Across Seven Seas and Thirteen Rivers

 T. S. Eliot begins The Waste Land with the austere provocation, “April is the cruellest month.” I have carried that line with me for decades. Eliot remains my favourite poet, and this poem my most revisited text, each reading yielding fresh meanings, like sediment stirred by a returning tide. Yet poetry, for all its authority, must sometimes yield to place. Where I live, in Kolkata, and across much of India, it is not April that deserves Eliot’s epithet. It is December. Here, December is the cruelest month. In December, the sky sinks low, like a heavy lid. Atmospheric inversion traps air near the Earth's surface, allowing pollution to settle and stagnate. Smoke lingers. Dust drifts but never disperses. Visibility dims, as though the city were seen through breath on glass. The air thickens, turns coarse, almost chewable. Cold does not cleanse. It constricts. To breathe becomes an effort, and then a risk. Kolkata's Air Pollution in December - photo courtesy https://bit.l...