Episode 1:

Conversation between two Ghosts who live in cracks and roam old/ancient buildings. One speaks, while the other listens. They know they are extinct, not what they must do with their extinction. They are storytellers to each other until they find other ghosts, other ears and other spaces inhabited by these future listeners. Till then, vacuous time echoes with their silent words. If they know the residents, either living or gone, they narrate their stories, full of anecdotes, asides and autopsy of character; if they are unknown, they invent. They often confuse spaces and people.

Ghost 1 (almost murmuring, then rising): Do not speak, do not breathe, walls do not breathe, ghosts do not breathe. When they do, there are no sounds. No, breath heavy, let your words clash against the bricks, to let them know we are here. Not existing, but here like ether, like these dark spots on this wall, each blot a year dead and its imprints on the wall. To let them know we are the fossils for the future geologist. That the dead are the future of the ones alive. That in the end, only time travellers live. Once we had a body. Bones as hard as this wall, flesh like glazing tint, our feet crushed stones. All that gone, we are sunk in this puddle of time. After losing their body, ghosts inhabit concrete spaces. Don’t be silent. Speak to me. No, be silent, listen to me. I don’t remember the last time words left my mouth. I am only a mouth now; body leaves slowly, very slowly after death. It wasn’t like this in the olden days, when there were abundant open spaces. We could hold on to our full bodies; the way we lived was the way we lived when we were dead. Now there are either buildings or owned properties. We cannot reside on their lands; we do not trespass. It is also against the physiognomy of ghosts. To adjust to smaller spaces our bodies began shrinking. Some are hands now, legs, breasts, or intestines—we chose to be heads. Not all of it functions, though. The unused parts keep forgetting their purpose, my hair, for instance, or my sense of smell. We fit into these cracks so well.  Each crack our mouth, each crack our ear, and so on. The dark speckles you see are the blood of termites and worms which lived here before us. In a way, we colonised their country. And every time we yell, there are splits and clefts on the wall. This wall is ours. This is our home; we sleep here when we need rest. It used to be a temple or a holy monument of some kind. We don’t know. But after we started residing here, it became renowned as the “Speaking Wall”. Estranged lovers would come and whisper their secrets into these cracks, our ears. Archeologists heard our incoherent tales and wanted to break this down. The government barred them. Sometimes religious mucks can save you, especially if you are dead. This is the tale of the wall. It is time to leave, till we are back again, till we are gone again. We are in search of other ghosts, we are afraid for each other, what if one of us vanishes one night, it doesn’t take much for ghosts to disappear, air they are, sometimes they evaporate, when the wind is high, and they are not home, not covered on all sides by mortar and paint. Who will listen to our stories then? Who will tell us, no, we are not alone? Not at all alone. Who will tell us? Who can tell us? So…we visit old, old, old structures, rooms, terraces, chairs, lamps, doors, and we narrate our pieces, our chronicles, histories of people or fabricate entirely new ones. Someday they will respond. They will say, “We are here. Can you hear us?”

Ghost 1 (sound of wind): We move like shots in cinema. In the last scene, we were in the holes; in this one, we are the ones holding the lens, stretching our bodies, bending our eyes, breathing smoke and grime (better than dust and brick, don’t you think?). I know what you’re thinking. That we should’ve been in a darker space, quieter, not even birds, flitting of birds. One can only tell stories where nothing stirs. I know. I can hear you think. But all dead things possess a shared ground of silence. Once we—who once lived and things once inhabited— die, we are gifted a strange wordless language, older than civilisation, older than the first vertical man, older than the world itself. It is the language of objects. The way a stone speaks to a stone. The way insects pray to the sun. We hear, we hear things without end, for everything has a voice; everything is speaking and speaking and speaking. The world is a babel of things gone. What is the Arch saying? It says it has form, structure, radius, vertical supports; it says it has a shape. It says we have none. But formless, shapeless, we are visible. It can see us. The way it sees the grilled windows, the rectangular doors, the semi-arches, and people barely living in that red faded building. Out of all the things vanished, this is what we needed—contours. “How would you understand patterns and moulds, when you have none?”

First Arch: 1849, the year they imagined a single vaulting arch built inside this mansion. Let us not name the owner; names will have religions, religions will have gods, and people who believe in gods do not believe in ghosts. Human hands erected me, this knowledge is sufficient for my account. All of them are dead, the sons and daughters of this family. Lives of this house, now haunting other places. All dead, some in desiring freedom, some in jails, others, the natural way, down to the last light. Only the poet entered me and jumped over to somewhere. A few who escaped this city are far away now, plotting and scheming to demolish the walls, to raise glass arches, or convert this into an antique spot, for lovers of the archaic perhaps. I sometimes think what it would be to be a part of antiquity, to be a collector’s item, to be seen as a relic, a prehistoric document. About the poet? What about the poet? The way he died? Oh, they didn’t find his body. It wasn’t what they said that he took his life. I know. He just wanted to be on the other side. And he thought I was the gateway, the opening to the cosmic mysteries of the universe. For days, he wouldn’t leave the chair. A wooden chair three feet away from my wall. Days dissolving into nights, and nights into days. Winters, he would tremble and look at me with sinking eyes. All summer, the grating sound of nib over the paper. Page over a page, the sketches of this one Arch. And poems on different parts. One on the keystones, one on the springing line, one on the yellow paint, another on the white, the pink, the black, the green border divisions, and one comparing me to the post and lintel, to the corbel arches, to the Roman rounded arches, the intersected pointed arches, the Syrian horseshoe arches, and catenary arches. Finally, all that physicality gave way to intangible forces of nature. Hours he would ponder over my shape. Whether I resembled the grail, a womb facing the heavens (he thought I gave birth to the gods), the organ which in dreams he entered, hands and head and full-body, entered a man and emerged a child, or was I the mouth of the mansion, or the door to unbounded, infinite space. At the age of 27, not in a trance anymore, entirely awake, entirely aware, he climbed the edges, the way he used to when he was a child, scolded and punished by his father, the same way that day. His legs balanced against a mild storm in the skies, he didn’t look down; his eyes were upwards turned. He touched everything that was me. My firm and solid frame melted under his warm blood. For moments, I was as shapeless and colourless in life and love as you are now in death and decay. And then there was a leap. He didn’t fall down; he rose up, like angels, and expanded like clouds till he was gone. I imagined him getting scattered all over space. I imagined him invading the storm, the storm intensifying, and my poet falling down on me as rain and entering my mouth as winds. I imagined because arches can’t mourn, things do not mourn. When you mourn you cry, when you cry there is water. If there is water, who will save us? Waters melt us, and we evaporate. Here was a man who loved and slept neither with a woman nor with a man. There was a man who heard the sounds of objects and fell in love with one of them.

(Silence)

Ghost 1: As soon as their stories end, they return to their sleep again—a long rest on silent beds. We depart without a farewell song, like one leaving home on a moonless night. Each meeting is the first, each meeting is the last. Our meetings hiding our deaths in departures. We are dying of pain…no, it doesn’t pain at all, and we can’t die anymore. The longer I know you, the more my heart turns into wet mud, and you sit there clawing it and making your pagan idol there. So I leave. I leave. We leave you alone with your memories. For everyone who remembers is a poet. 

To another arch then before the night is heavy, and things wane again.

Columns and arches, more arches than columns, columns more than arches, arches fusing into the columns. Are you awake? Are your eyes closed? One side forever in darkness, another too much in light, when there is light. One eye in the light, another in the shadow, and the semi-circular middle half-illuminated—an immense penumbra. Perhaps you sleep like gods, one eye endlessly open on the world and things that crawl and scream on the surface.

Second Arch: Where are you?

Ghost 1: Our heads are in the shadows, with their back against the second column. Light burns us. But we are looking. We are here to listen. We see a little hole convulsing. It’s your mouth. You will speak now. 

Second Arch: Press your ears against the lines of these columns. What do you hear? It’s the music of children—so many, ah, so many. I lost count, that many. Each day a new one, the same one talking to another one. Hiding behind these columns, hopping over the light, avoiding light, and landing on the shadows, them too like you. Their sounds in these slabs.  On happy days the kind father, the child on his lap, would teach her numbers. “Count the columns,” he would say. “Now the patterned petals on the arches.” Other days, the cruel father would punish the son, “Stand in the sun, stand till you faint,” “Your back against the pillar till your legs are numb.” An artist needs solitude. They say you meet yourself in solitude. How do I do that? With so many voices inside, how do I do that? When I speak, it’s always with someone else’s voice. And every time, I know whose voice it is—everybody’s, not mine. Each time I begin, someone else is speaking. Who is speaking now? Perhaps, it is I, since ghosts need no voice. Look at the light falling inside, the shape of elongated arches. Now, like an arc, it curves on the left. It will turn further and further and then disappear. Tomorrow again, from right to left, the slow dancing of shadows, like a pendulum outside time, so slow, slow, slow, sometimes observing these movements I fall in a daze, hypnotised for days, then I wake up again like one from a prolonged sickness. In the absence of the children, I play with the sun. After the matriarch’s death, a feud began between the brothers. Who owns which column? Whose room is under which arch? They even divided the ground for the children for my children. The farthest column belonged to the eldest son, the last to the third brother, and so on. It took a few days. The children were quiet, their symphony replaced by howling and wailing of the other inhabitants. The mother, when she was alive, used to say, “How do you own shadows? How can anyone possess a house which is three hundred years old? A house which has heard of three hundred deaths? Only the house can own the house.” When people leave, empty houses talk to other empty houses. When the other homes lose their voice, the solitary house talks to its rooms, its glasses, its gossamer, its lizards, its columns, its arches.  Within a few years, all the brothers left along with their families. Barring the youngest (the fourth son), his wife, and his daughter. They stayed out of an attachment they couldn’t define. Perhaps they couldn’t yet separate the deaths from the objects that were its witness—so many gone, leaving the high arches and the columns standing. Then the days of madness. On nights when silence burst out like waves over waves and crashed into bodies, into souls, the last brother would come out with a hammer and smash the columns. He couldn’t reach the arches; he tried throwing the hammer thrice and failed. If you look closely, you’ll find wounds and gashes on my skin. The flower engravings over the borders are all deformed now—everything, a blessing from the hammer. After mauling, and cursing, and thrashing, he would hold on to the columns, embrace them one by one, his hands almost meeting on the other side, and weep. Oh, what a loud lamenting it was! It is a bizarre thing with tears. They streamed down for a while, then seeped inside the block, the cement, and the rods. The wife consulted an astrologer, and they decided that to leave was the only solution. On the last day, the daughter smiled, the wife wept, and the youngest son kept his eyes shut like one possessed, like one averting the eyes of dying love. Perhaps, he is cured now. There are often unknown faces here these days—promoters, contractors and different buyers. Touching us, measuring us, weighing us, painting us to cover the sores, the scars, the impressions time left on us.  It was them again, I thought when I heard you the first time. Stay awhile, stay till they tear us down, ground us to soot and smut. Witnesses to death want witnesses too.  No, don’t stay. It’s a human thing. To be seen, to be remembered. We are only the bearers. We carry stories of others. And that is how we end, overflowing with fiction. Columns and arches look after columns and arches. Don’t stay…we avoid humans, ghosts, and living alike. 

Ghost 1: Wherever we are, in search of other ghosts, we find things speaking. Where have all the ghosts gone? Perhaps, they have dissolved and become one with the objects they slept in. The things and the ghosts are one; things speak with the mouths of the ghosts. 

We leave then. Once again, searching for things then, for when we die, some of us become things too.     

Episode 2:

Ghost 1  (sound of rain): Sometimes…no most of the times, my eyes are only half-open, blinking for light to enter, not blinking for darkness to remain, looking at the world and not looking at it, remembering everyone, remembering no one. I know, I know, I know what it is to not have weight and talk to things that are nothing but weight. That is the obstacle—their weight and nothing more. And language all around them. They end up believing that words are weight. The reason why they borrow the language of the living. Why else use this language, this letter, this word, this syntax, why stitch words up in the same sickening pattern, the same codes, the same messages hidden under the same codes, the same dredging machine spouting the same laughter, the same sadness, the same tragic overtones, the same ending every damn time, the same every time to the same audience? Do things have a primal language too? To which they can return, once they are tired and exhausted of that old, old engine—tongue. Since they don’t have that fleshy organ to lick and taste tactile, what wags instead of the tongue? Granules perhaps, frothing of particles…the bricks shift when they speak, there is a tremor every time they talk. That is their lot. To speak is to shake foundations.

Stairs 1: Who is speaking? Do not tell me. Rather, are you standing on these steps or moving up into the rooms or mounting down to leave this house? We are the in-between, the mediators between outsides and insides, the carriers of motion, the bridge to all that is behind the doors. They are always leaving, always entering…and sometimes, at night, or an indolent afternoon when everything in the universe shivers in heat, a mulish girl, or an unaccompanied man sits on the fourth or the sixth step, holds the railing, thrusts her face or thrusts his face into the elongated grill, and waits for someone, waits for no one. Are you walking now? I listen to your feet, and I hear nothing. Imagine these words in your ear: ‘stairs’ and ‘footsteps,’ ‘footsteps’ and ‘stairs,’ and you are lost in sibilance, the sounds of ‘s’ in footsteps, it doesn’t leave your mouth, ‘footsteps,’ feet in the mouth, and mouth turns into stairs. How ironic! When a foot falls on marble, it loses the music of the word ‘footsteps’.  It is hard, bone against a rock, or boot over granite. No music, only cluck cluck or thomp thomp! Do you want to meet the others?

Ghost 1: Yes, that is why we are here! To meet the stairs. We know the lord of the house loved broad staircases; his wife loved them; he built them for her. In memory of her, after she died. Stairs of diverse shapes and sizes! He would say to her ghost, “So many ways to reach your room now! So many stairs to arrive at your absence! Sometimes I am lost in these stairs or simply fatigued, and the tiredness drowns the thought of you; I forget why I set foot on this quest. When I finally reach your room, I sleep on your bed, over your body that is not there, you take me in again, till I wake again, till I leave the room in search of you again.” People have seen the wife standing on these stairs, not moving, light piercing her form, or emanating from her and falling on the steps. Yes, we are here to meet the others, you and the others.

Stairs 1: Follow my steps, then follow the floor, the floor becomes us, and then we continue as the floor. A house is always a continuum, dividing into rooms and corridors, yet the same floor, the same stairs. I should warn you that the other stairs might not answer. They have abandoned speech; they have been in perpetual mourning since the wife died. They will speak only if they find you silent with amplified ears. Let us meet the others now then; you will meet me in the end again.   

Ghost 1: And you aren’t mourning? 

Stairs 1: I am. By not staying silent. Meet the endless U-shaped wooden stairs..

..these produce..

U-shape Stairs: I produce…

Stairs 1: Oh, see them? They are the visitors. They’ve come to listen. I told them that none of the stairs speaks. Have you decided to talk now?

U-shape Stairs: No, I will reminisce, recollect, remember. I will invent nothing new. Talking of memories is saying nothing at all. It shouldn’t be considered as speech. I will click pictures of my mind and show you the photographs. 

Stairs 1: Very well, we are silent then.

U-shape Stairs: I produce a different sound when you scale my body. That is my uniqueness that you cannot move over me without being heard by others. And it is always the sound of something breaking, the cartilage of wood perhaps, the sound of suffering. It reminds me of winter, a forest and a man with an axe looking at a tree. They avoid these stairs; it was here that they saw the wife for the last time. She was ascending, up, up, up and then slowly fading, vaporising and finally one with the light. It might all seem unusual now, improbable, but hundred years back, there were still people who searched for the gods, underground, overground, in the air, in forsaken rooms, even in the skies. She dug the ground with her bare hands, ravaged the rooms (cobwebs in her hair), condemned the airs, and then mounted the stairs. One step at a time, not rushing, what if god was waiting for her on one of these steps, (she was convinced that the feet of gods would not make the woods shriek), round and round, in gyres, advancing towards god, as if gods were a fixed mark at the middle of a circle, and the woods were the only way to reach that spot. Some say a malicious light swallowed her, some, that finding nothing up there, or everything up there, she jumped from that height, and there are also those who think that one of those spiteful gods, hating her guts, ground her between his teeth and spat her out. There, look up, it’s always light there, even at night. Up there, on the other side of these stairs, is the abyss, and it’s always white. 

Stairs 1: Behold, this is the gossamer stairs! 

Gossamer Stairs: Gossamer stairs! 

Stairs 1: He opens as well…a fortunate day for you ghosts.

Gossamer Stairs: There is no such form or design. When you look at us, you feel dizzy, as if they induce some soporific drug in your mind, some ancient hallucinogenic. As if the stairs are dreaming…look…not for long…I don’t know how it affects ghosts. I don’t know what happens to ghosts on drugs if they fall on air like silk or hard on the chequered tiles. As if the stairs are dreaming, stairs dreaming of stairs, light falling on them, shadows falling on them, falling stairs over rising stairs, ending and beginning at the same time. Spinnerets spewing web in air, a three-dimensional castle of a spider, a labyrinth from where there is no escape. When it grows old, that floaty, chiffon thread, they call it cobweb. And they only settle in the leftover rooms and ceilings. You cannot move without tearing them, and they have the nature of sticking to your hand, like adhesive, like memories. You cannot move through these stairs without feeling that mucilage of melancholy…your foot glued on every step, and every time you let your hands do the unhinging, then next step and another foot stuck. When you reach the last step, you have no limbs left. Nothing left, only the smell of silk.

Stairs 1: The last one. The story of ‘The Snail on the Rail’ or ‘Ode to Slowness.’ Do I narrate, or do you?

Snail Stairs: Only I can. Can you find the snail on the stairs? 

Ghost 1: No, we don’t see anything.

Snail Stairs: It can’t be seen. Always invisible, always hiding. Photographs of large spaces often conceal the poetic details. First, about its pace, and how it was observed by me. It is an emotional story, might make you snivel a little. Two kinds of living organisms lose speed on the stairs. Aged humans and snails. Old men hold the railings and strike the steps with their sticks, what a din every damn time these men come and go. Like a false metronome. The snail is afraid, the boot might stamp on it, and the stick can crush its shell. Not only the old man. What about the rushing feet of other men and women, the unnatural feet of children, heavy objects rolling down the steps? Even a ball is a potential threat to the snail! Who cares? 

Ghost 1: Not us!

Stairs 1: The stairs do. It talks to the snail. It knows the feet of the family. The turns they would take, the stops they would make, the things they would forget and fetch. It advises the snail, no it warns the snail. Hide! Under the rails now! Over to that corner! Behind that cloth, that drum, no not there, there, yes! But the snail is slow. When it finally escapes death, the moment is already gone. It was sheer fate that saved it. It took ten years for the snail to reach the last step. It shouldn’t have under ideal circumstances. Perhaps, it was love for the stairs which made the snail stop numerous times. Maybe it was suicidal, playing games of death every time it smelt feet with its lower tentacles. When you look at it, it’s not moving, then you look everywhere and then again at the snail, and you find it has covered some distance. You are shocked. It’s a miracle of god. When did it happen? This unearthly movement! The stairs believe that they move with the speed of light when no one’s looking. But who wants to move so blindingly fast? The snail would ask, “What about slowness?” The stairs thought it was such a struggle for the snail, dragging its body across the concrete. This end to that end, an entire day gone! The stairs looked at it and wondered, “Who possesses this kind of time? No one. They are all rushing over and against death.” Later, only after talking with the snail, the stairs discovered that snails follow planetary time, space-time, another notion of time, where things move only when you forget to look at them.  Humans have failed to stop. And the snail refuses to move. A dark brown lined shell and a mollusc inside it. A man and a woman inside a shell on the stairs, on the rail, and the endless meetings with death every day.

Stairs 1: One last time, another return to the first stairs.

Do you notice that broken part in the middle? The reason I have no name. Not a single person in this house visits these stairs. I am part of superstition now, a sinister construction that caused someone’s death. That little girl with her head out, who would wait for someone to arrive someday, fell on these stairs, her head rupturing the step and splitting in turn. Blood gushed like water from a furrow—blood washing the last step. No one even cleaned it afterwards. Nothing remains of humans but stains. I have written something for the girl. For the ghost of the girl who would return someday.

Ghost 1: We must return. We must sleep now. Tired that we are.

Stairs 1: I am reciting from memory. It’s called ‘Remembering Home’.
A blast on all three floors.
First, the iron, the metals, the nails, 
Second, the brick, the ancient mortar, the footmarks of old ghosts walking on concrete, 
The third of soft mahogany, the piano. 
The burning house smelling of burning wood and burning tiles, 
Dead smell with light weight of decay, 
Rising and falling like voice, stairs swallow stairs, 
You enter and breathe an air of steel and crust of earth’s core, 
Memories fall on your shoulders like ruined ships in high waters, 
You crawl your way upwards, 
You look out the unhinged windows and shiver, 
You remember the war pictures where they set fire to the trees, 
You remember the roof forbidden by your mother, 
For she feared your daring, little feet, 
Finding lost regions like explorers, 
You recognise the rain-painted roof now lying at this weeping woman’s feet.
You don’t know who burnt the house.
The sun poured in through the curtain-holes, and there was fire.
Or, the loveless rooms lit themselves up out of loneliness.
Who can tell?
Perhaps, you left without writing an ode to the house
A day’s raging fire in the ashen heart of the house
Ending all music of living voices
And echoes of sheltering touches.

Ghost 1(singing): 

I would sit upon the stairs
And shed a runnel of tears
And all that’s left of stairs
Are deaths and memories and fears
And when it was evening
The stairs and its dreaming 
The stairs and its screaming
Bleeding, breathing, heaving
Sleeping, sleeping, sleeping.