Imagining the wiki city

From PhalkeFactory

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 bent over talbes, wielding a pen sized scanner shining a light, like a small sabre.. and with it, the capture old parchments, page by crumbling page. We are just a couple, still happy to be together, to love and write in cities we had only read of before. It is lucky when the travel happens officially, like this time, work, and we can both be collaborators.

The gates look Verdant with design full, overblown quite..enough intricate details to catch you by the leg down a stairwell where one thing transforms into another. As E M forster had imperatived- connect! connect.. this under your feet is a living road, where a goldsmith might lead us to a tannery, an ayurvedic doctor to church, a snake to homeopathy.


N: You are a romantic more than I, more able to find fancy in what you see. I am a student of science and then of seeking livelihood at best. i can only see what is..outside the city gate, around us, what we see everywhere, squatter settlement walls that have become one with dry ground, the 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 little shops that their family might have kept over generations, they are faded by seeing the sun from the same spot every day, all day. 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. 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