Built by Dark

By Durva Kamdar

we built our city by the night - rome was not built in a day but we said ours was. night was rome’s failure, not ours, and kiasu we were to make it seem like concrete skyscrapers and stone juggernauts were born suddenly out of the earth and that a labour never existed - we loved the idea that our grey jungle could exist only with light and none of the dark that helped mould the clay and hammer in the foundations, fertilise the soil that held us up. even now, we disparage the night and let its ashes burn in tirades of treason and territorialism. maybe it isn’t surprising, then, that it is so easy now to walk by the city and spit at the tired man crouching by the sidewalk whose only crime was his name, his smell, his skin whilst forgetting that his calloused, rough hands were what sculpted our tapestry. we love the light; what are we but dayseekers? seeking easy money, easy success, easy credit - as if there were no hands to push us up and the stairway to heaven or our rooftops were serendipitous creations. and when we talk about our crimes (what crimes?) we talk about them like they are a relic kept in the museum, yellowing with the bitter aftertaste of the past, an old albeit unsightly blemish in our tightly-woven, tense tapestry even when scylla rears her ugly head every time we see the bangladeshi man on the street. let the record show that colonisers crown our history books with their carefully crafted plans with no mention of the silent, faceless men that carried them out for our sake. this city was not built only by day, it was built by dark, the night, by falling, by failures, by the brown men on the street. and our biggest crime is not that we let it happen; our biggest crime is that we forget. we forget our story, their story, history.