sorry i miss walter benjamin and my doe eyed childlike naivety

happy to have escaped the latter as i realize there is no reconciliation to the memory and the graveyard of the city

I shift through the weeks now listless, traversing the necropolis, partly weary, mostly curious. In ‘The Painter of Modernity’ Baudelaire wishes the artist to embrace the tragicomic life of the streets. Urging the artist to become a flaneur — Walter Benjamin then in his unfinished Arcades Project attempts to erect an assemblage of the thousand fragments of the arcades in Paris forging a precise image of the relationship between architecture and history. I wonder how that translates into my life, I have lived and loved in Bangalore for eight years now and I am only beginning to see the wonders of the assemblage and the cascading ruins that envelop me.

The muck of the city is witness to third world renditions of glittering modernity, as Benjamin suggests, ‘temples of consumerism’ and it is all that urban nostalgia is afflicted by. The crowd as I move through it, opens up to me, an aesthetic spectacle. In my first few years in the city, there was no elegance to the towering modernity that the city promised, there still isn’t, it was culture in decay through and through but then you grow up and possess the unbridled agency a teenage girl isn’t granted and suddenly, there are places that come as an anathema to modernity, nostalgia lapsing into nooks and corners, the kiosks of tea stalls and butcher shops formed a new assemblage, a new collage of what the present built upon relentlessly. 

I am inclined to agree with Benjamin’s criticism of Baudelaire, insofar that while modernity afforded freedom, it had manufactured hospitable conditions for fascism.  I find myself often at odds with what I think of the ‘crowd’ — my relationship with faith is tense and supple with conflictions, is it god that I am rattled by or the spectacle of the congregation? Every year, around Eid, the images of the masjid congregations fill me with fear and awe, like there is something waiting at the precipice, that could only be resolved by burying myself in pages and pages of Iqbal. But then, when I am seated in the cinema hall, probably one of the largest cornerstones of modernity, replicating the amphitheatre in the epoch of consumerism, I am filled with the same fervour, a religiosity that escapes me on other occasions. To find your way in the city is no feat, but to be lost in it, is something else. I feel this way about crowds almost always, but only a specific character of crowd, I do not feel this way when I am — say, in line at the trial room, or at a concert, or a book signing, there’s an urgency that cheapens the sentimentality and allure of crowds entirely. The crowd near Jama Masjid and the Hyderabad Tombs however, I was shaking and quivering, restless, the past, it seemed, was waiting for me and I had swallowed the key. 

The crowd is a powerful uniform figure under fascism, from the Leni Riefenstahl film to images of Babri, crowds are potent with the immediacy of being turned into symbols of state power. In this city, as much as I love it, the reversion of boredom or the promise of it is indeed phantasmagoria, with everything couched in a dream factory. The shopping complexes that were erected in the city, are burial grounds for the past. The ideal consumer partakes in this chain of dream making, completely invisibilizing history and labour, forging a production of images that lulls us all into a false consciousness. 

All of this to say, I feel complexly about crowds is a meandering ruse. It took me years to school myself in getting lost, in and around the city itself. ‘The pathos of this project…I find every city beautiful’ – in the true Brechtian fashion, I view Delhi as he does Berlin, impossible to live in, impossible to leave. My love letters to other cities are full of such contemplations, constructing an exhibit well into the future, I assure myself that it is not idyllic romanticism that I am after, but an archaeological excavation that I have been building up in my mind. The very need to witness cities and confront their pasts is at the nerve of this informal project. My fascination with the modern metropolis is one of loving and loathing and I wonder if I can ever reconcile the two, I wonder if I have to? While modernity is suitable, is it tolerable? I loiter around the city looking for textual fragments and pieces of the city’s past that overlook the present, but there is only a mild respite from modernity, can Makkah, military hotels and the restless aquariums adjoining the butcher shops only do so much in forgetting the intolerance of modernity that is upon us? 

The rendezvous in the city, early trysts, hoped to conceal the filth of my childhood. Tender yet dirty, nothing has certified my memory so profoundly as peering into the backyards and alleyways, one of whose unadministered parks cast an enormous ugly shadow over me, ruminating on the cradle that awaited me in the new city borne as a new citizen. The rhythm of unerring traffic and trucks loading and unloading lulled me into sleep, the sound of the tap running and the disgruntled yelps of a child being beaten in the towering gated society became routine. The radio became a companion in times of dull cabbing around, time spent being holed up in murky cabs became the clock of lovers hoping to spend as much time as possible, drowning out the ricks engaged in an enthused screaming match. Later, peering onto incoming traffic, the junction became a fixture of my gaze, parting from the landscape and forming an image of dilapidated movement, movement that was hauling a triteness into our lives. In the years since I was a doe eyed teenager, the marketplace has changed less than other places. Their negation of change isn’t the only reason as to why they stay with me, it is much more on account of their composite chaos for one who seems to be homesick at all times. I am perpetually homesick, and yet the muslim parts of the city are the only true times I come close to feeling any semblance of homeside warmth. An alienation imbibed into belonging, the double edged sword is cutting the city up into lumps and lumps of temporality. The lanes and streets open up sometimes to vividly colored doors, abandoned often, a bright blue, a desperate yellow, time and space meet here on their own terms, there is no rush to amalgamate, only two girls walking hand in hand before me. There are pockets, afflicted by pain and terror and yet I have to ask, is there a mausoleum long awaiting me in these pockets? 

On some days, in the absence of a dear friend, I sit by a cafe with a cigarette and gaze into the windows of buses. The warmth of the sun is pleasant but I think there is a grimacing earnestness to the city that one can only find hiding at night, like a bandit. I window watch when I move along commercial street, I can never fully immerse myself into the crowd unless I am at a distance, that is a strange inversion I have not understood yet. I look at the kites swooping down to pick the leftovers of raw meat discarded next to meat stalls, they almost touch the ground and swiftly make an exit, leaving the scene of crime. At the end of the day, in a bar, I wait anxiously, I am almost always anxious. Me and the waiter have been exchanging pleasantries for years now. Sometimes there’s a gig, sometimes it’s underwhelming. A woman in a crowd says she loves what I am wearing, I tell a man very gleefully that all my rings are my mother’s, he says she says good taste, I nod and agree. I see that the new Blossoms has had Derrida and Butler for a while now, I never knew of this, perhaps as twisted logic would have it, I preferred the old one to the new, I grow uncomfortable with how good of a time I have in the new blossoms — a betrayal of sorts. 

I have been looking endlessly for a quiet and plain journal to start writing more earnestly. A friend found my old mostly empty journal in between his keepsakes as he was packing to leave the country. It is strange how losing a friend to a distant land, irony has it that I have gained what I was looking for for months now. I saw him off at the airport this morning, departures are so flighty, they make me sick to the stomach but I think the only structure of modernity that truly knows how to console me is the airport, the trans fixation and mutation of sweet arrivals and longing goodbyes are so incoherent, I do incredibly well with the absence of a clear fixed lexicon, the vocabulary of meetings at the airport are both a source of great comfort and perennial sadness that I am making room for these days. 

I see my 20s as a luxury and a test. I am so frightened by the thought of not living as much as I should and yet I take living for granted on days when I am only twenty one and lounging on bed in a pile of dirty laundry and sauntering distracted looks.  There is much to the city I don’t know, despite eight long years, in an attempt to not turn into a tourist when I got here, I have neglected some seminal cornerstones of history. My last semester in the metropolis afforded me liberties I had only dreamed of, to touch upon the texture of the city and to feel dialectically about it, the claustrophobia metamorphosed into something else entirely. 

I turn twenty two in a few weeks, I am frightened again at the inescapable moment of dread that is going to visit me. But I suppose that is true of any day that bears the slightest of a calendar significance. I am on edge and inconsolable, building up an appetite for ceaseless neurosis, I am restless. Two days ago, I hosted a christmas party to write home about. I am always on the edge of things deliberately as I photograph and archive them into my digital library of fondness. I can’t believe that some of the brightest and kindest people I knew were under the same roof. I was looking at them with the softest eye, keen and fixating on the film that passed through them in my mind. I am thankful I break bread with those I love, I am glad that those I love earnestly come to love each other too, so naturally, that is far too rare to witness and find and I hope to tuck it away in the safest of the city’s corners. I might always have unresolved feelings about the crowd, but I know what I felt about this one. 

While twenty two terrifies me, twenty one has been good to me, kind to me with my writing, it has been patient in waiting on me to have something worthwhile to say. Challenging, yes, but so indulgent and accommodating for my words that have begun to make themselves at home. Love and loathing are always at odds, as I turn twenty two, I hope to abandon the internet and become more snug with the act of rereading, rereading to me after all have always been akin to penance and I wish to see some remedy to it. 

The city is the grander picture and I think I am going to continue to imprison its stillness and turmoil in my frame.  

I have to now fold my jacket that’s been forlorn on my bed for so long, but perhaps it can lay a little more, I do find its inanimate togetherness endearing to say the least.