Akbar's curse: Joy of revisiting the past
Last week, I called up a friend to ask him whether we could meet up the next evening. Not possible, he said. He was travelling to Ranthambore. "Ranthambore, again?" I asked. "You must have been there 20 times!"
"The forest is never the same," he replied. "You can never visit the same forest twice. If you love a forest, it'll always be new." I wished him bon voyage, and went back to work. But a question was hanging around in my head and wouldn't leave unless I paid it attention: All of us keep going back to certain things; why do we do that? These need not be places. They can be films, books, and in less common cases, spouses or partners we left. I have never tired of visiting Fatehpur Sikri, the doomed capital city that Akbar built to stay close to his guru Salim Chishti.
Curse
Legend goes the Sufi saint forbade the emperor repeatedly, because he did not want to live close to a seat of political and military power, but his disciple wouldn't listen. Akbar spent a decade and a half constructing his dream capital, and then had to abandon it after only a few years - there was simply no water around. The tour guides will tell you this was Chishti's curse. "There's water everywhere around us, so why shouldn't there be water here?" they will ask rhetorically.
Curse or not, the fact remains that it's a perfectly preserved monument with some of the finest Mughal architecture one can find anywhere - the Diwan-i-Khaas, with its central pillar connected high above the visitor's head to each corner of the square building through four stone walkways; the Panch Mahal, a five-storied structure open to the air with the tiers gradually diminishing in size, till the final one is just a single domed chhatri; the Naubat Khana, the Ibadat Khana. It is a ghost city where one can sit down in any shady corner and try imagining what it would have been like four and a half centuries ago: Akbar conferring with his navratnas, meeting leaders of different faiths and formulating the syncretic Din-e-Ilahi, the emperor playing blind man's bluff with his wives and concubines. I have always dreamt of spending a night there alone, waiting for the ghosts to come out. And I hope to do that sometime.
Of course, there are places one keeps revisiting for more worldly reasons - like memories. A friend and his wife spent their wedding anniversary every year, for many years, at Naldera, above Shimla, where they had spent their honeymoon. Others keep going to Goa, for rather more mundane - but no less valid-reasons. Fundamentally, there are two reasons why people keep going back to places, books, films, whatever (We'll leave former spouses and partners out of this, because that topic can't be handled in a thousand words).
Familiarity
One, they go back for the familiarity, the comfort that brings, and the knowledge that you and your world may have changed, but this has not. And two - and, this is a diametrically opposite reason- because every time you revisit, you always find something new. Like my friend who goes to the same forest over and over again because the forest is never the same. So it is with profound works of art. Any truly great film reveals to you, on every new viewing, something you hadn't noticed before, some nuance that had escaped you earlier. Some detail, something happening in the background, a little bit of something that anactor does in one little scene.
About Vertigo, the film that was voted recently by the British Film Institute's panel of experts as the best movie ever made, director Alfred Hitchcock had said (I paraphrase from memory): "Every little thing that you see in Vertigo is there because I wanted it that way.
Obsession
If you see a yellow Volkswagen passing by in the distance on the road outside the room where the characters are, it is a yellow Volkswagen because I wanted it to be a yellow Volkswagen." That is obsession, which is a great quality for creators, and it also breeds obsessions for dedicated viewers. The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. I have no idea how many thousands of PhD theses have been done on what Michelangelo created, but I can say that at least a few hundred people have spent decades of their lives studying it, and finding new meanings and hints tucked away in various corners or even hidden in plain sight. It's so daunting and so seemingly infinite in every way - from technique to story to code-even Dan Brown hasn't attempted a novel about it. It's the same with books. I know people who, in times of confusion or distress, go back to Shakespeare and read their favourite passages. I, being much more timid, return to Wodehouse and his world of young men in spats, Mr Mulliner at the Angler's Rest, and Blandings Castle.
Or to The Great Gatsby, a perfect gem of a novel where every word is in its right place and there is not a word extra. Of course I know how it all ends, but it's not the story-wonderful and heart-wrenching though it is-that I go back to it for, but the sparkling beauty of expression, and the depths beneath the lines that I never seem to be able to plumb enough. We keep going back because timeless beauty is succour for the soul, either in its familiarity or in its seductive promise of something hidden-always something out of our grasp. It's our way to try to rise above time and what it is doing at this very moment to each and every one of us. As the last line of The Great Gatsby says: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."