Kolkata Erasure

Image text rom Stray Birds, a book of erasures sourced from Tagore’s work by the same name and inspired by my early days in India.

After first moving to Kolkata, a city of several million people, I was caught off guard when I realized the night sky was always a faintly glowing gray. Laying alone on a pitch black hillside in the Appalachian foothills where I grew up, I never dreamed to attempt counting the stars by sight. In Kolkata it was easy…just one.

When I think about it now, the concept of light pollution is as if we, ourselves, are stars. The more of us on the ground, the fewer visible in the sky. It is as if we have dropped down, one by one, fallen stars walking among the earth. I think I’d like to write a fairytale about that some day.