News That Stays News

“Whilst they lived they seemed to be somewhat, but now no one speaks of them” March 18, 2013

Ala-ud-din Khilji is the sort one has to respect, after a certain fashion.  Though he reigned in Delhi, his armies ranged as far afield as Madurai.  Though Delhi was sacked under his rule, in the years after the death of Kublai Khan Khilji’s generals defeated the Chagatai Mongols not once but four separate times.  Such a man saw the century-old Qutb minar, and decided that he would do build a tower twice its size.  At his death, it was thirty meters across, and twenty high.  Four years later, his dynasty was gone, replaced by his general Ghiyas ud-Din Tughluq.  No one ever touched the Alai Minar again.

I cannot see a pile of rubble, in the clear outline of a fluted column of impossible proportions, and not think of Shelley’s poem.  As it turns out, in those times buildings were always built by piling the rubble of older buildings and fixing them with cement, and only afterwards neatly cutting stone for the facade.  This is interesting, but cannot combat the feeling that an enchanter had begun to raise the tower, and then all that he had built had fallen from the air into a pool of cement, and been left floating in an invisible mold, like bits of chicken do in a clear plastic bag of lemon coriander soup.  If that last image is not especially evocative for you, there is still the sheer span of time for which this project has remained abandoned.  The engraving below is from within a generation of the British conquest of Delhi from the Mughals, about two hundred years after Shah Jahan built the Taj Mahal, and three hundred years after the Mughals themselves took Delhi from the Lodi sultans.  At this point, I begin to lose track, for by then the Alai Minar had stood barren already for three dynasties and nine generations, and yet when Ala-ud-Din first set out to build it, the original construction of the Qutb Minar had already passed out of living memory.

The Qutb Minar is by turns impressive and just old.  The original design would have pleased Gaudi: three stories of a vast and tapered fluted column, the flutes first angled sandstone, then round, then alternating cylindrical and angled, and always maintained in alignment.  On account of the natural disasters of the better part of a millenium, the higher stories are no longer related: the fourth floor is completely smooth and faced in marble.  From near the base, the whole thing feels a bit like forced perspective, as though the someone had been trying to make the tower look even taller than it really was.  The inscriptions and the red sandstone walls are a bit worn, and in truth perhaps no longer so very impressive.  The balconies seem, at first, to have been recently hung with a metal screen to keep pieces from falling off and hitting anyone on the ground.  Then again, one realizes rather suddenly, the pendant metal mesh is in fact an effect just an effect produced by the stone carvers of some long ago time.

Ruins of Delhi from Adam Khan’s Tomb

Ayaz Basrai is the kind of guy you have to respect.  Everybody’s sure that electric doors are cool.  Best Buy thinks electric doors that slide open when you stand in front of them are cool.  Ayaz knows that doors that slide open when you press a button on the wall, are way cool.  In the bathrooms of the club he designed, on the second to last floor of the crescent mall, are toilets that genuinely feel like they might be recycled space pods.  The club itself is a curving and organic mix of light and shadow that I don’t expect outside the fantasies of madmen, and perhaps the City Museum.  Perhaps it should not be surprising that the crowd there is classy.  It’s one of the few places I’ve walked into willingly while I’ve been here and simply felt completely awkward.  Sometimes, I rely on foreignness to get through situations that I do not or cannot make sense of.  In fairness, I should concede that the scene was colorful, the gender ratio nearly balanced, and that my friend later reckoned that there was one song that had gone well, even if I’d shown no sign of noticing.  Yet, I’d somehow got that feeling -uncommon even for a dilettante- as if everyone I danced with was consistently off by one beat.  That being crazy, I just called it a night.

This is real

Ayaz handiwork in the restaurant on the rooftop itself, however, was even more incredible.  I ordered lamb on a skewer for old time’s sake, but it was not like old times.  Perhaps I should have expected something different when a little bowl of parsley butter turned up with a few warm rolls.  Perhaps, in truth, I should have expected something different when I saw the screens between the sections, like the whitewashed sections of some gargantuan butterfly’s wings, shot through with triangular holes.  Perhaps when I took my seat, intensively curved and yet quite solid, and a little as though Botero had gotten high with Dali, and decided to paint the hilt of a giant’s rapier, left carelessly thrust into the ground.  When it did arrive, the lamb was indeed on skewers, but spread lightly with mint, laid out on a beautiful walnut-stained wooden plate, and tender enough to savor the feeling as the pieces came apart.  Around it on the plate lay a salad of fine texture, the bell peppers cut smaller than the corn they mixed with, and the rice of a stout but small grain I’ve not seen before or since, and didn’t think to inquire about.  Even the whiskey sauce, despite what the name evokes, was superb.  It was the sort of meal one should have eaten with eyes closed, but that beneath the serenely curving crescent of lintels, and between the implacable white cylinders that held them, one could see the Qutb minar, lit against the night.

In truth, somewhere around a half millenium after it was built, the world began to fill with other tall, tapered red towers, horizontally divided at regular intervals.  And for a person who has seen factory chimneys, the feeling of knowing what one is looking at is quite powerful indeed.  But the tower was finished, for the first time, before Thomas Aquinas took orders, and that’s the sort of thing that demands some respect.