You couldn’t pick a more melodramatic setting: by the light of a single table lamp, listening to Depeche Mode’s “Precious” on constant repeat, mulling over the events of the day and thinking of the allegorical implications of building construction.
A mite more pathetic than that character in Nick Hornby’s ‘About a boy’. That Hugh Grant whats-it vehicle. More like a moped on go-kart wheels.
Quite a bit happened in the morning which made me furious at the time, which only makes me feel sad and resigned. I’ll spare myself the details here, simply because there are none. I sat by my desk in utter incredulity. I’ve had it happen before, seen it happen before, but I couldn’t have imagined being a victim in my office.
So much the better, at least that peculiar illusion is now shattered.
My engineer colleague I’ll be picking up later at about 12.30 am once pointed out some buildings that were undergoing construction. The formwork was up, the scaffolding was in place to hold up the drying RC structure, and it rose some 60′ in the air. That’s about 5 storeys, girders and steel bars portruding upward like thin, metal weeds in a garden of grey.
“Did you know? For every storey high they build this thing, they’ve got to have support pylons an equal number of storeys deep?” he said, looking at me. We both were staring up at the structure, our hands shielding our eyes. We watched the stationary cranes lift bundles of steel bars up, each bundle looking like a collection of twigs. The crane moved slowly, as if burdened by such a light load, and we could hear the churn of motors. The sound of gears gnashing teeth was barely heard above the roar of an excavator in full swing. It was all yellows, oranges and grey where we stood.
“And if they go 30 storeys up?” I asked, taking refuge behind a pair of sunglasses. My shirt was starting to make me feel uncomfortable under the afternoon sun.
“They go 30 storeys down,” he said, shortly.
“That can’t be. It’s not feasible,” I said, now looking at him. He turned to me, a frown on his face.
“Dey, it’s true lah,” he said, in his own long-suffering manner.
“You’d think after 5,000 years of construction we’d have figured out how to build castles in the sky,” I said, turning back to watch the crane overhead deposit its load. The driver in the cabin looked busy, his arms pumping forwards and back on thin levers. His hard hat made him look both important and comical: like a daffy duck performing surgery.
“You’d never have made it as an engineer,” he said, laughing. I laughed along, for no apparent reason: it would’ve been true, anyway.
“I wouldn’t make it past algebra much less mechatronics, sir,” I said.
“Isn’t that the god-awful truth?” he said, laughing again, “Had enough staring at the sky?”
“Just thinking,” I said. My eyes were fixed on the slow, returning arm of the crane. Hydraulics, metallurgy, tolerance testing, all this and more went into the making of that mechanical marvel.
“Uh-oh,” he said.
“It’s like watching a person grow up, isn’t it?” I said, after a while.
“Not more of your arty-farty shit lah, dey,” he said, taking of his hard hat to run his fingers through his wet hair.
“No, seriously. As high as we can go up, we can sink as low, too,” I said.
“Dey, fucker, I left bible class a long time ago, and I don’t need another lesson now, ok. I’m hungry lah, and I can’t eat concrete,” he said, already turning away and heading down toward the entrance. I looked back and saw him scrunch past a pile of rusting formwork attachments. I remember muttering, ‘fucking philistine’ before walking after him. I forgot how that sort of sentimental bullshit only marked me out, more and more, as naive.
I had the same thought today, when morning turned to evening.
