A glaring red Om tilak,

imprinted over a yellow dot

on dry paste of vibhuti stripes

across foreheads,

as if a badge of honor for selfies.

Streets choked, cacophonic, and unhinged —

funnel through narrow lanes

releasing the city’s pressure valve

into the ghat.

Sheer density of rawness breaks open —

beliefs, prayers, and sorrow

cows, dung, dogs, and flowers

bells, chants, chimes, and generators

incense, food, garbage, and sewage

smoke of burning wood: cremation —

all linger, then discharge,

exhaling into this ghat.

A woman squats to pee by the bank,

bare backs glaze in the morning sun after a dip,

austerity cock rings

on godmen in fake rudraksha,

chillum-smoking beggars —

peer out at you, cloaked in ash,

orange-cloaked sadhus in dreadlocks

all find their space without a blink.

‘what do you do here all day?’ I ask one,

with a nonchalant shrug: ‘I just sit here’.

A white bedsheet with blood stains —

bare life and death in ritual —

alongside funeral pyres on the banks,

beside sheep on hay,

a natural daily rhythm:

expressions of belief,

otherwise shunned for their proximity

gather for the sanctity of the departed —

on this threshold of reincarnation.

Moksha despite human waste,

sought in tandem

in this epicenter —

A mural of Shiva with Ganga flowing

from the mountain to his hair

blue hallucinogenic swirls

dissolving into eyes,

written: ‘there is nothing here’.

Spiritual tourists huddle with godmen

in plastic tents.

newlywed girls in red and gold peer out, lifting their pallu.

an old woman wears sorrow-peace.

Chants and chimes echo behind

hundreds soaking in cleansing ritual.

Simultaneous sensory overload —

all five short-circuited at once,

defying the nature of our species.

To stay there longer

would mean a deeper unsettling,

not from within,

but solely from without.

Condensing all unsettling

where the membrane

between belief and reality collapses

into one continuous two-kilometer

sliver of steps in stone —

overt humanity colliding

in dissonance —

a primordial rawness in attack mode!

With a deep breath in Kailash,

she prepares for a long inhale —

accumulating people’s faith, beliefs and waste,

the purifier,

all the way into the ocean,

not given a chance to breathe,

to rejuvenate.

This city’s essence, its initial intent

seems washed away by Ganga Mata’s inhale

into the ocean along with everything else.

Like the rising sunlight allows

a brief breath in the morning,

for a long inhale through the day

into the stagnant hazy sunset —

of glowing particulate pollution.

In the narrow alley,

an old abandoned motorcycle,

a target for pan spit over years,

camouflaged into the red stains

on the wall —

A ceremonious liquid bowl filling the mouth,

not allowing coherent speech,

with the putrid smell of urine, dung, and dog waste

along the sides.

The unbearable simultaneity —

the varnish stripped off souls —

laid bare, exposed, uncalloused,

in a collective frenzy of belief —

until the day this discord

spontaneously bursts into flames —

for its own moksha.