I am scolding myself about why I had not been to the Madh Fort all these years. I am also grateful to that Air Marshall with a generous heart who called me last evening to let me know that there was a film shoot at the fort and it was open to civilians today. I am also berating myself for not enjoying this immense, forsaken, and dilapidated architecture and thinking about other random things.
CUT
Reality claws its way back into me as a nasal overbearing voice booms into the air. A full-size woman dressed in a sickly yellow gown with a tattoo of an eagle running into her breasts swimmingly settles into an ancient wooden bench from a 16th century British landscape. She is mouthing a ballad for an overgrown man who runs towards her dramatically and..
CUT
I am on top of the Madh Fort. I can see my city trailing the ocean. I am pure, unsullied, undefiled. I am virginal again. This city is nothing the way I have seen it ever. This city I call my own is beating to a different heartbeat that I never heard.
It is late evening and the sun is melting away into the sea. To add to my wonder and elation, it is a full moon night and the moon appears into the twilight – bright and orange. The big bunny in the moon is napping away. The lights are appearing, a flicker here and there and in a few minutes everything is illuminated. The city is like a vision. Everything that exists is a dream. A dream that the big bunny dreams.
CUT
The shot has changed. The lights are slipping away. A few shots here and there and the director wants to call it day. His assistant is screaming on the microphone, his cap twisted the other way on his head. There is a Labrador that the crew boys adore. He is creating havoc on the sets running around with the actor’s headdress in his mouth. The crew boys are running behind him. One of them catches up to him holds him tight, rolls on the wild grass with him and it is all calm again. The location has changed. The crew hastily moves down to the lower part of the fort.
CUT
There is a lonely canoe near the shore. No one to claim it. It is blue, pretty and free. The bigger boats are into the deep sea. The smell of dry fish invading every single pore in my body. It feels like me now.
CUT
The city is aflame. I can see my building. If I imagine it, I can even see my house. If I imagine hard, I can see myself. I am ordinary.
CUT
The fort is all-stone. Its rugged, its old-world, its green. There are parts where you cannot distinguish the fort from the shrubbery. At the entrance is a tree aloof and calm suspended mid air growing through the fort walls. The windows are barred and limiting like a viewfinder on the camera. The midget-sized gates are bolted with huge locks. The fort is under the control of Indian air force. No civilians allowed, but for a shoot.
CUT
Madh is happy. It is like a friendly community where beggars laugh with the locals. A group of villages, it retains and celebrates itself. Boats in the sea fishing away, middlemen trading with the Kolis is the middle of busy streets, children with bruised knees playing in alleys, young armed men from the Naval base sitting in cozy groups, women in all sorts of attires parading the streets, young underground rockers walking their stride, old men sneering at me, a huge buffalo steering traffic, hostile film vans barricading the bungalows, rickshaws which do not follow the meter, a small city within a city. Madh is untouched.
So am I.
