A pair of cockroaches in the festival din

 

A huskily building twilight losing itself to the imponderable quest of the artificial lights in the town market. The whinnying tenor of shoppers conveying some oppressive clanging even among the festival chimes. This is Diwali eve. A dissolute sense surreptitiously serenading somewhere in the crowd’s eyes.

Shop fronts are glittering with lighted strings. Almost a hemorrhage of consumerism. Allurement lurking precipitately from tables, shelves, display cases and shopkeepers’ faces. A plethora of presentiment. Colossal and gigantic stream to buy and sell. The worshippers of gold gathered in swanky jewelry temples. Most of the hypnotized people bow with prodigious prostration to gold.

The sellers seem invincible today. And the consumers sleepwalking with some unknown enfeeblement of senses. Sweet-makers with mounds of sweets; offering sugar lumps against life’s embittering experiences. The collective enthusiasm going with colossus undulations among the crowd. Almost sepulchral sovereignty of profiteering leer. The crowd in intangible trepidation. It’s the occasion to look up and move forward. Guttural, hoarse hiccups of the consumerist, capitalist desire.

Lots of firecrackers selling openly despite the ban. Spicy street food stalls catching tongues with the adroit endeavor of a chameleon catching a fly.

There are insects on the dirty ground below, under new boots, sneakers and fancy heeled footwear. And there is a bigger pair of insects, let’s say bigger beetles or cockroaches. A father cockroach and a child cockroach. Victims of destiny’s selectivity in turning some fates to cockroaches and others to earthly gods. As the bigger world of festival eve humans goes with a burgeoning whoosh, the father cockroach broods over the baby cockroach that is lying like a little bundle of garbage.

The father cockroach’s clothes are so dirty and hair so wild, shabby and unkempt as to make him some humanoid form of mud in the drain. The child cockroach is lying on a dirty cloth. His head bandaged, yellow antiseptic visible at places. The feet are also bound in dirty dressing. In all probability he is a made-up patient, opiated and dumped by the father to gather some survival grains of human sympathy in the dust. A tragic little brigandage. They have made themselves so dirty and stinking that nobody dressed festively would dare and touch the child to verify the truth and would just throw a coin to move away from the ill-fated dirty cockroaches.