This project was conceived as an architectural investigation into the life of non-living things, animals, and human spectres. I would like to acknowledge Anubha Fatehpuria (Thespian and Architect) for approaching me with an experimental concept of making architectural spaces speak. I also take this opportunity to thank Anirban Dutta (Independent Filmmaker) for generously sharing his magnificent photographs of old buildings and abandoned spaces of Kolkata. This third episode on Courtyards transports the readers to an alternative and exotic (if not abstract and outlandish) world of emptiness and memories.
Background: These conversations form parts of a long journey undertaken by two familial Ghosts who live in cracks and roam old/ancient buildings. One speaks, while the other listens, but oftentimes, they forget this fundamental rule. They know they are extinct, not what they must do with their extinction. They are storytellers to each other until they find other ghosts, other ears, and other spaces inhabited by these future listeners. Till then, vacuous time echoes with their silent words. If they know the residents, either living or gone, they narrate their stories, full of anecdotes, asides, and autopsies of characters; if they are unknown, they invent. They often confuse spaces and people.
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Ghost 1: (sounds of thunder) Thunder is the first sound, the first voice.
Ghost 2: I thought it was us. The first ape, the first vertical man, the first woman procreating.
Ghost 1: No. It was the babel of gods. They saw us hunting and they were furious, they saw us breeding over the leaves, the soil, inside the animals.
Ghost 2: Oh! Yes, we stole their skin and seized their flesh.
Ghost 1: We will never be forgiven.
Ghost 2: Never.
Ghost 1: We will never be silent.
Ghost 2: Never!
Ghost 1: We will never unravel the meaning of rains.
Ghost 2: Never…
Ghost 1: Never translate the words of fire.
Ghost 2: Never?
Ghost 1: Never tranquilize the pain of things.
Ghost 2: Never! Never! Never! Never! Never!
Ghost 1: You see now? Language was justice from the gods, a punishment, a plague, always a burden, a torment that left us in a vast open field with lethal grass all around us.
Ghost 2: And we wait for an interpreter.
Ghost 1: It has always been the sole malediction! The oath we had to take to imagine ourselves… all-surpassing.
Ghost 2: The more I speak the more I build prisons.
Ghost 1: To speak is to repeat this unending punishment of speaking.
Ghost 2: I will be silent for a while then!
Ghost 1: Let us listen to these courtyards instead.
Ghost 2: It’s that tragedy about them that compels me to listen.
Ghost 1: What’s that?
Ghost 2: They don’t have roofs. Usually, I mean. Their words levitate, and finding no objects on their way, to enter of course, and reach the brain, evanesce into the skies. Heard only by them in the heavens, I suppose!
Ghost 1: We shall tell them that we are messengers from the gods!
Ghost 2: Come this day, we are, to save ourselves from ourselves!
Courtyard 1: Who speaks?
Ghost 1: Who speaks?
Courtyard 1: I!
Ghost 1: I!
Ghost 2: I too! What are you?
Courtyard 1: Anatomy. And you?
Ghost 1: Remainders.
Courtyard 1: Why are you here?
Ghost 2: Why are you here?
Courtyard 1: I can’t move. It is my destiny to be here.
Ghost 1: And we can. It is ours to be elsewhere.
Courtyard 1: Everything is plural, only space singular.
Ghost 1: What do you mean?
Courtyard 1: It means you’re in a spiral, forming, deforming, reforming, altering shapes, sizes, selves, entire bodies sometimes. You can’t even stop after death, even when all you want is to end it all, after being clobbered inside a coffin, burnt to cinders, or pecked by ravens. When you have nothing to say about the disconsolate life you’ve lived, you devise fantasies on death.
Ghost 2: We are what we are!
Courtyard 1: Miserable, pitiable, wretched creatures!
Ghost 1: We were what we were!
Courtyard 1: Living and deaf!
Ghost 2: Now we hear!
Courtyard 1: No, first observe. Three elongated, etched arches, sculpted on bricks, railings, and plants bending over, and beyond that the firmament.
Ghost 1: Such an outdated word! Firmament (laughter)! It’s my first discernible laughter after death. Thank you.
Courtyard 1: You’re welcome! But a reminder, I am the one living, still, over and above death. You are outside expiration, stripped of life, outside calendars, yes, outdated is the word for you.
Ghost 1: The firmament, yes?
Courtyard 1: They think we are static, pulled down and disfigured only by earthquakes or implosions, high-reach arms, or a wrecking ball.
Ghost 2: So many ways to end one human-made structure?
Courtyard 1: So many ways to give life, so many to end it.
Ghost 1: Why does it numb my senses? So many ways for the non-living!
Courtyard 1: It shouldn’t. We live unlike the living. In the end, for us, it’s all drawings and diameters and directions. They blast our vertical supports with internal explosions. Dramatic, I give you that, and it ends all pains at once, all memories drown with detonations. You know, it is impossible to recollect anything once we are debris and nothing more. If the height exceeds 66 feet, they use excavators with demolition arms fitted with telescopic booms. The crusher then chokes the steel, cracks the stonework, and rends the monument. From monument to mausoleum! A graveyard of a house! Someone cleans the space, someone wipes the dust from her face, and someone writes an epitaph: “There lived a house that lives no more”. Children come and scrape the words “lived” and “lives” and paint two other substitute words, “stood” and “stands”. Futile sentiments, fling them to the bin. Tell me, how much does a wrecking ball weigh?
Ghost 1: I don’t know.
Courtyard 1: 13,500 pounds. That’s the combined average weight of 36 humans. 36 of your kind for one of ours.
Ghost 1: I am ashamed!
Courtyard 1: You are dead! They think we are static, but we move. The blue takes us, the shredded clouds take us, the rains, the light, the meteors, the birds, and the astronomical bodies.
Ghost 2: Take you where?
Courtyard 1: Everywhere, that’s where. Nowhere is everywhere for them. They are what they are. We don’t need machines. We look, we are lifted, and we are elsewhere. We use our voice, and the sky has codes hidden in thunder. When they want to touch us, there is a cloudburst overhead and for a long, long time we are cold and moist and warm and soft. Short of breath and all that liquid seeping in, in, in. Ah, happy and wet! (Silence)
Ghost 2: What about the sun?
Courtyard 1: What about it? The sun is an old bastard! It is not there at night. While they murder and plunder here, it shines on the other half, on the old and nothing new.
Ghost 1: They also sleep at night.
Courtyard 1: They shouldn’t close their eyes. At least not till they are safely dead. If you close your eyes, you become objects. Disposable, useless ones. Humans are not objects. Sleeping, they are objects caught in dreams, dreaming of humans, as if they resist even in that inert state, denying all objecthood. Screaming in dreams: “I am a human. Not this sleeping, motionless lump!”
Ghost 2: You are bleak!
Courtyard 1: I AM truth.
Ghost 1: Cut! (sudden disappearance and reappearance)
2: A Populated Courtyard
Ghost 2: There are things that, even when pulsating with life, seem so close to extinction.
Ghost 1: And things that wear the face of life only after their passing away.
Ghost 2: It’s all stain and decay. I don’t think it will speak.
Courtyard 2: Are you looking for old courtyards?
Ghost 1: Yes, but not always deserted.
Courtyard 2: Not abandoned, yes, but neglected, forsaken. Wherever you read that abandonment comes only after the departure of inhabitants, throw that book away, and burn its misleading pages. A bloodier tragedy is unconcern and absence of care. They live, the trash, the junk, the grot, the slops, all stinks of their existence here. Men and women are located by the waste they generate. They build their pipes underground, let the shit flow in all that water so tranquilly, and then call themselves clean. Whatever emerges from the entrails is hidden, driven out, sent to some dark waters, and all that is external is pushed to the dump yard. The rest, whatever remains, whatever is forgotten in all that early morning hurry, lands on my face. It has corrupted my soul and my language. My words smell like muck! Incessant human feet have indented the ground (do you see that cut right in the middle?). All air enters from there and all night it sucks the oxygen up. I breathe again only at dawn. But we are comrades, the garbage and I. It begins with the design… they conceived me like an entrapment, a cage for a rat. You enter and you’re confined. They follow the same model for their rooms, their nerves, their progeny, and the dogs they domesticate.
“A rat under a guillotine”, that’s humans for you! The rejected heap on the omitted courtyard! They are as old as I am. The hands that ejected them, the lips that smoked them, the soles that walked in them, the food packed in them, the water stored in them, all gone, all dead. I talk to them ─ the leftovers. The half-smoked, the semi-eaten, the carcass of the smelly kitten, the wrappers and the papers (yesterday’s news of yesterday’s people), the falling rust, the tainted blue arches, the tilted pillars, the lonely brick and the burdened string, and the clothes that hang. That is how I know they are still living! Fading colors and water dripping from them (one drop, then two, then the third drop is blue, is there anything more beautiful than the process of drying?). When the wind blows it fills the clothes up with air and suddenly, I see the sleeves are full, the chest is full, the stomach too. And there, finally, a man hanging from the rope, headless and vacillating in the evening wind! A sight, I tell you. Believe me, they respond, they always respond!
Ghost 1: He is senile, isn’t he?
Ghost 2: Gone in the head! Leave!
Ghost 1: Cut! (sudden disappearance and reappearance)
3: A Columned Courtyard
Ghost 1: (the fan, the windows, the columns, the chandeliers all come alive, such that there is light, wind, clatter of shades, and cracking of columns) What a war! My ears are turning into stone.
Courtyard 3: They are just happy. Every time someone enters through that blazing mouth, they are happy. They have not yet learnt to discriminate between humans and non-humans. Everything is a thing of joy for them, a reason for discourse. Human children are contaminated that way. From the first day, “Say paah paah, say maah maah, say sis ter”, but never, “Say wall, say window, say columns, say arches, say chandelier, say courtyards”, as if the child lived in the air, not under a roof, not behind doors protected from the barbarians outside.
Ghost 2: The words are too strenuous for the child to pronounce, too heavy on the tongue.
Courtyard 3: How do you know? It’s more about the intention of the parents. The substance and significance they attach to us are so abysmally low that the children, with their pastels, shift from the tottering figure of their parents directly to the hideous sun, the grisly trees, and famished animals. We are invisible to the child, the one who grows up to be two more feet thrusting the earth down in the rotational ring.
Ghost 1: (sarcastic) And your children, they don’t have language, do they?
Courtyard 3: Is it sarcasm? A little nudge and you are the sentinel of human civilization. You don’t understand, our language is much more primal…anything that is un-borrowed, and independent, like the sound you’re born with, is the only language that belongs to you. Everything else is a potential pollutant, an infection that perverts your essence.
Ghost 2: Why is there a false roof between you and the blue?
Courtyard 3: It was constructed as an afterthought by the sons, after the death of their father. The columns supporting the garlanded roof, the artificial wind, the hanging glass lights, the green apertures. They say they want to say something to you.
Ghost 1: We are listening. Let them, and you translate.
Courtyard 3: Fan first (sound of all 4 fans for 10 seconds) They are saying, “You don’t smell like humans!”
Ghost 1: Ten seconds of speech and just 5 words?
Courtyard 3: Five words and your entire existence defined! Be silent, the windows clang. (sound of all 3 green windows for 10 seconds) Their words are, “We keep our panels shut, we are scared of ghosts. We know you are here, looking at us, but we can’t hear you. Are you not alive?”
Ghost 2: Shouldn’t they know the truth? Tell them the truth.
Courtyard 3: No! Hear the chandeliers now! (the chandeliers switch their lights on and off for 10 seconds) “You there or you aren’t? You there or you aren’t? Why can’t I see you? What kind of light do you need? Is my vision spoilt like that of the humans? I have heard, they don’t see ghosts, and when they do it’s only a sight of imminent death”.
Ghost 1: We are here! Do you see us? See us! (louder) See us now!
Courtyard 3: Stop yelling! The last one, the columns. (columns split and move as if in a trance-like dance for 10 seconds). This roughly translates into, “Get out!”
Ghost 2: Is that what you want as well?
Courtyard 3: I want what they want. We are one. I am what they are.
Ghost 1: Cut! (sudden disappearance and reappearance)
4: The Yellow Palace Courtyard
Courtyard 4: You have wasted your visit. I have nothing to say. Do not come near me!
Ghost 1: Just one story and we are gone.
Courtyard 4: What will one story change? You can’t have eternal life. Soon even this ethereal form will erode, like shores breaking under seas.
Ghost 1: One more story is many nights of dreamless sleep! Sleep…that is an art. Those who sleep are artists. Sleep is the beginning of folklore, why it was the spoken word before the written one.
Courtyard 4: I have one story about love, one about vengeance, one about hope, another about betrayal, and another about madness, and another…
Ghost 2: Love!
Courtyard 4: I am impatient. The story will be in fragments, like photographs. All this was 55 years ago. Two women, a photojournalist documenting old buildings and the eldest daughter of this house in charge of guiding her through the physical and incorporeal archives. The day’s journey through the veins and vennels of the house ended in the courtyard. Recumbent on the floor, spread-eagled, both of them horizontal over this horizontal, under the sempiternal stars. Conjoined hands thawing, and melding, feet knotted and dissolving, wafting hair a forest and a stream running through its roots. Everything was water about them. Do you hear the sea? The sound of seas…how to describe the sound of seas, how does one reproduce such unreality? Every night their naked baths in the sea. If there was a moon, they could be seen. Other times one would only hear sea-songs from that darkness. I longed for the sea. All my grains still burn with that thirst. One vision and there would be peace neverendingly. I remember the first time we had that accidental meeting ─ the sea and I. They were looking at some pictures of the sea. I tried to peer my way through their massive heads for just one look at the sea. All I could make out was the naked woman who belonged to this house, and the parts of the sea shot with a flash. They kept tossing the photographs all over me, like children drowning stones in water. One of those wet documents of mad motion fell inverted on the ground. Ah, the first encounter! The white frozen wave, snow waves riding on black waters, the naked woman dissolved in the picture, and it was like a black giant crouching towards the house, towards the floor, it felt that it would shatter the iron and engulf the house, its sole desire was to have me under, submerged and silent! And as if, like an epiphany, it was all too evident now. The sea was in love with me. All night, the sea would speak, the sea speaks to me, and the words are “shshshshshshshshshshshshshshshshshshshshshshshshshshshshshshshshshs”. One prolonged hum and hymn.
Then one day, there was the sea-water oozing from their clothes, their legs. It tasted like salt (I know how salt tastes; it has been carelessly dropped so many times by the women of this house). The taste of my love in my mouth! How tired it is from the waves crashing and lashing all days, since the beginning, since the first drop. My love bleeds in the crusade of the waves. The color of her blood is white, the taste of her blood is salt. Waves of the sea are smeared with blood. But one fails to hold on to liquid. What does one need in love? Flesh! Immediately another longing! Now the women were kissing, and from their tongue the only gift from my sea. A particle of sand fell from their mouth. The sand had been blest by the holy waters of my love. And the weight it had, that nanoscopic grain, caused such trembling, it sent waves down to my convulsing core. I shuddered and shivered all night. Nothing has changed, except a few deaths and births in some of those rooms, and the escape of the lovers one such sea-night, their fading footsteps merging with the song of our love. And this is how we sang it. “shshshshshshshshshshshshshshshshshshshshshshshshshshshshshsh” (fusing with the real sound of seas).
Ghost 1 and 2: (overtaken, overwhelmed, overwritten, fade slowly, very slowly).
