The boy gathers materials for a temple, and then when he is thirty, concludes to build a woodshed.
- Henry David Thoreau
the heat had already parched us within a few minutes of emerging out of the rattled steel cage that are jeeps on craggy roads, and the gracious blind roadside seller served us some hudka, a local rice brew served with (literally) a pinch of salt and grams (again the literal, as fate 'in the heat' would have it)...
onwards we pushed then, hydrated, and the temples opened up creepily in, well, creepers...
the deulghata group of temples lie about 50 kms off purulia main town in the same district, the road is part highway and part pothole, a nice peepy ride nevertheless, and the sight of stone and sun locked up in the mid day tussle is a sweaty affair, but then, what sport isn't...
the group of 15 temples is mostly in ruins, but the survivors are a marvelous elegy of the past, the intricate fusion of hindu and jain architectural motifs peppered with a lot more... and the oddly shaped shivlings, completely cylindrical till the top instead of the regular domed representations....
sometimes, the sun deserves the middle finger... while you smile at the stone and go about making friends with the mason's ethic...
and the creeper is seldom creepy; in the outdoor sun on a childhood high, rather, it is one's ally against 'em solars...
and there are lines, bisections, and all of that math and all of that chisel, a pleasure unto geometry...
and in a 'through the lens', one knows what a pain it is to accompany a photographer...
the 'elephant' motif stands out pretty strongly though, amidst all the stories chiselleld onto the (once maybe) lava...
the shivlings glisten though, in all of their strong and precise metaphor whatever topology or construction material might be thrown at them, from granite to ice,,,
the bats go about i that usual daytime nonchalance, though...
the rotating shivlings were an actual discovery, they structures were wound around a very tight circumference, which was sealed some time unknown to the most...
the corbel arches are a relief and delight at the same time, for one really finds a very little of them in the heritage littered capital cit of ours...
and one can only surmise that some decapitations are totally useless...
the priceless monoliths strewn around does make one jittery, but safety then, one muses, should not on protocol mess with the divine, and of myths that still hold...
and the buses parked divine...
one really feels for the avian kind though, the creatures miffed at the sudden absence of water where there was a torrent a while back...
the time to visit is post the monsoons, acquainting oneself with the autumn, as the kansai, now dry, gurgles, and the flame of the forest sets in, the 'palash parban' is a a famous regional festival, and a time to witness the song and dance that makes the soil survive...
panting back into some stale cool vehicle air, we trundled on a bit further to the village aghorpur, to an artificial lake, a summer respite for bodies rattled as they tan...
and then there is a frustrated hot smoke...