An Image

You know how some images stick in your mind for years, even though they may not mean anything very much; may not even be beautiful? I have a ruined hut in my mind which is like that. I had seen it in Chakwal, Pakistan, for a few minutes, in between some other things. I have written about my visit to Chakwal already.

My sister visited me in November, bringing with her a box of slides of Pakistan which I had left with her. Most of them have a nasty purplish overlay, which I've been trying to clear away through the magic of Photoshop. I was scanning the slides from Chakwal, and found one of the hut. Fittingly, perhaps, it was ruined; I couldn't bring it to life. And yet the photograph succeeds for me, because it suggests something coloured by the imagination:


I love the little tree, which someone carefully planted beside the door -- I had forgotten it. This is what I wrote:

It was the most rudimentary structure, enclosed within a low stone wall. The pale stones, mud mortar crumbling away, the half-fallen thatch of the roof through which blue sky was visible, the rotting door, the broken wooden bedstead -- all seemed touching. I wondered about the lives it had contained, and why they had left it. The air was very quiet, sunny, clear and cold.

Ketas

Here I am, still (mentally) in the Salt Range, in Pakistan. As I was scanning my slides I got attracted to one of a ruined Hindu temple at Ketas, and decided to try to paint it. It seemed to exemplify what attracted me to that place: an austere beauty, a limited pallette of colours, the way the buildings seemed to merge with the earth. Here's what I posted about this temple earlier. I saw it in 1986:

In nearby Ketas a ruined Hindu temple complex straddled the main road. On one side of the road caves were cut into the cliff, on the other a sacred pool had declined into a marsh. Behind the pool were a fort, two large buildings with domes like inverted lotuses, and a few whitewashed shrines with plain yellow-washed domes.

No one could tell me to which god the temple had been dedicated. Later I read that it had been a temple of Shiva. The pool was full of Shiva's tears, which fell when his wife Sati died. The place used to be a centre of pilgrimage -- Hindus came to bathe in the pool -- but it was now very dilapidated. The temple was situated in such a way that it controlled the road, which was at this point a pass between low cliffs. According to the British District Gazetteer for 1904, "with some exceptions these priests are ignorant and quarrelsome, and are by no means popular in the neighbourhood." They used to extort tolls from travellers through the pass.

Squatters lived in the buildings now. A boy sat on a roof, reading a book beside a petaled dome. Behind the temple a hamlet sprawled beside a few cultivated fields.