Beauty in the Beast

Capitalism, in its zeal to grow rich and richer has made rag-pickers of us all, picking bits of beauty in beastly heaps of all pervading trash.

RV Road.

I always avoid taking this road to get home. I usually take the parallel service road or another parallel road. For it hurts to see the metro flyover right in the middle of a once beautiful RV road that stretched beyond sight, flanked by trees on both sides whose boughs bent to touch one another at the centre before the axe fell on them to make room for huge beastly stilts.

When the auto driver is about to swerve towards the straightforward route through RV Road that goes to my place, I almost scream in panic at him, asking him to go straight instead of left, without being conscious of the fact that I am doing so to avoid pain. It’s a reflex.

One of these days, as I was returning from an event late in the night, when there was no vehicle on the road other than our bike, and the endless stilts were lit on one half by the yellow glow of street lights and the other half, by yellow receding to grey and the road itself was striped with the uniform shadows of the stilts, the picture with its symmetry, though of a beast, looked, for once, beautiful.