Masquerade

First Ghost

Lost in the fair,
we lingered behind the past.
Like a sunflower,
endless hunger kept on blooming.

Among countless stalls of coloured lights,

among innumerable marionettes,

I lay fallen—

a mask.

Your face resting on a mask—
and inside that mask,
you found me.
Losing yourself, you found me.
I found you.

There was no returning
to the search for a self.
At a fair, after all,
we arrive already prepared
to lose our way.

Soliloquy

A cricket kept me awake the whole night long.
Having lost its way, it sat at the doorway.
Whenever sleep drew close,

it called out

in its own tongue:

Rise, rise, rise…

At the blue hour
it took its life.
Around its neck
it tied a red-and-yellow balloon.

By morning, the cricket lay
inside a swarm of ants.
They shared equally
its earthly body.

Second Ghost

Fireworks flare,
the ferris wheel turns.
Bunches of coloured balloons
hang like grapes
from children’s hands.

You hold my hand and move ahead;
I am in yours.

You dissolve among the children.
I slip away, then return
with a mirror—clear, unblemished.

You meet my face in the mirror.

You meet me within the mirror,
From within

I draw you into my arms.

Hands entwined,
we drift forward through the crowd.

Time revolves—
slow, radiant,
like a ferris wheel.

Third Ghost

By what blessed rite
did we become an offering
at the luminous edge of being?

Within dust, smoke, and fatigue,
a sullied world.

Wakefulness dulls

this ravaged body.

The soul of a cricket

flutters down

and rests on the chest.

In a field of directionless emptiness
we lie face-up,
turned toward the sky.
Around us,
everything hardens into stone.

Little by little,
darkness gathers everywhere.
Inside it,
a clay lamp
holds its ground.

Soliloquy

There is nothing called truth,

just as there is no definition of falsehood.

No words, no songs,

no enemies or friends—

everything is false.

In the dark

I strip myself bare,
drunk, striking at the heart.
All the poems of youth

I throw into the fire.

Inside me,

a wheel turns—

air, microbes,

and the stench of filth

Now I offer everything to the auction—
dreams, reminiscences, melancholy
the remainder of a life.

I will return again.
Seated in a tethered boat,
oar laid aside,
I will listen all night
to the song of solitude.

__________________________________
24 October 1993
First published: Sutradhar, 1–15 January 1994

Editor's Note

Masquerade is presented not as celebration but as a ritualized suspension of identity. Its brightness is cosmetic; beneath it lies exhaustion, moral disarray, and spectral presence. What appears festive functions as a masking economy: faces multiply, meanings dissolve, and the self is temporarily unmoored. The fair becomes a spiritual place precisely because it evacuates stable identity—much like pilgrimage sites or carnivals in myth, but emptied of transcendence.

Here, losing is not failure but initiation. To lose oneself is to participate fully. Disorientation becomes the only shared truth.

The Three Ghosts: A Degenerative Ontology

The ghosts are not supernatural figures but modes of being—a downward metaphysical sequence: Memory (Displacement & Hunger), Intimacy (Fleeting Tenderness), and Nihilistic Accounting (Auction of Life) The first ghost anchors the poem in historical injury. Hunger is not only physical but mnemonic: a craving for place, continuity, and recognition. Displacement fractures time; the past is present but unusable. The second ghost introduces proximity without permanence. Touch exists, but it cannot settle. Tenderness flickers in motion—on swings, in crowds, during transit. This is intimacy stripped of duration, haunted by its own vanishing. The final ghost marks ethical collapse. Life is converted into units, bids, and negations. Truth does not die heroically—it falters, slips, is miscounted. Existence itself becomes tradable, assessed, dismissed. This is not evil but administrative denial. Together, the ghosts trace a movement from loss, to fragile connection, to systematic negation.

The poem’s refusal to offer liberation is deliberate. Escape would be dishonest. Instead, it proposes recurrence as the minimal continuity life allows. Not hope, not redemption—only return.

The final image of the tied boat is quietly devastating. It cannot leave, yet it listens. Solitude is not romanticized; it is endured. Trust has vanished, but responsibility remains—a thin, luminous ethic that persists without guarantees.

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