A lost playground

A photoessay/vignette into a microcosm of worlds lost to enclosures and militarism. A portal into the rebellion of vines and the stochastic un-discipline of life and bodies that continue to persist.

Having found myself at an unforeseen crossroad, for the last several months, I have been living in my Indian hometown.

Apart from a few short sojourns elsewhere and abroad punctuating this time, I have had the task of re-membering and re-gathering roots in places, seasons and temporalities I have not experienced since I was a pre-teen.

The mind wants to plan and strategize plans for completion, the body unravels. As Tyson Yunkaporta ponders about the role of stories and lore in global systems change, and the near impossibility of protecting them being co-opted my neoliberal and imperialist logics, he reminds us, we must also let the land heal us. Far too often, without intending to, those of us like myself who sometimes identify with the intersection of justice, creativity and research, think about this healing and restoration through habits of thought and action that echo control and subjugation narratives, reproducing the hierarchical stress on systems and our bodies that have ravaged the earth, yet we hope that this time, we really can mobilize the same strategy to fix things.

In this unintended moment of surrender, when I am unable to plan beyond mere weeks into the future, I asked the land to speak through my body. It led me down old pathways stored deep in the worlds and habits of my toddler self, my preteen self, and fragmented selves lost in the years in between.

In one of my expeditions to find new ways to root back in to community and the land, I ventured into an area where there used to be a playground I would come to as an infant, then later as a toddler.

What used to be earlier a simple dirt road, is now paved, albeit imperfectly, to make way for vehicles of urban tourists, bureaucrats and military personnel. As someone who spent my formative years walking down these paths, and inhabiting the logics of the earlier landscape forms were most prevalent in this area, over the years, my body has sedimented a form of heuristics, that almost feels like a form of divination, to orient to space in these parts. As discussed in Madelaine Ley’s explorations of sedimentation and rupture, there are ways we co-constitute the worlds around us through iterative narratives and action, that lead the path forward. There are ways that these pathways (perhaps even in the neural sense) are sedimented into our lifeworlds, or what Joseph von Uexküll might call umwelten. Then suddenly, there may be ruptures that compel us to consider ways beyond the sedimented pathways. At least that is how I understand it. For long, I have been fortuitous to navigate and relate to space, nature and sense of collective place in large parts of my Indian hometown in a way that exists beyond the domain of enclosures. At the very least, this was my normative orientation to the area around the playground I sought to find, once again.

What used to signal open expanses of the commons is now fenced off to demarcate land between various parties, cementing the separation between a university, a military outpost, and public lands. Yet they all come together, in confluences and in memories. Not yet spatially disparate, regardless of what official documents may say. Meandering my way into these enclosed spaces, reminds me, the land cannot be contained. It will run away. It will invite fugitives to co-conspire. It will forever evade capture.

We are told that animals that migrate between territories as seasons change often rely on landscapes they can recognize from afar. What happens when the landscapes are constantly reshuffled and made anew to suit the whims of the metabolism of neoliberal bureaucracies? The tendency to enclose is anathema to life, and the iterations of current enclosures, and failed ones from the past, throughout the land, stand out as an archive of the ongoing tensions between the delusion of mastery over the amorphous sensory reign of life, soils, vines, critters and animals.

My infant body remembers the trails across the land but my adult self keeps coming across enclosed areas on the way to my old playground, and yet I still find beings and agents that defy the logics of enclosure.

Gates unlocked, where I am never supposed to find a way in. Posters of Lenin in territories marked by the long shadow of Hindu fascism. Contradictions dance about in my field of vision. I, too, can survive this field that is to come. I do not need to hold on a version of a safer past, terrified of the 2024 Indian elections, and what future they may bring. I can make myself thrive in the corners of the earth that fascism forgot, or cannot see, while it continues to animate and play along the walls and enclosures it seeks to embolden.

The temporal and spatial life of trees teach us that there are those who bear witness to longer histories than human sentimentality is capable of grasping. Some of these trees have seen the days of British colonialism and the partition of Bengal. And here I am a child of the ‘90s subjecting myself to daily internal strife over the looming threat of Hindu fascism, as if it is powerful enough to end all life and sparks of freedom, revelry and multi-species, trans-spatial sensualities weaving together faiths and lineages.

I do not want to fear this oncoming world. And perhaps that is why I am most intimate with the land now than any other living person. Day after day, since the inauguration of the Ram temple in Ayodhya on the site of Babri Masjid, destroyed in 1992 by fascist Hindu militants, there has been multiple reports of further threats to the Muslim and syncretic religious heritage in India. The oldest Sufi shrine in Delhi, over 800 years old, was demolished by municipal authorities for “encroachment.” It’s been years since I have visited Delhi, and the simple notion that there existed the site of a sanctuary in the midst of a forest within such a bustling city pulled me into my heart. The news of its destruction fractured what was already heavy and ailing. Perhaps that is the medicine of Sufi shrines, to continue to break hearts again and again, even as it gets razed, continuing to serve its intended purpose of letting people root into their hearts.

I am not religious, but I am a student of memory and of placemaking. How we create and name spaces and places subjects lands and all its relations to a specific ordering of the world. Thousands of miles away, Gaza is being razed in a so-called act of self-defence. I am holding these timelines in my mind, as my adult body, holding my childhood selves, moves towards an old playground.

Between the threshold of what used to be the playground and the surrounding area there are fences. The fences divide the region into two major sections. The university area - a residence for male international students, and a military outpost. I remember the red barren earth animating these areas where the more fortified military outpost and the more recently constructed university residence now is. It never fails to amaze, as I have remarked before, that people refuse to accept the barren-ness of the land, and its refusal to be productive. Deserts are not to be forced to bloom.

Vines have wrapped around what was an open field of red barren badlands. But time and time again, as the cool dry air that enveloped the area this time of the year reminds me, the land - with its barren-ness, its refusal to be a place of cultivation, continues to thrive below. It’s waiting for its comeback.

The commons, too, persist. With all the gates “accidentally” left unlocked, cows graze in makeshift pastures, across from a towering fortress of vines, that rises up towards the skies.

As militaristic and neoliberal university enclosures compete to demarcate land between themselves, the commons remake themselves anew. The vines, create their own spatial and temporal arrangements.

I may not see the dry red dirt of the badlands anymore, at least in this area. I will never reach the spot where there used to be my childhood playground. But I am learning to make relations and find refuge in the shadow of this fortress of vines. A new world beckons, and maybe the vines will teach me to play, to conspire and the continue to thrive beyond logics of empire and enclosures.

Just like the Sufi shrine in the forests of Delhi, unjustly razed and returned to the soil in which it was built, has found new sanctuary inside the cracks of my shattered heart, a new playground will emerge, perhaps beyond the curtains of vines, which keeps secrets, holding a rich archive of dreams yet to spring forth into this body and out in the world.

As Layla Feghali teaches us, the land lives on within our bones, regardless of the violences and the artifices that have been imposed upon it, it conspires with plants, animals, minerals and all kinds of animate and inanimate entities and bodies to restore itself. In my countless, nearly compulsive walks through these dry, cool and empty days, I feel the badlands rising up to meet me under the facades of green. And every day, bit by bit, I surrender to its desires. That is my playground now.