Calming thoughts of ghosts

Right In The Middle

I would have said the clock struck one had I been at home and possibly lived in a mansion and had what we all called as kids, a grandfather’s clock. But instead I was out on Queen’s Road, glad that the name still remains and doesn’t prove costly for the penuries we suffer augmented by the expenses of rubber stamps, marking and regaling fanatics who are wont to change history by changing names of roads, for no rhyme or reason as Shakespeare would aver and whom the fanatics have not read.

Traffic was as sparse as it would have been at 8’O clock 20 odd years ago, when you paid the entire sum of the cost of a vehicle, a fiscal policy which hadn’t expanded the economy to choke the roads, and when banking pace and civic amenities seemed in harmony. You could actually see the features of the road and that of the others as I drove past at that unearthly hour! Boy! Bangalore is sure beautiful. She looked calm, serene and rightly populated with a flicker of a tail light in the distance.

It was in that moment I was wont to lament. If it weren’t for the multitudinous vehicles on the road, dangerous drivers who blatantly defy all traffic rules and norms, BBMP authority’s lacadisikle efforts at street maintenance, bridges left unpainted, footpaths untenable, the trees come in the way, or the stone slab is broken and a perilous gape awaiting to ensnare an unsuspecting pedestrian, horror of horrors!

Another thought strikes, me as there were quite a few vehicles yet on the road.

Whatever do ghosts do to walk in solitude and venture out into our terrestrial? Twelve would be the deadline in all the ghost stories I read as a child. Now, half past one and some of us had yet places to go. I unleash the ghosts out from all those books. The white ethereal and luminescent hooded images, slowly take to the streets. The night is still yet with that hush of breeze. There is an odd feeling of calm; ghosts are such peace loving folks, unlike horn-blaring taxis, infuriatingly gesticulating auto drivers and bullying buses drivers! Ghosts just haunt you with calm; a promise of how bliss is to follow if …