ghats by the Ganges, and hovers over the baroque choir of colonial relics. Standing in the most schizophrenic bastion of the undead Raj, slightly misplaced in my ritualistic tweed dress and Oxford shoes, I take in Calcutta—the Mistress, the Madman, the Mendicant, the Merchant. My favourite thing about this enclave is its unabashed heterogeneity in consequential homogeneity—how piety and sacrilege, the meek and the majestic, birth and death, meeting and parting go hand in hand within that tiny stretch. From the heartland of this voyeuristic beautifully unfinished, the untold bygone props out of the monotonous mundane and goes on a ravenous rampage of everything revoltingly real, oblivious, and modern. Andrei Tarkovsky once made a film on sights and sounds like these. Nostalghia, he called it. Dimly lit jhopris of telebhaja, futchka, and flowers hemline, the Imperial Wailing Wall of ruined church spires, marble colonnades of bonedi baris, stained-glass French windows consecrated with the Tudor Roses and the Fleur-de-lis, and a cornucopia of insignias comprising swords, globes, ships, crowns, scales, scrolls, horses, wailing women, and triumphant men. In the miserly intervals between the shacks, lie trapped deities—of flesh and clay—discarded in the aftermath of purpose and ceremony. What and who do not find acceptance in society, find sanctuary in this hallowed ground. One meets a dishevelled, naked goddess still poised to bless her perpetrators, Ardhanarishwars frescoed above heaps of garbage, a decapitated Krishna and Sudhama locked in eternal embrace, a legion of Karthiks held hostage in open urashringas, a lonely saint of yore unattended for, and niched shrines of sindoor-smeared Hindoo tokens. Couples of all ages fare to and fro on the road running parallel to a cluster of sooty colonial warehouses and a trickling railway track and inevitably, snippets of interesting conversations reach me. If I am lucky, I run into immersions. The dhaak and the kasha dirge, as the idols sink into the rippling, turquoise heart of the Ganges, looked on by mournful but hopeful devotees harking away ‘Asche bochor aabar hobe!’ I pause at the ‘middleman’ Shovabazar ferry ghat and sit on one of the giant, rusty, stumps that still anchor launches ferrying passengers and goods. Afar, the ‘egg yolk’ of a sun sets over the orange and brown silhouette of what looks like a lego metropolis; the farewell rays shimmer off the phosphorus waves, legitimising before nightfall the ‘Bengali’ Ganges’ knighthood of the ‘Silver Riverine’. Sprinkled over this crinkled but soothing carpet are fishermen and tourists in small boats—one relishing in the godly gift for its beauty, the other for bread. In the golden-silvery side-lines, I spot the indifferent weary washing away clothes, bodies, exhaustion, and sin. In the absence of a natural horizon—it’s hidden from plain sight by Charnock’s Calcutta—I reflect on my obscure, unwept horizons, munching on the kabiraji from the iconic Dhiren Cabin. As the last of the dying embers illuminate the open sky in one final octave, I turn to Wordsworth’s wisdom: ‘There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, The earth, and every common sight, To me did seem, Apparelled in celestial light, The glory and the freshness of a dream/ It is not now as it hath been of yore—Turn wheresoe'er I may, By night or day, The things which I have seen I now can see no more.’