We scavenge at night, pockets full of broken futures
Libraries were demolished brick by brick
Books pulped into silence.
In the After-Nation, the greatest crime was remembering.
History was classified as combustible material.
Libraries were demolished brick by brick; books pulped into silence.
Every time a city drowned or burned, the Ministry of Truth simply removed its name.
Maps became fiction.
Memory—resistance.
We were Rubble-keepers.
We scavenge at night, pockets full of broken futures:
a shard of temple mosaic, scorched concrete from a dam-burst village, rusted rods from luxury towers swallowed by monsoon.
We didn’t know why we collected them, only that the rubble felt alive, like something unfinished, like a conversation interrupted mid-sentence.
Some of us were artists once. Some engineers. Some farmers who had forgotten the smell of rain. All exiles in our own land, carrying fragments of a country that no longer admits it is dying.
The sky that night glowed with the colour of open wounds, red and raw.
That’s when we saw it.
A structure where there had been barren land yesterday.
Not assembled, grown.
Concrete rose like bone.
Steel ribs curved like spine.
Glass glimmered like wet leaves.
Ghungroos threaded through the walls quivered as if sensing us, memory trembling.
We approached with the caution survivors learn.
Inside, everything disobeyed logic, ceilings breathed,
books wrote themselves when touched,
floors turned to rivers then back to tile like nothing happened.
In one room, rain fell upward. In another, walls peeled back like eyelids to reveal constellations no telescope had catalogued. It felt as though we had stepped into a building dreaming itself into being.
We named it The Archive of the Uninhabitable.
Not a museum.
Not a refuge.
A phenomenon.
A possibility…
Vibha Galhotra is a conceptual artist whose multimedia oeuvre—including sculptures, installations, photographs, videos, site-specific work and public art interventions—addresses the shifting topography of a world radically transformed by climate change, consumerism, capitalism and globalisation
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This article appeared as ‘The City That Remembered Us ...’ in Outlook’s 30th anniversary double issue ‘Party is Elsewhere’ dated January 21st, 2025, which explores the subject of imagined spaces as tools of resistance and politics.
