The Politics of Non-Arrival: Avikunthak Waiting for Kalki Arka Chattopadhyay In the third of his Blue Octavo Notebooks (1917-1919), the German writer Franz Kafka had written that “the Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary, he will come only one day after his arrival, he will not come on the last day, but on the last day of all.” (the entry of December 4) 1 The promised arrival of a saviour has haunted the trans-religious and trans-cultural imaginary for ages. We could think of the German philosopher Walter Benjamin’s assertion that “every second of time was the strait gate, through which the Messiah might enter” 2 in ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (1940) or Samuel Beckett’s famous play Waiting for Godot (1953) where the two tramps wait on in vain for their potential saviour who fails to appear. What Kafka, Benjamin and Beckett share in this arrival which turns into a potential arrival with the actuality of non-arrival is the 20 th century Europe, devastated by the two World Wars. In the Hindu cultural imaginary of the Indian sub- continent, Kalki is the name of a similar promise. Kalki meaning ‘eternity’, ‘white horse’ or ‘destroyer of faith’ is the tenth and final incarnation of Lord Vishnu and the Puranas foretell his arrival on horseback at the end of the present Kali Yuga and he is supposed to usher us back into Satya Yuga. Kalki as our saviour has the double function of terminating one full time cycle (Satya, Treta, Dvapara and Kali) and initiating the next cycle with the resumption of Satya Yuga. And unlike the Messiahs or Godots of the War-stricken Europe, the cult of Kalki is not necessarily one of failed arrival. In other words, we can count on Kalki much more than we can on Beckett’s Godot or Kafka’s Messiah to save us from the impiety and corruption of our times and revive the lost glory of religiosity. This is precisely where Ashish Avikunthak’s latest film Kalkimanthankatha (Bengali; Colour; DCP; 79 minutes; India and Germany; 2015) scores by unifying the optimism of Kalki’s arrival with the stoicism of Godot’s non-arrival. The film subverts Kalki with Godot as arrival translates into non-arrival. Avikunthak transplants Beckett’s Waiting for Godot from its Francophone and Anglophone European contexts (Beckett wrote the play in French and English respectively) to Bengali language and the Hindu pilgrimage of the Kumbh Mela, giving it a specific geographical setting unlike the famously generic and undefined ‘a country road’ in Beckett’s directions. 3 Avikunthak’s adaptation is faithful more to the spirit of Beckett and doesn’t want to follow the text to the letter. In this inter-medial adaptation of the play into the film, the director begins with translations of Beckett’s text but as the film proceeds, matures and