Barnali Saha

The year I visited the group of monuments
and inhaled the delicious smell of ancient history
in its numbered halls and dark, silent caverns
as I walked into them and passed by them
I realized,
I´d been living too long in cities,
devoid of vestiges of a beauteous life,
My soaring spirit composed rhythm-less syncopation
that apprehended and animated me, I understood I was transfixed by history
of aesthetical sculptures done in stone.
Alcohol drinking males,
cows and horses, sensual desires screaming in unheard language
were imbibed by the vacant mind. Signifiers,
signifying a world bereft of un-sensual vice.
I let myself be entranced by the beauty of perfectness,
and awed by the carvings of invisible genius hands on squarish blocks
of stone. Scenes of pursuit, fornication,
the honeyed smooth aura of mystic love
stood warm underneath the flavicomous light of the sun.
In the manicured lawns there were foreigners,
agog by the satisfaction of their Oriental dream of romantic love,
their open-mouths paid homage to the splendor of Khajuraho.
Their noiseless feet and clicking shutters
their bodies relaxed and excited
displayed appreciation.
Inside those towers embedded with life,
inside the exterior of heaving bosoms,
a god or a goddess dwell in respite.
In naked-nests devoid of a speck of carving,
in haunted holes smelling of bats,
there they have been dwelling since antiquity
in peace; unmoved by the heat of passion,
warfare, and the churning emotions of the world.
With silent gleaming eyes the gods direct you to follow
a dead moral existence and live a life like them
in a cloistered cave
abstracted from the lustful obsessions that cloak the human race.