The Spectator

First Contact - Chapter 1

Twelfth day of May, I looked up and saw nothing but the withered sky. I shuttered the window. The afternoon glare was banished from the room. I felt calm.

Inside the room was an ordinary sort of dark and at this hour the darkness was crimsoned by a bolt of light entering from a circular air vent above the window.

The air vent of radius eight inches placed twelve inches below the line where the wall meets the ceiling and barred by a metal grill with eight spokes, each spoke a stylized fleur-de-lis radiating outwards from the core, the one fixed point, its center, so to speak.

The window spans parts of two walls and is cut into the curved junction formed by the north and west flank of the building-the north-west corner also capped by a bell-shaped turret. Other three corners of the building, or as it is known hereabouts, The Barracks, have straight edges and no turret.

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Kavki first visited my room in the Barracks one winter afternoon some years back. Her hand in mine, I led the way to the terrace. Gripping her wrist, I pointed with the other hand and said: 'This turret, the way it is crumbling, symbolizes everything I love about the city.'

Before us was Craiovas, the port city, its borders sloping towards the horizon, its history nestled in the upturned palm of time.

Kavki nodded her agreement. Explained how the turret reminded her of Hundertwasser's blue observation tower atop The Bad Fischau Highway Inn located 45 miles-a half-hour drive-to the south of Vienna.

'Blue is a color that does best in the East,' I said.

'Blue is how I feel today.'

'In that case our thinking is aligned.'

She found no grounds to disagree and I felt better for it.

Our consonance formed a vital lineament in the scaffolding behind which our nascent relationship had every reason to rise, to flourish.

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The year I leased a room at the Barracks, I was a student, a philosophy major with the temperament of the artist. Like other students, but one with expectations-at the time I hadn't chucked my belief art was the soul of humanity-I was on the lookout for a habitable garret. A space engendering the study of philosophy and with natural light to boot.

The room in the Barracks, because of its single west facing window met my requirements. Which is how I came to live there; below the northwest turret.

The landlady, at the time we met to view the room ascertained my credentials, and expressed her satisfaction the garret had remained vacant these many months so a student or a philosopher or an artist be presented the opportunity to rent it. She told me over and over again how delighted she was that the afternoon sun brightened the room and yet didn't make it too hot. The garret, she explained, was narrower at the window and widened as one moved away. A classic Gou-mukh-the head of cow-shape, and much valued by the proponents of Vastu, the sacred architecture of object placement. My non-committal nod of the chin got her to remark:

'Not that I expected you cared for such primitive evaluation criteria given your age. Those old-fashioned value systems aren't for the modern youth.

'Am I therefore become your enemy, because I tell you the truth?' she said.

Besides, she confessed, it was her nature to disclose relevant attributes of a space a person was considering as their primary dwelling.

The viewing had come to an end and I was ready to sign the lease.