Imagining the wiki city

राह चलती सड़क एक ऊँचे आर्च से फिसल कर गायब हो जाती है, तो समझो शहर यहाँ पर ख़तम होता है. "या शुरू", और जैसे अपनी बात को सच बताने के लिए, तुम यह कहते कहते कहते तेज़ कदम पर उस गेट के पार, सड़क के आखरी टुकड़े पर जा खड़े होते हो, गेट को देखते हुए. मैं जब वहाँ पहुँचता हूँ, तुम्हें मौन पाता हूँ. तुम कुछ देर गेट ताकते रहते हो, और फिर मेरी तरफ मुड़ कर देखते हो, बच्चे की सी मुस्कान होंठों पर लिए हुए. फिर सर घुमा कर उस गेट को देखते हो, फिर मुझे.. चहरे पर लिखा है, तुम्हारा मन आँखों की चमकती नाव पर चढ़कर मछ्लीद्वार की उन बड़ी मछ्लियोन के बीच तैर रहा है, बुर्क़े की टोप से बाल लिए शेरो से आँख मिला रहा है, नाव से झुककर,पत्थर के गजों की पीठ सहला रहा है.

M: The gates are almost forgotten structures at the end of the inner city, waiting for some restoration drive to take fancy to them, drive away the many settlers that have made homes on these margins, around the gates, and re gild their forms. Lions in bonnets, fish like wet eyes, and a quiet line of elephants that will not easily be metaphorised.. we both love the animal gates we have seen in cities in this land. But this time we have made a work out of it.. i feel a bit shy to call myself a researcher, i have seen what those animals are like, they live in libraries and wield a pen size scanner with a light on it, like a small sword and capture old parchments, page by crumbling page, presumably consumed by a desire to read them. We, well we got a chance to be together through this work and this work will be both of us wandering through the city from its outer most posts- these gates... Verdant with design they look, full, overblown quite..and the intricate details catches you by the legs and you fall down the stairwell where one thing transforms into another. Associate, Forster had injuncted! welcome to the city of living roads, where a goldsmith might lead us to a tannery, an ayurvedic doctor to church, a snake to homeopathy.

N: You are a more romantic man than I, more able to find fancy in what you see. I see what is as is. student of science? what lies before us where we stand at one of this city's gates? squatter settlement walls that have become one with dry ground, the familiar all manner of salvage to make homes, broken with bright colour from time to time. a large drain shared between this side of the gate and that- inside the gates, small men with small claims in their little shops that their family might kept over generations. and the stillness of being in one place all their lives seems to have faded them. I spent some time this afternoon imagining what the face of the shopkeeper might look like smiling, as we sat outside the shop... half an hour, making enquiries, asking questions, waiting while his boy ran to fetch us some tea. Yes, of course, he had heard of Phalke, there is a clock tower, a main road and various suchlikes named after him. A medical college, too, for some reason. Dadasaheb Phalke medical college? Really? the man could not see the humour of it, of course. I wonder what the old man would have made of that. Might have simply taken it in his Konkanastha Kashyap Brahman stride. Talking of which, we met a Mr. Kashyap today.

M: The man who took us around, finding us a house yesterday. Mr. Kashyap. Kashyap, the turtle, who was sent by the officer in the fancy Vimana Shastra building, to take us around the city. Bright eyed Mr. Kashyap, balding, shoulders bent. Kashyap, he told me, means turtle, after a great sage. I nodded, though I had known this, been reading up for a bit.. I looked at the namesake- I saw an ageing, but still graceful bird.

The gate of flight

The gate to the puranic story

The mechanised being, his gate

the gate of ages and ageing

The gate of alchemy

the gate to the botanical garden

the gate of those dreamers who trace, translate, repeat

footnote: a letter to italo

make it like the skanda purana, in tamil also called the scrap purana- written over hundreds of years, stories added and added and added to it, small ref to skanda purana here, for this http://www.nasikchitpavan.org/history-of-chitpavans.php