The company of the dead tends to give out a lot of lessons.You just need to spend some time in their company, and the lessons start coming to you on their own.
Such was the case this Saturday when it was decided between @Polgrim and me to spend our evening at the Lodi Gardens and break our fast there. Home to one of the finest manicured greens in Delhi, which house the very dead remains of the Lodi dynasty, the gardens are one of the few settings which provide a sense of calm to anyone who goes searching. Families out on a picnic with kids leaping around trying to catch frisbees, lovers sitting on secluded benches while awkwardly trying to weave an imaginary drape around themselves to provide shelter from prying eyes, middle aged bureaucrats, diplomats and bureaucrats out to take a walk and ‘talk philosophy’ (yes, that was overheard by @Polgrim), travelers taking a tour of the lawns with their travel diaries and cameras in tow, amongst folks like us who wouldn’t like to have anything more than just drowning ourselves in this collective atmosphere set against the backdrop of the architectural structures.
With the sun setting behind the Sheesh Gumbad, we took up a place on a terrace adjoining the Bada Gumbad, which gave us the best possible ‘bird’s eye view’ of the lawns, if the view could be called that way. Simple Iftar with goodies from the neighborhood baker, as we looked at the birds making their flight back home, their silhouettes flying over the domes of the dead against a dramatic skyline which changed color from grey to fiery orange to a bright yellow before going dark again. The sky turned black, and for a moment it seemed like the outlines of the birds and their chirps were eaten up by the dark of the graveyard.
Time for Maghreb prayers after Iftar was had, and I was a bit confused about where to pray. Of course, the natural thing to occur to mind was to just say my prayers at the terrace itself. I took out my phone and checked the Qibla (the direction of the Ka’aba in Mecca towards which Muslims turn to in order to say prayers) app to confirm the direction. Looking in that direction, I realized the three domed mosque right across from where I was, at the other end of the Bada Gumbad. Of course, the mosque is now abandoned, but I slipped downstairs and quietly performed prayers behind a pillar of the mosque as the light from a sodium streetlamp began to cast longer shadows in the hall. And I still feel amazed at the accuracy with which people could ascertain directions even five centuries back.
Did someone say dead men don’t tell tales?
For the full image set of the One Lunar Month, you can have a look here.