Orchha ~

It was not even seven in the morning, and the sun had an ascendancy. It portended a hot day, here in the middle of MP, in Orccha. There was a loudspeakered bhajan emanating from one of the numerous temples all around. And as I looked around from top of the ramparts of the Orccha Fort, I could see dried brown vegetation upto the horizon, broken only by the cones of temples all around, as if there was a circle  of protection around the city. Birds chirperd, and the broken fort wall I sat on seemed to be begging for its stories to be heard. 

Who had passed by, what had they done. What were there dreams and frustrations? Was anybody a poet, pushed to become a king? A queen who wanted more of life, but didn't know what? Whose spirits haunted this place, who came here on moon-lit nights, who looked after these ruins and who wanted them no more?

Or maybe these are just passages in time, memories in passing, stone monuments perchance. For nothing stays. Just as we forget, these tall structures will break down and nothing will remain of them but the dust from there bones, which will then blow in the wind, and be no more. 

There is a strange desolation, which comes with the silence, born out of the sound which the wind makes around the temples and ruins, as I walk within the womb of a hot brown world, which finds ways to eke out sweat from my skin, and makes me feel a random panic. The wedding decorations are cones of glitter 

in front of abandoned temples. I feel I'm one with them. They mean nothing and everything. 

And I wonder how randomly god lies around, like breathing. Always there. You just have to reach out.

Places carry their stories in the dermis of their air. You have to be outside, on the roads, with the wind and the sun, and the sights, and the people, and the things they are saying, the things they are writing on the walls, and how they look at you, and what they say. The things they sell to you, and the way they sell them. The way they react when you say no, and the way they answer when you ask them about themselves. 

And amidst this all-encompassing dust and throat-stringing heat, I walk in clothes which are not only inappropriate to the place but bad for the body in the oven. Jeans and t shirt, the bare minimum in a city road, was excessive here: a dhoti or loose cotton pyjamas or an aerated linen trouser was max for the temperatures. And my sharp-looking cap was of course completing my peacock look, with the cap being my plumage. 

The heat was opening my pores and the sheen of sweat was soon converted into rivulets. And the brine drying on my skin made it scratchy. The hard and unrelenting sun, I realized, created strange illusions. It poured weight and had the capacity to crush, but at the same time it opened something which seemed to make you see within things, a kind of a vast-void-vision which was giving me waves upon waves of messages from things inanimate. 

Is anything ever dead?

Is lingering in the air,

is playing on the mind,

is crushing the heart,

not just other ways to say -

there are stories still to tell,

and the end is but a pause?

Ancient structures break my heart. They stand lonely and mute. They let light in. They let birds fly in them with abandon. They let their walls be mutilated with words which don't deserve immortality. And keep their stories and their pain buried deep inside their stone, until one day even that breaks down. And they die, brick by brick, as dust, unremembered, unmourned, unloved. 

Giants fall thus. In wilderness, in desert air, in rarefied light, with starlight and breeze touching their ruins and moving on. Rarely, if ever, comes the lover who searches, runs his fingers on faded designs and broken backs, imagines and silently mourns what was, what could be.

Dust to dust. So goes the trajectory - for men and all that they create.