I experience a peculiar kind of disorientation whenever my line of sight happens to pierce through a picturesque archway. This effect is greatly amplified by a series of identical arches, caught in stasis after the self has been in motion, as if for a brief moment the curving corridors of time have aligned and let a few determined rays of light illuminate the motifs carved on the keystones for my murkiest memories.
The pretty pointed rib vault arches (Gothic, revival) along a cloister leading away from the nave of Yale’s Sterling Memorial library in striated limestone and sandstone that bewitched a college freshman bleed seamlessly into the semi-circular arches (Edwardian) at Doon’s Main Building that provided an exposed gauged brickwork frame to the Himalayan view from each classroom for a wandering schoolboy’s wondering eyes.
Islamicate arches in virginal marble adorning passageways for the pious in the monumental masjids, infant hand in father’s hand, follow after brief interludes of Dubai’s elevated metro stations (ultramodern parametricism) that conjure oyster shells in tinted glass and stainless steel.
I hear the marble’s message echo in Sacre Couer’s white limestone cupolas (Neo-Byzantine Romanesque) in Paris as a somewhat jaded 25 year old, and feel its essence reverberate (if there is reverberation, must there not be an initial verberation?) in the water flowing between the bridges Monbijou and Friedrichs off Berlin’s Museum Island as an infinitely idealistic 23 year old.
If I look the furthest inside, quiet boulevards lined with trees tilted towards their counterparts with branches mingling in one dense canopy appear, shading the long road trips across the North Indian plains to my grandmother’s house. The sun sparkles through those intarsia leaves by day, and the moon races us to our destination by night. I am tempted to surrender to this litany, and find words to construct and reconstruct these proscenium arches till the prose is positively purple while my life plays out as frozen moments in all the scattered locales I once called home down on the stage below, but I pause here and hope an impression of infinity can be rendered recursively with all the suggestive flourish of a mathematical treatise leaving a proof as an exercise for the reader (one that is dismayed by the number of lines it took to demonstrate that a circle is a circle, while a rectangle may or may not be a square).
All the dizzying déjà vu referring back to earlier déjà vu that in turn reinforces this déjà vu forms a cyclic cascade of memories and reveries illusory and real that threaten to pluck me from the present and toss me (unharmed, but rather shaken) back to a past I never learnt to leave behind. I suspect on occasion, when the arches are particularly architectural and my fanciful faculties are left unchecked, that I have already been transported back — is the sudden sadness I feel nostalgia for a life already lived that destiny determined deserved a second try? Each such sighting is then merely the framework to instantiate another checkpoint in the game of life.
Doorways domestic, frames foreign, conjoined pillars of support each demarcating increments along an unbroken episode from beginning to ending while all their alcoves whisper that there is a principal axis to this existence and all of experience would make sense if only I could look both forwards and backwards to unite the vanishing perspectives from distant horizons at the singular point where the dot to my I — the locus of my personhood — resides (midway between left pupil and right pupil, about halfway back to the plane cut by the ears).
I read that there is a link between crossing such thresholds and refreshing our running cache of working memory, a little heuristic written deep in the operating system of the mind. Perhaps prehistorically it evolved to separate matters of the home from matters of the world (venturing past the mouth of a cave), but it separates now my arrival at the kitchen from certain knowledge of the simple reason I came.
Forget the hourglass for a minute, and think: what are the sands, in the sands of time?