Matiyaburj

The sky is ashen and the ashen road is sunny. A yellow-helmeted man is atop one of the many Roman Metro pillars, atop one of the similar scaled cylindrical concretes, atop an edifice of the 21 st century where the roof is a super-fast suburban train: Delhi, like Rome, cannot be built in a day. You have to wish for it. Like the pizza delivery boy, easing himself and yawning besides the ashen road, his boxed hot delivery, waiting in the old ash and red scooter, during the rider’s warm piss, becoming roadside food. You have to wish for it. Or is he just returning, having delivered?
ABCD: It’s a mall of billboards, Noida’s biggest four-sided ad space; unmissable, the companies would have thought. Away, near, the tall apartment blocks, rising up on home loans—the city’s middle-class encroachments.

Man was born and he wanted to make something of himself. His brain was not unlike the other creatures born before him. But he had a thing is his heart: he wanted to make something of himself. (Still, today, many millennia later, I cannot think up myself. I just am, whatever it is, nothing more, nothing less; I am this; I am that. It’s not possible. Still.): DCBA. BDAC: The National Science Centre, one carton atop another, one container atop another, veering away into the sky, and the old tomb dome. The distant past and the near past, divided by a modern two-lane road. Its noon.

A: When leaders die, they do leave behind voids, unmissable voids, patches of green land on the ashen roadsides, to be forcefully kept vacant for as long as the State can hold on, where, for now, nothing can grow except regularly manicured grass. The park is for the dead whom the State says was and is still above the ordinary, the ordinary in their lives as well as their deaths. The park is for the dead leader—burned and powdered away—the leader who might have been humble or haughty, but was powerful bothways. The park is for his ghost in our minds, nourished by the State since schooldays and annual functions, and the ghost happily strolls in his foliage-rich neat park every moisture-laden night.

D: The State is not the Society’s mind. The State has its own mind and the Society has its own. When the State thinks, the Society’s mind breaks down. When the Society thinks, the State breaks down. It happens once in a century because the State has prisons.

B: The idea is not to make arrogant buildings.

C: Modern white-body streetlights leaning onto the Gurgaon highway, but never falling into it. Car, car.