The Verticality Of City Buildings

Since I first moved to Purvasha, the Mayur Viharhousing society in which my parents own a flat, I have been going up to theroofs of C and D block. And since I first went up to a roof, long before I movedto Purvasha, I have been wondering what draws me up.

We read the history of the city every time we look out on it. From atop Cblock you see Rashtrapati Bhawan flanked by secretariats, looking down theavenue through India Gate at the Purana Quila. From here, east of the Yamuna, wesee the British planners paying homage to the imperium they replaced. The firstfloodlit Indian stadium stands not far south, named for the prime minister whoinaugurated our republic. And further south, the towers of Nehru Place , theirroots infested with computer peripherals, the building blocks of the neweconomy, of this latest turn no one foresaw. We write the history of the cityevery time we look out on it.

One whole chapter of Victor Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris is devoted tothe view of Paris from the tower of the cathedral. Standing there in the middleof the nineteenth century, he reconstructs the fifteenth century view. For Hugothe view from the top of the old gothic building plays an essential part in histragic tale. And reading that chapter I begin to feel that perhaps it is morethan part of the story. Perhaps it is the story.

* *

In 1803 the British defeated the Marathas in a pitchedbattle fought somewhere between the pontoon bridge road and Akshardham temple.Not far from where the Commomnwealth Games Village is supposed to be. I knowthis because the first time I read about this engagement, the battle ofPatparganj, the writer said that if you climbed to the top of Humayun's tomb youcould see cannons blazing across the Yamuna.

And when I read this line, everything else fell away: the British on theascendant, the Marathas finally beaten, the Mughals humiliated and weakened,India's history waiting for the victor to start writing it. It all fell away.

All I could think of was that person, that hypothetical person, who hadclimbed to the top of Humayun's tomb that day in 1803 to watch the guns flashingeast of the river.

* *

I find myself up on the roof of the main building ofIIT every weekday afternoon at lunch time. I stand in sight of the Qutab Minar,at a place that was a phantom point suspended in midair for most of thatbuilding's history. The secretariats are seen side-on from IIT, Rashtrapati Bhawan sitting back west of them, its darker dome a clear assertion of superiority. On foggy winter days, all three grand domes are smudged onto a horizon that has crept closer while I wasn't looking.

Almost every day I try to figure out where Purvasha lies on the landscapethat lies north of me. I've taken various sighters—there's the Lotus temple,there's Nehru place—and tried to triangulate the Mayur Vihar Phase 1 grouphousing societies. It hasn't worked, so far. One particularly clear day I sawthe four-chimneyed power station that sits near Pragati Maidan. It doesn't help.My eyes aren't used to calculating these kinds of depths.

On the other side of the river, here in Mayur Vihar, I have never tried tolook for anything in particular. Each distinctive and diffused landmark carriesits own weight, like the songs of a favourite album. Each one draws a differentmood towards it. But there is never one feature of the landscape I seek from theroofs of Purvasha the way I seek Purvasha when I am on the roof of the IITbuilding.

* *

The F train comes overground for two stops on my way towork.

Some evenings I look west— past backyard flowerpot neighbourhoods, pastdelivery trucks crawling south on a snarled expressway to Bensonhurst or StatenIsland, past the bay with its small celebrated islands and its statues ofliberty—to Jersey where the sun is setting red. Some mornings I look north tothe tall buildings of downtown Brooklyn, where I'm headed, or the diminished,but still impressive, cluster of oblong boxes that sits at the lower tip ofManhattan. Some days I look east over the canal, past its picture postcarddrawbridge, past old factory signboards, past graffiti-stained boundary walls,past rows of residential rooftops to graceful old apartment buildings.

And then there are days when all I want to do is spot the two church spiresthat bookend the block on which I live.

* *

Looking down from the D block roof, there is the gameof cricket underway in Sahyog apartments. You have to wait for the ball to beretrieved from under cars or inside a drain, you have to wait for squabblesabout numbers of balls bowled or number of runs scored to be resolved, you haveto wait while evening walkers stroll through the playing area. And then, whenyou've waited, comes the delivery, the swing of the bat, the scrambling batsmen,the throw to the column that serves for the stumps, the appeal, therecriminations, and then, after another long wait, the continuation.

And right next to it, a buffer between the two societies, a dirt strip thatnot long ago housed people. No smell of rotis cooking rises from it anymore, nofilm songs play on black and white televisions. We shared a wall with somepeople for several years, and now a court has ordered it so they are gone.

In The Point of Return, Siddhartha Deb's protagonist thinks aboutbidding farewell to Rilbong, his fictional hometown. And he thinks that the bestway to bid it farewell is to go to a place from where the entire town can beseen and to stand there and look out at it. It is the kind of farewell thatbrings reassurance; the feeling that the view from on high is permanent in a waythat our lives are not. Standing there looking down at the strip which separatesPurvasha from Sahyog, I feel that idea of permanence crumble. Deb's protagonist,having thought of going up the hill and looking down on Rilbong, doesn'tactually do it. And it strikes me that perhaps this is because he realizes thatthe permanence he seeks is an illusion, has always been.

The city forms and reforms itself. Hoardings come down, flyovers go up. Andwe continue to look out on it, to recount the stories of our lives through whatwe see, and remember how we felt when what is gone was still there.

* *

In 1988 Bruce Springsteen played in Delhi. The cheapestticket was one hundred rupees, not the kind of money I could ask my parents for.Not for a concert. Not because my parents didn't want me to go to concerts, butbecause there had never been concerts to go to.

Even today when I see the floodlights of Nehru stadium, I sometimes findmyself thinking of that night in 1988 when I stood out on the balcony of ourfifth floor flat in Shahjahan road and looked east at them, glowing yellow inthe smoggy Delhi air while Bruce Springsteen played underneath.

* *

In his Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard talksabout the role of the attic and the cellar in bestowing a sense of"verticality" to the dwelling which, he says, is essential in creatingthe intimacy of the home. Talking of "incomplete" Paris dwellings hewrites:

"But the height of city buildings is a purely exterior one... "(pp 27)

The opposition is to Bachelard's daydream of a country home. The absence ofan attic, a place that can be climbed to, flattens the city home, flattens itinto "mere horizontality."

Having lived all but one or two years of my life in multi-storeyed buildings,I have known the truth of Bachelard's statement. I know that I have known itstruth because I have rebelled against it.

When I go up to the seventh floor and I climb that last flight up to theroof, I am like Bachelard's daydreamer climbing up the stairs to the attic. LikeBachelard, I always remember those stairs leading up. On the way up they couldlead to the joyous freedom of an open sky or, when the management committeedecrees it, the crashing disappointment of a locked grill. There's no way toknow till you've climbed the first nine and made the turn. On the way up, themystery at the end of the stairs has the power to exalt and to dismay. On theway down they're just stairs.

" ...a house in a big city lacks cosmicity. For here, where houses areno longer set in natural surroundings, the relationship between house and spacebecomes an artificial one." (Poetics of Space, pp 27)

Perhaps in Bachelard's Paris there is no chhat, no place to walk outon in the evening, no place to fly a kite from. But here in Purvasha there is.The view from the roofs of the society takes Bachelard's "natural" anddisembowels it. Once you walk up to the roof, this group housing society, thisgated village, reveals the organic relationship it bears to the space itinhabits.

Perhaps Bachelard has forgotten Victor Hugo standing up on the tower of NotreDame looking out at that same Paris. Each one of our homes may lack cosmicity,but together we own these high points, these places from which a collection ofugly grey towers is as natural or unnatural as a mausoleum of sandstone andmarble.

And from these high places we can stand and claim intimacy with everythingthat we see. Not ownership. Intimacy.

* *

I thought about Jacques Cousteau all morning today. Notabout the Calypso sailing in search of the secrets of the sea, not about divingbells and underwater cameras, but of an old man talking about what we've alllost. Cousteau talked about pollution, about the greying of the skies. He saidsomething I don't exactly recall, but it went something like this:

"I remember," he said, "the time when, as a boy, I could seethe Alps in the distance from on top of the Eiffel tower in Paris."

* *

They begin to lose their specificity, these patterns oflight. It starts with the evening when sunset slowly transforms the horizon intoa set of diffuse bands. The pinks are the centrepiece, the yellows the body.Some evenings grey-black streaks of cloud overlay the composition, directing andredirecting the eye.

This show doesn't last long. It's easy to miss it. Spend ten minutes chattingwith someone down near the water tank and it's gone.

At night the Nizamuddin bridge used to pulse with light like a vein shotthrough with radioactive dye. It looks dimmer now, with the formalized lightingof the new temple behind it. And lost in the night sky is the memory of thepontoon bridge road when it was still in use, a twinkling string of firefliesswaying where it passed over the river. Far away on the other side thegurdwara's dome is lit and, on a clear night, behind it stands the much biggerdome of Humayun's tomb, its marble white reflecting already reflected light.

Then there are those days when at eleven in the morning the sun disappearsbehind a sky full of clouds. Thin clouds that cannot keep the light out. Shadowsdisappear. Everything is lit sepia. And you hope that it will not rain foranother ten minutes at least, because it might be years before this light isseen again. And when it is, you might not be here to see it.

* *

Circles of confusion capture the light of the Dutchsun.

Did Vermeer use the camera obscura to project a view of Delft before hepainted it? Did its early lenses throw small unfocussed patches of light—circles of confusion— onto the wall where the sun glinted off the buildings?

It's the only way he could have known where and how to scatter thosebrilliant dots of yellow, that illumination. It's the only way he could haveobserved a phenomenon not visible to the naked eye.

Looking down at the old city from the southern tower of Jama Masjid, aninversion of Vermeer's view of Delft is seen. The rooftops of Delhi, whitewashand concrete as opposed to the dark browns of Delft, are dotted with circles ofblack. It is a phenomenon visible to the naked eye: Sintex water tanks.

"Vermeer seems almost not to care, or even to know, what it is that heis painting. What do men call this wedge of light? ... What do we know of itsshape? To Vermeer none of this matters, the conceptual world of names andknowledge is forgotten, nothing concerns him but what is visible."(Lawrence Gowing. Vermeer.)

* *

When we seek out the roof, we seek solitude and an end to solitude. We wantto feel like part of the expanse. We want to feel insignificant in the expanse.

This Independence Day I stood up on the C block roof and watched people flykites. Thread tangled with thread up in the sky. People stood on a few squarefeet of space, not a boundary wall in sight, locked in delicate battles highabove. The wind was blowing west and every now and then a defeated kite floatedinto Purvasha. One of them came flying towards me, and for a moment it seemedthat the bubble that surrounds me would burst. But a draught caught it at thelast moment and it flew up, then landed flat on the roof just behind me.

And when it had fallen, and when a little girl who was flying kites with herfamily on the other side of the water tank had run around and picked it up,smiled at me and walked away, I wished for a moment that it had hit me, thiskite. I wished for a moment that it had made me feel something pointed,something physical.

* *

When the Admiral came down the stairs I noticed he wascarrying a telescope.

"That's a nice telescope," I said, once introductions had beenmade.

"I was first in my class in Khadakvasla," he said, mixing himself adrink. "This was the prize."

It lay on the table and I looked at it with awe, realizing that things Icould not begin to imagine must have been seen through its eyepiece in the threedecades since it was presented to a young naval cadet at Khadakvasla.

"It's a good telescope," he said, setting his glass down next toit.

"What were you looking at up there?" I asked.

"They've been working on the colony water tank for the last two days. Iwas trying to see how much longer it will take."

Amitabha Bagchi's first novel, AboveAverage, releases in February