Waiting to exhale

When does the Indian megacity ever sleep? Its mechanics in perpetual motion, its speed blurs the daily collisions between dusk and dawn. Seamlessly elastic. Morphing. Constantly changing. Cinematic in its fluidity, it encompasses within its single frame slums and mansions, boulevards and gallis, cars and pushcarts, lush parks and landfills. It seduces with its carnivalesque nature and leaves its citizens, most often, in a state of surrendered participation or numbed acceptance.

Unlike most of their Western counterparts, a Delhi or a Mumbai remains in a permanent state of cacophonous construction. Buildings seemingly appear and disappear at will. Streets change names, widths and shape. They extend and distend, above and below. Transit lines criss-cross in conflicting patterns, branches and even clover-leaves. The megacity’s circuitry is overloaded, it has been called ugly, overgrown, unpredictable and even putrid. Its shiny surfaces, tarnished edges, crevices — sewers and rivers — and bridges are broken and re-built with illogical impunity.

 

The Indian megacity seems to be rooted in a future centred on commerce and economics. It rapidly outgrows its own skin and leaves more and more obsolete in its wake. Traditionalists may lament, but this incessant transformation is more than a quirk of character and is a character in itself.

Yet, like an infinite sentence with no punctuation the city needs its occasional pauses, its “commas”, to understand itself better and then to allow itself to be understood. It may not cease, but needs on occasion to take a breath so it may reflect, recharge and even rejoice over itself before it trapezes into its next avatar — like a circus artiste it leaps, grasping at edges, for it doesn’t have the time to think.

Like a comma that has no real meaning in itself but allows us to experience structure and thus the meaning of a sentence, the Indian city, too, needs its points of pause. These are perhaps best typified in its monuments.

A recent visit to the Sidi Saiyyed Mosque in the heart of Ahmedabad brought home this thought. Standing barefoot within its courtyard, admiring the intricacy of its famous jali with the intertwined tree pattern that adorns the emblem of the city, I was at once participant and voyeur. The city grazes its boundaries but never enters. Like an island, the monument offers a perspective within itself and then a better one of the chaotic modernity that surrounds it.

More than the symbolic references that adorn municipal billboards, the Qut’b Minar in Delhi and Gateway in Mumbai, like other monuments, have become more precious than mere heritage sites, as they are places where a “pause” may be experienced. Where one can remain within the city and yet at a distance from it. Too often reduced to embellishments for postcards and picnic grounds, and as a backdrop to the contemporary, monuments today are the only places within the megacity where time visibly rests.

Enter the gardens of the Victoria Memorial in Kolkata, lift your eyes to admire the temple gopurams of Chennai, touch the red sandstone of Humayun’s tomb in Delhi, or climb the steps of the Asiatic Library in Mumbai: the heritage encased celebrates craft, quality and high endeavour in its own unique manner. Yet what they all have in common is “stillness”. By definition, a monument is where time is frozen into a state, timeless.

Recent reports suggest that Delhi is eyeing the title of World Heritage City, hoping to be seen as a “living museum”.

I think the need to “pickle” our heritage should come from the more mundane need for pause, rather than just preservation. Memory, here, becomes the reason to pause, leading to the discovery of meanings, within the textual narrative of the continuum city.

Suparna Bhalla is a Delhi-based architect