I address you Lord as you ride your magnificent chariot the last and hurtle past not men but nameless oceans and deserts! This is that pure kernel of constant joy for ever effervescent and askance, the pure ‘why’! I address you Lord as my task remains undone and crowded by pillars of grey, my truthless tubers of dismay take root, swell and burst underneath layers of clay. The serene song no longer a cry of hopeless anger, no longer a ploy for the humdrum of the day! I address your Lord as pure ‘Ka’ , the ‘who’ and that is who you are, ‘the who of all whos’, fulminating darkness of the seed’s interior, heat of the hour by which sands for shore and sights form tower, the primordial sea grumbling, growling and falling back forever. I address you Lord to bear my gems of fretfulness, my longing, my disgust, to bear in your non-being the whiffs of my smouldering song born out of fire ignited by words ‘unknown.’ I address you Lord as the wanderer ‘you’ as the lord of the vagrant thistle that unmakes all that is seen and felt, all that is found lost, our ashen earth’s sweet fruits and poisonous harvest! I address you Lord as the jewelled core of alabaster and wax, the ‘consecrated nothing’ beckoning the fullness of things, to whither and fester like the trunks of the trees like lilies of dead water! Lord I address you as the witness of the wee-hour when minor Gods sleep and men begin their prayers to harbour one last sin, but sure that you would listen through the roll of drums and conch shells, their little whisper!

I am the seed Lord from which the trees sprouted yet I am not the tree worthy of your timber, the divine carpenter’s mindgame, now near, now far! Lord it hurts when you call me to the hall of bhaktas, who are not men, but their alibis jostling for form, their words fall like plasters from an old house where all hopes are cries and all loves are cinder! A residual tether holds you like a wisp of smoke circling the obelisk of fire. The obelisk, the totem, the spire, the trunk, the mask, the bower! Symbols galore in the effulgent light of Godhood Lord, what play! What dare! The chariots roll, the play ensues, the jesters’ rant fills the astral hour. I need no deliverance Lord, I need to wallow in the smelly mud of the fallen in this venomous relief between life and living, between faith and its apparition. Your chariots are built finger by finger marks of the pure crystalline calipers and virgin timber. It takes as long as it takes to make and unmake a tower on the sand,, often ages to make and more often a trice to unmake. Your eyes, as you roll past, pure black, lidless yet hooded, saturnine and forgiving, eloquent without words! Punish me Lord, ride over me, let millions trample upon me and leave me purloined like a treasure chest, a desiccated sap, a dangerous address or some luciferian booty.

They came to Puri to master the fine art of chariot making. They took photographs of shadow carpenters, their shadow tools and their shadow handler as if in a play of masks. They numbered and counted the wood pieces, the nails, the linens, the wheels, the axles and remembered by rote, the precarious creaks of every lurch. They debunked science to reach the pure white core of the divine artisan, they built perhaps another one, but not the one you ride ‘O Lord’! They could not build the chariot you ride. You have seen it all. This journey of yours from here to nowhere has brought in the rain clouds of hope as the stones loosen in the sanctum and the turret drips water, as the floral smell of festering rituals fill the unholy void. No one can build your chariot, nobody can take You out on a journey from the corpuscles of the blood to the billowing harvest-smell of fallow land drenched by the morning dew and occasional rain.

No one can replicate you in your likeness unless willed by the guardians of the firmament and the five elements from which this body is born. You willed yourself this wooden body and a wooden chariot to be the ‘treeness’ of the tree amidst mounds of meteorites, hailstones and tar.

Supplicants gather at the end of your journey like predators, converging at the water hole to quench their thirst and you my lord the ‘predator’ of predators’ smile! You would return after your sojourn of nine days to a glittering vesper of iridescent earthen lamps to bellyful indulgence of the essences of all essences and to the brutal remains of memory and its absence, where the words are stalled because the sea of words want to speak! The sea carries Your elemental timber Lord, it carries in its drift the continents to the shore and our little homes to the Grand Bazar. We dream of a fullness until now not known. We offer our little hands to be filled with ashes and diamonds. We know not Lord what would happen to our stolen diadem of pettiness and scorn! Glory to the Lord! Glory to Man as the chariots return one by one, the quiet hurricane back to its ocean!