Extra blood is pumped to my sweating legs as they rush alongside the tracks over the Esplanade to catch up on the moving tram. As it slows down to match the pace of the congestion ahead of it — people, cycles, rickshaws and the characteristic Kolkata antique yellow cabs all fight for advantage on the unending stream of traffic in West Bengal’s capital city — I reach the metal pole at the middle of the threshold and jump into the moving vehicle.
Soon enough, my senses are struck by the feeling of an unknown past which came to surround me, as the door I just passed through can be easily taken for a passage to another era, moving frames that could rival Dali’s melting clocks metaphor.
 It’s astounding to me what a different comprehension of the city one can have with your eyes behind the bars of these tramcar windows, almost as if you could look at it through the lens of the past. The creamy blue buses in which dark skinned men shout the names of their final stop as they hang on to the handles in the wall before jumping off to the street over the smallest hint of a break to look for other possible passengers around the mobs that follow up with the traffic is a sight you could expect to have had decades ago, and one might even wonder if he’d be lucky enough to see one of the many personalities cited by Moorhouse in his account of the city history, that probably shared these very same views of the town, while the decay of the British architecture snitched on what age each of them was sitting.
The hard benches on the tram turn soft and the odors accumulated over the years that sat behind me started fading within the air conditioned breeze of my bus, currently marching steadily northwards through the Minas Gerais’s highlands, as I tried to hold onto an image of Kolkata which existed but in my mind, a memory embroidered in the ingenuity of a now delirious and drunk soul.
The creation and being hold no more significance for me than what lies behind the horizon. And if I ever attach meaning to a so-called truth, let it be this Kolkata and these bar-covered windows, Time.

Accounts from the East