The Indifferent Wonder of an Edible Place.

"In my country, history itself is edible. Time masticated into tales, people digested into stories.

Places leak mineral flavor. Buildings are grated and ground. Domes flattened into rotis, Blood boiled into dal.

The very earth on which we once grew, is reabsorbed into the metabolism of a nation that has decided to consume itself, like an ouroboros.

A glorious violent meal. A spectacular event.

A prelude to excreting people who have been leached of all flavor and all difference. The ideal members of a new state. Excrement of the old."

by Mir UmarHassan 1960, Translated to English by Gpoichand Majumdar 1989.

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The indifferent wonder of an edible place is a short story about a municipal building eater who is consuming a tower on the edge of an unnamed town.

In 1961 when the state of Bombay split like an egg on the jagged edge of the Western Ghats and formed the states of Gujarat and Maharashtra, the town of Matsyapura was swallowed in the riots which followed the division.

Mir UmarHassan, the fabled (and fictitious) Gujarati poet, lamented the willful and violent erasure of this ancient town and in a delightful satirical poem, he wrote about the consumption of a place and the excretion of a vapid people devoid of the flavours of their individual and munificent past.

With recent cause to recollect the horror of the demolition of Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, and in solidarity with the protests against the draconian actions of our government - we are revisiting UmarHassan's original poem, and responding to it in the form of this game.