What is it about old buildings that I find so fascinating? I visit Calcutta every year and what never ceases to amaze me is how old, derelict , almost crumbling buildings still manage to stand upright and even be inhabited by people who do not seem to mind having their lives at risk day in and day out. The precariousness of the structure that they live in hangs literally like the Sword of Damoceles on their heads and yet they continue to live there. However, some if not most of these deteriorating structures are of-course abandoned and look like empty shells or lost ghosts of what once lived.
Every time I see one of these ancient edifices I just end up staring at it in a kind of morbid trance. My sister who lives in Calcutta raises her eyebrows theatrically and makes a face at what she calls my ‘macabre’ fascination for these old buildings. According to her they are just ‘eyesores which need to be blasted off the face of the earth’. But I see them differently.
To me, old buildings gone to seed, the mildewed, blackened walls with the paint peeling off ; the cracked and falling off plaster; the weathered wooden planks naked and exposed; the iron grills rusted over; the windows and doors hanging off their hinges like a drunk person’s lop sided reeling; the rotting rafters; the half torn down walls, broken glass panes; the growth of moss and creepers and weeds; the general aura of decay and decomposition, to me, all these , reek of the mystery of life and death itself. Just the sight of one of these makes me go all introspective and philosophical.
These buildings at one time might have been constructed with dreams and loving care. They must have housed people both good and bad with dreams all of their own, and been the admiration and envy of others. And now just look at them. As with all things, cruel time has rendered these once beautiful houses, old and decadent.
Yet, no matter how ugly, run down or deprecit these buildings might be each has a distinctive persona all it’s own, a certain character or oddity that defines it. One old mansion looks like an old ghoul with black and vacant windows as eyes; another one seems to totter on it’s own foundations, like a torn and tattered, half decomposed corpse straight out of Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’, another one looks like a gnarled, withered old man with the torturous roots of a peepal tree growing all over it’s damaged facade, and yet another looks like a serene old dame, still clinging to the essence of her lost beauty preciously and with a certain grace and dignity inspite of the ravages of time and weather.
New buildings are all neat and orderly lines and curves but old buildings follow no rules of structure. Their lines are all messed up as if some careless hand has riffled through them. But they have some mean substance that the new buildings do not have. Old buildings have so much of a history in them. So many lives having been lived out within their confines they seem to hide within their darknesses the secrets of many hidden passions, jealousies, angst, mental torture. If only one could read the minds of these old bricks what stories they might have to narrate to us of the people who lived and died there! Do the spirits and ghosts of those people and the events of their lives still haunt these dwellings? There is an aura of many mysteries in the hidden depth, heights and the metaphysical dimensions of these old walls. One feels that you just have to scratch the surface for all the old stories to come tumbling out.
There is something so helpless and vulnerable about these dilapidated edifices, yet they also exhibit a shrewd but almost careless kind of a generosity allowing creepers to grow all over themselves, black crows and cooing pigeons to perch on and make their nests in the nooks and crevices created by cracks, scorpions to scurry surreptitiously through the dust and dried leaves blown in on the floors, vagrants to create a make shift night shelter in their warm interiors or stray cats and dogs to pass through them uninhibited and unchecked. These are the living dead buildings, the ghosts of what once was, what once used to be. They are now the aged remnants of an era gone by, over and done with. Maybe that is why they are nicknamed ‘bhoot banglas.’
I wonder who owns these places and why they are left as they are. Have these building psychologically overpowered the humans who own them refusing to be done out of existence? Have they been neglected and therefore come to this state or were they lovingly maintained till such time that nothing could be done for them no more? And then, what do they want, these senescent structures? Do they wish to be restored and preserved for their heritage, or do they want to be done away with speedily and with all dignity and respect, or do they wish to linger on maliciously hell bent on marring the beauty of the modernity and newness of other buildings in the area? Perhaps filled with many jealousies they try to thus exact a futile kind of revenge against all that is still young and beautiful and wanted and adored.
I also wonder that when the time comes for their demolition, will they give in to their ultimate fate with a huge sigh of relief or resignation, or will they rebel with a roaring sound and go down fighting.
The buildings stare back at me with their hollowed out blank eyes seeming to whisper, ‘Understand me if you can or go your way. Take a last good look at me as you might never see me again. I am a symbol of the past that must crumble down against the might of time some day. But for the moment I am a defiant spirit as yet unbroken, defying the march of time, as yet standing tall. Though I am old I still am. I still exist. ‘

http://neeras.sulekha.com/blog/post/2008/09/those-old-buildings.htm