Whenever you get to Barcelona do go to Sagrada Família and wonder, just as I did, whether God had handed the blueprints to a man who had just eaten something deeply inadvisable in a Catalan Forest

Let us begin with the facts because the facts are, in themselves, already quite extraordinary. Antoni Gaudí — the man who designed and began building the basilica towering over Barcelona and spent his final years eating nothing but lettuce and nuts — is said to have had a particular relationship with mushrooms of the Catalonian countryside and was struck dead by a tram in 1926 because he had become so unkempt and ragged that nobody recognised him as the most famous architect in Spain.

The man, whom the Vatican is currently processing for sainthood, is buried beneath the nave of his own unfinished structure, which will, if the projections hold, be completed sometime around 2034 — more than a century after his death. The church is shaped, as someone said, like a cluster of calcium deposits found inside a diseased lung.

As I stood before the Sagrada Família craning my neck to find the top on a clear day, I experienced not the spiritual elevation its many defenders promise, but a specific kind of vertigo — the sensation of staring too long at something that refuses to resolve into meaning.

The towers melt upward like wax figures caught in a house fire. The facades are encrusted with stone vegetables, writhing saints, and amphibian geometries that appear less designed than secreted, as though the building grew its own skin overnight. 

Where is the Rational Line?

One searches instinctively for the rational line, the deliberate proportion, the hand of a reasoning adult — and finds, instead, the fever dream. Gaudí’s genius insists on being hallucinatory. His Casa Batlló presents a facade that resembles nothing so much as a dragon in the act of digesting a Renaissance townhouse.

Thousands of Gaudi’s admires wait in long queues to step gingerly into a structure and coo when they see a roof that undulates in glazed ceramic tiles of blue and green while the balconies below gape open like the skulls and bones of the creature’s victims. This is described, in the tourist literature, as whimsical. I would describe it as the product of a man who had achieved a rather advanced state of botanical communion with the local fungi population and had decided, mid-vision, to build something.

Park Güell, a public park on top of a hill that looks less like a park than like the ruins of a civilisation that worshipped ceramic lizards, is perhaps the purest expression of the Gaudínian worldview. The famous mosaic salamander — draped across its stairway like a tourist trap deity — is charming enough, in the way that certain kind of madness is charming when safely contained behind a ticket barrier.

The colonnade beneath the terrace consists of columns that lean at angles no structural engineer schooled in classical proportion would tolerate without reaching for a stiff drink. They work, one is assured. The physics are sound. This only deepens the suspicion: how much more unsettling is a successful derangement than a failed one?

Grief and Self-Mortification

To understand the architecture, one must first understand the man — and the man, it turns out, was a study in accumulated grief and self-imposed mortification.

Gaudí, we are told, never married, though not for want of feeling. He fell deeply in love at least twice and was twice refused — a pattern of romantic failure that he absorbed with the stoic masochism of a medieval monk. After the second rejection, he appears to have simply retired from the idea of human companionship altogether, channelling whatever emotional turbulence remained into stone and tile and reinforced concrete.

His mother died when he was young. His sister died. His niece, who had served as his housekeeper and the last domestic warmth in his life, died too. By his final decade, he had outlived everyone he loved, was living as a near-hermit in the workshop of the Sagrada Família basilica, sleeping on a cot among the plaster models, eating his lettuce, and receiving the priest for daily Mass.

His faith, meanwhile, was not the comfortable Sunday variety, we understand, but a scorching, all-consuming obsession that makes the average cathedral-goer look like a casual tourist in the pews. Gaudí flagellated himself during Lent. He undertook barefoot pilgrimages.

He is reported to have said, with complete sincerity, that the Sagrada Família basilica was not his project but God’s — that he was merely the instrument. One almost believes him. No architect reasoning in full possession of his secular ego would design a nativity facade so encrusted with symbolic detail that visitors require a printed guide simply to identify which blob of stone represents the Holy Spirit. 

And yet this ferocious, grief-scorched, romantically thwarted, semi-fasting mystic produced work of such raw organic power that one suspects the suffering was not incidental to the vision, but its very engine. He built as a man builds who has nothing left to lose — which is to say, with absolute freedom, and no sense whatsoever of the rational limits that keep the rest of us sane.

Genius in Progress

It would be comforting to think that the critical establishment of Gaudí’s era was simply too timid, too hidebound, to recognise genius in progress. Comforting, but inaccurate. The truth is that some of the sharpest minds of the 20^th century took one look at his work and recoiled — not from timidity, but from genuine aesthetic horror. 

When George Orwell, visiting Barcelona in 1936, found himself standing before the Sagrada Família basilica his response was not wonder. Writing in Homage to Catalonia, he described it as “one of the most hideous buildings in the world,” with spires he memorably compared to the shape of hock bottles.

Orwell was not alone in his discomfort. When Gaudí graduated from the Barcelona Higher School of Architecture in 1878, the school’s director — a man who had watched the young Gaudí’s projects develop over several years — turned to his colleagues after the ceremony and delivered what remains perhaps the most precise critical summary of his career: “Today we have given an architecture degree to a madman or a genius. Only time will tell.” 

The hostility wasn’t confined to only outsiders and academics. The citizens of Barcelona themselves responded to Casa Milà with open mockery. The building acquired its now-famous nickname, La Pedrera, “the stone quarry,” from the Barcelonans who could not see in its undulating limestone facade anything other than an unfinished quarry wall that had wandered into the city and refused to leave. 

Satirical cartoons in the Catalan press depicted it as a garage for zeppelins. The local government fined the owners for building code violations. The city council ordered the demolition of elements exceeding height standards. Even Gaudí’s own client, Señora Milà, reportedly detested her husband’s choice of architect throughout the entire project — which, given that she had to live inside the resulting edifice, seems a fair if belated position to take.

Crowds Don’t Lie

And yet, here is where I must exercise my most vigorous intellectual honesty, even at the cost of my own thesis. The crowds do not lie — or rather, they lie about many things, but not about their capacity for genuine wonder. The three million annual visitors to the Sagrada Família are not all victims of collective delusion. There is something in Gaudí that bypasses the critical faculties entirely and speaks directly to something older, stranger, and more animal in the human response to space. His buildings breathe. They seem to move. They are unmistakably alive in a way that even the most beautiful rationalist architecture is not.

One is also obliged, in the spirit of fairness, to record that the basilica’s eventual structural completion in February 2026 — when the final cross was hoisted atop the Tower of Jesus Christ, making it the tallest church in the world at 172 metres — owes a considerable, if unlikely, debt to Australia. 

Specifically, to one Professor Mark Burry of RMIT University in Melbourne, who has served as the basilica’s executive architect and researcher since 1979, commuting between Melbourne and Barcelona for decades in what must rank as the most eccentric long-distance working arrangement in architectural history. 

It was Burry who, from 1989 onwards, cracked the Gaudí Code: deciphering the master’s three-dimensional geometric strategies from burned plans, smashed plaster models, and a set of surviving photographs, then translating them into computer-aided design tools that could guide modern builders through Gaudí’s deliberately agrammatical geometry. 

Without Burry and the research apparatus of RMIT behind him, the basilica’s upper towers would likely still be a Catalan aspiration rather than a global skyline. That a New Zealand-born academic working out of Melbourne should be the man to finally unlock the fever-dream logic of a nineteenth-century Catalan mystic is, one concedes, the kind of detail that Gaudí himself — who believed the whole project was in God’s hands — would probably have found entirely unsurprising.

Gaudí’s basilica – for good or bad — tends to appear in the dreams of millions. That is either the highest compliment one can pay an architect, or the most damning.  Standing beneath those calcium towers in the May light I was unsure which of two was true.

The Vatican Knows Best

Perhaps the Vatican knows something we do not. Perhaps sanctity and structural derangement have always been closer neighbours than the architectural profession would care to admit. 

There was once a man who ate mushrooms, smoked questionable herbs, walked in front of a tram, and built the most visited monument in Spain. He is being made a saint for a building he never finished, which has been under construction for more than 140 years and which looks like God sneezed into wet concrete. And the infuriating, irrational, wonderful world absolutely loves it.

It is all a rather weird experience, but one that must be experienced if only once in your lifetime. So, do go there and make up your mind. Carry some mushrooms, just in case…

—–

Five burials, one wrong ocean, and the city that grew rich on the mistake.

He is carried, even in death, by others. Four stone kings — Castile, Aragon, Navarre and León — hoist the coffin on their shoulders, a sarcophagus that seems perpetually in transit, which is entirely appropriate.

The first thing you encounter when you walk into the Cathedral of Seville is the tomb of Christopher Columbus, and the first thing you realise, if you know the story, is that this is not so much a resting place as it is the latest stop on a very long and disputed journey. He has been buried five times. He is still, arguably, not done.

Columbus died in Spain’s Valladolid on May 20, 1506 — unremarkable rooms, diminished circumstances, a man who had found an entire hemisphere and returned home to argue with accountants about his back pay.

His body went first to the Convent of San Francisco in Valladolid, then was transferred at his son Diego’s instruction to the Carthusian monastery of Santa María de las Cuevas in Seville, a place Columbus had loved in life and used as a retreat before his voyages. So far, it was all rather ordinary. Then things got complicated.

The Five Burials

His wish — stated, reiterated, and finally honoured by his daughter-in-law María de Toledo — had been to be buried in the New World, in the lands he had found. Around 1542, his remains crossed the Atlantic to the Cathedral of Santo Domingo in Hispaniola, the first permanent European city in the Americas.

There he lay for two centuries, through hurricanes, pirates, earthquakes and poverty. When France acquired the territory in 1795, Spain would not leave Columbus to French soil. His remains were exhumed and sailed to Havana.

When Spain lost Cuba in 1898, the bones came home again, arriving in Seville on the back of imperial defeat. The elaborate tomb we see today — four stone kings, a theatrical procession frozen mid-stride — was installed in 1899. It was, in part, a statement of grief dressed up as honour.

There is a final, gloriously unresolved wrinkle. In 1877, workers repairing the Santo Domingo cathedral found a lead box inscribed with the words: Illtre. y Esdo. Varon Don Cristoval Colon — the distinguished man, Christopher Columbus. The Dominicans have always maintained that the Spaniards took the wrong box in 1795, and that the real Columbus never left the island at all.

DNA testing conducted between 2003 and 2005 confirmed that the bones in Seville belong to the Columbus family — but the Seville tomb contains only about twenty percent of a complete skeleton. The bones in Santo Domingo have never been tested.

It is entirely possible that Columbus is in both places at once, which is, when you think about it, a perfectly appropriate state for a man who spent his life between worlds he could not quite name.

The India He Never Found

The misunderstanding that made all this history possible was, at its core, a geographic one. Columbus sailed west convinced he was finding a shorter route to Asia — to the Indies, to the spice ports and gold bazaars that Marco Polo had described. He called the people he encountered Indios and died insisting, against all mounting evidence, that the islands he had reached were the outer edges of Asia. It was Amerigo Vespucci — who would later work in Seville at the very institution Columbus’s voyages made necessary — who argued, more persuasively, that this was something else entirely. A new world. They named the continents after Vespucci, not Columbus. Mr C. would have found this infuriating.

What he found instead of India was something the Europeans had not imagined: an Atlantic world, a vast and populated hemisphere with its own civilisations, calendars, gods and gold. The gold, incidentally, changed everything — and nowhere did it change things more radically, more suddenly, than in Seville.

The City That The Error Built

Stand at the corner of the Cathedral and look across at the long, colonnaded building that faces it: the Archive of the Indies, its stone warm in the afternoon light. It was built as a merchants’ exchange — the Lonja de Mercaderes — because by the 1580s, when Philip II commissioned it, the traders of Seville had grown so numerous and so rich that they were conducting their business on the very steps of the Cathedral. The building that now houses every letter, map, contract and cargo manifest from four centuries of the Spanish empire was built because the commerce of the New World had outgrown the street.

The transformation began with a royal decree. On January 20, 1503, Queen Isabella established the Casa de Contratación — the House of Trade — in Seville, granting the city the exclusive right to conduct commerce with the New World. Every ship bound for America had to depart from Seville. Every ship returning had to arrive there. Every gram of gold and silver had to be registered, taxed at twenty percent and processed here before it could circulate anywhere in Spain or Europe. Seville did not merely participate in the wealth of the Americas. It was the lock through which all of it had to pass.

The city exploded. The population tripled in the sixteenth century. Genoese bankers — Italians had always followed money, and the money was here — congregated on the marble terrace around the Cathedral. The largest guilds were embroiderers, silversmiths, engravers, painters, glaziers.

Vespucci himself served as the Casa’s chief navigator, the piloto mayor, training sailors for the Atlantic crossing until his death in 1512. Seville had become, within a single generation of Columbus’s first voyage, one of the wealthiest and most cosmopolitan cities in Europe.

The Casa maintained something extraordinary: the Padrón Real, the official map of the world, constantly updated as each returning expedition brought new coastlines, new islands, new rivers. It hung under permanent guard, because the maps were the empire. Every pilot who crossed the Atlantic was given a copy. The true treasure flowing into Seville, one might argue, was not the silver — it was the knowledge of where things were.

What The Alcazar Remembers

Walk five minutes from the Cathedral and you are in the Real Alcázar, the royal palace begun by Moorish kings and continuously elaborated by every subsequent ruler. This is where Columbus was received when he returned from his second voyage — not in Castile, not in Madrid, but here, in rooms that still bear the geometries of the Arab craftsmen who built them, amid tilework and muqarnas and garden channels that feel more Marrakech than Madrid.

The aesthetic inheritance of the Arabs sits in every surface of this city: in the yellow and blue ceramics that fill the souvenir shops of Triana, in the tiles of the Plaza de España, in the very name Guadalquivir — from the Arabic al-wadi al-kabir, the great river — that carried Columbus’s ships to the sea.

In the Alcázar’s Sala de Audiencias hangs a large painting called the Virgin of the Navigators, painted around 1535. She spreads her cloak wide, and sheltering beneath it are the figures of the age of discovery — conquistadors, explorers, the men who sailed west. Columbus may be among them; scholars debate which figure is his.

The painting is an act of official memory, the empire composing its own legend while it was still happening. What it does not show, because paintings of this kind never do, is the world that existed on the other side of those ships — the millions who did not shelter under any cloak.

Bones And Questions

Back in the Cathedral, in the fading afternoon light that enters through windows the color of amber and deep sea, I stand in front of the tomb again. The four kingdoms — Castile, Aragon, Navarre, León — bear the weight without expression. The coffin they carry is, in all probability, partly Columbus and partly not. It is a monument to a journey that began in confusion and ended in one. He set out to find India. He found America. He never admitted the difference. He was buried five times. His remains are split between a cathedral in Spain and a lighthouse in the Caribbean.

And yet Seville is, in a very real sense, the city that his confusion built. The gold and silver that arrived here because Columbus pointed his ships in the wrong direction and kept sailing built the churches, funded the art, drew the merchants, created the monopoly, and made this city the gateway of a world it had not suspected existed.

The Archive of the Indies, the Alcázar, the ceramics of Triana, the tilework, the flamenco rhythms that absorbed the grief and the distance of displacement — all of it rests, in some way, on the foundation of that first magnificent miscalculation.

As I look at the Cathedral’s massive doors — the Cathedral itself, the largest Gothic building in the world, built on the site of the great mosque, which was built where a Roman temple stood, which was built where someone before them had already built something — I think about how history in Seville is not a sequence but a palimpsest. Everything written over everything else, and all of it still faintly legible if you know how to read the light.

Columbus did not find India. He found something that remade the world. Seville took its cut, and the cut was glorious, and brief, and it is still here in the stones, in the archive, in the four kings carrying a coffin through a nave that has no end.

We sometimes find strange things about strange people in strange places, like I found Karimuddin Asif (a tailor who became a film director) in Raj Thapar’s memoir — All These Years — that was given to me by her daughter Mala Singh nearly 35 years ago.

“Your first lesson in politics,” Mala wrote on the first blank page of the book, which I got around reading again recently after three decades!

Amidst the politics spanning five decades I found Asif lying “in his bath tub atop blocks of ice, his method of cooling down for sleep” whenever he felt overwhelmed with the heat and tension of directing the glorious Mughal-e-Azam, starring Prithviraj Kapoor, Dilip Kumar and Madhubala, which took 16 years to make!

So what is Asif — who died young after making what was then biggest blockbuster of its times — doing in Raj’s memoir? He got in there because of her husband Romesh — at one point a close advisor of Indira Gandhi — who was tasked during his days in what was then Bombay to write the English script of the film for a then princely monthly fee of 700 rupees. Asif wanted an English version of the film. It didn’t happen.

Mughal-e-Azam almost ruined the financier Shapoorji Pallonji Mistry (more about him another time), but became a huge success once it hit the screens in 1960. It was the highest grossing film of all times in India and held that record until Raj Sippy’s Sholay took the crown 15 years later.

Asif, I learnt from the book, “answered in looks to all that the priggish associated with men of the cinema: uncouth, unlettered, unshaven, a slight twist in his jaw, dishevelled hair falling all over his forehead, short hands with stubby, stained fingers, a cigarette clutched between the middle and the forefinger, silk shirted and with chest on display, a gambler whose gambling instincts had brought him from tailoring … to the studios of Bombay.”

Asif married twice (one of his wives was the famous dancer Sitara Devi who finds mention in the book too), had six children and died leaving an unfinished film — Love and God — which had to be put on hold when its lead actor Guru Dutt passed on. Sanjeev Kumar was roped in, but then Asif called it a day at age 48.

Shut your eyes and imagine this film-maker lying on top of ice blocks in his bath tub on a balmy pre-monsoon Bombay afternoon and you can probably picture why it took as it long it did to make the film!

According to Raj, “it was a world of the bizarre, where in a sense they were all living in their fantasies, having pushed the other realities into some hidden corner of the mind.”

I wonder if much has changed in Bollywood since.

Prithviraj, Akbar and the metallic armour

Raj had an eye for details, finely carved while describing characters in her book. Read below an excerpt that brings to life the great actor Prithviraj Kapoor’s attempts to don the metallic armour and breathe Akbar into his soul:

“This obsession with exaggerated realism had its satirical moments. When Prithviraj Kapoor, who was playing the great Akbar, had to don the armour which was brought from the Jaipur Museum, Prithviraj sat on a stool for half-an-hour, eyelids shut, meditating, drawing inspiration for the character which he was about to portray. 

“Everyone stood around waiting in silence for Prithvi to announce that he was ready. He did so soon enough, in his deep, reverberating voice, always pregnant with some hidden meaning which no one was ever able to fathom — ‘Bring it now. I am ready.’

“Two hangers-on rushed out at great speed and brought the armour. Slowly they let it fall over his head and into position. Prithvi was still in nortial trance muttering to himself, then with his characteristic gesture of hand, convinced that the great Akbar was within him, he attempted to rise, but nothing happened. He tried once, he tried twice, but his massive frame refused to move, weighed down with the armour.

“How we had deteriorated in a brief five hundred years! Akbar must have donned that armour, leapt on to his horse, wielding at least a sword, and Prithvi, much the same in build and height, could not move from his stool. Everyone was stifling their laughs, it wouldn’t do to annoy Prithvi, but this was certainly more dramatic than anything else in the film, and seeing Prithvi’s defeated, dejected face, Asif took over. He ordered a light aluminium copy of the original armour, and the scene would have to wait until the replacement arrived.”

From All These Years – A Memoir by Raj Thapar. Seminar Publications, 1991

This, ladies and gentlemen, is a story about three men — all dead but bound together in the pages of a 53-year-old frayed and heavily pencilled book that I chanced upon last month while cleaning up my late father’s collection.

The paths of these men — a newspaper editor and chronicler of history, a patriot army general and my father — crossed at different times in the last century in a strange twist of fate that also found me looking at what I would call a historical treasure filled with facts, gossip and secrets that has made the book a fascinating read.

The journey of this prized copy of “India From Curzon to Nehru and After” also shows how strange coincidences fill our lives and how sometimes we, mere bystanders, become a part of stories that began long before us.

Durga Das, once a Reuters correspondent, editor of the Hindustan Times, founder of the Press Club of India and author of the book and General Nathu Singh, who could have possibly become the first Indian chief of the Indian army, were contemporaries who witnessed the violent birth of a nation that we now call home.

Born about seven months apart in 1900, the two chose different paths but played important roles in the story of India as it hobbled through an ugly partition and beyond. They both had a front-row view of events that shaped the formation of India and lived long enough post independence to be able to judge history.

Das, with a pen and pad in his hand and deep memory to store big and small stories, reported for what was then the Associated Press of India (which later aligned with the Indian News Agency before they were taken over by Reuters), as he hobnobbed with the Indian and British elite who mattered during the British Raj.

Singh, a dominant personality with a handlebar moustache who was the second Indian to graduate from the military academy at Sandhurst at 21, fought in the Second World War and ended up as ADC to India’s second last British governor general. It was to him that the Japanese troops surrendered in Nicobar in 1945 when the big war ended.

He later managed one of the biggest refugee camps in post-partition India for the hundreds of thousands who streamed in from the newly born Pakistan. Later, he commanded the army’s eastern region, which became the site for the first war between India and China.

My father was a mere bystander who walked into this story in the last years of the general’s life in a small town of Rajasthan.

How does the book connect them? Well, Das and Singh obviously knew each other and the copy of the book I am writing about was presented by Das to the general who probably lent it to my father when their paths crossed in early 1990s. The general hailed from Dungarpur and had retired there after his exciting military career. My father was then working there and befriended Singh because he simply loved meeting people and had a knack of bumping into many with interesting pasts. (He once found himself in a hospital in Nasik in mid-1950s where a man lying chained in the next bed and surrounded by policemen turned out to be Nathuram Godse’s brother, apparently recovering from a bad bout of dysentery!)

Das’s book, which many have panned as a continuum of historical gossip, was published in 1969. He presented a copy with the following inscription — “With best wishes to a great soldier patriot General Nathu Singh, Durgadas” — to the general a year later and then died in 1974.

Singh lived until 93, ramrod straight, sharp and with a voice that could still shake the cows and crops he tended at his farm just as it shook soldiers of the past. My father — 34 years younger than the other two in this narration — passed on this year.

When paths crossed

I never met Durga Das as I was only a decade old in this world when he called quits. My only connection with him beyond the book is the fact that we both worked at both Reuters and the Hindustan Times — many decades apart — in almost similar roles.

However, I did have the pleasure of spending time with the good general during my visits to Dungarpur to meet my parents. My father had told the general about his journalist son and I was ushered in to meet a man who didn’t quite look like the general I had expected to meet. Nearly four decades after leaving the army he was more of a farmer with fascinating stories from a past I then was only learning to understand.

I did end up writing his story for the newspaper I then worked for, re-introducing the man to the elite of the Indian capital he had left behind. The story struck a chord with many old timers in an age when there was no internet and social media. Unfortunately, I have lost the clipping of that story, though much of what he shared with me came alive in what’s scribbled on almost every page of the book.

The general obviously seems to have spent a lot of time reading and judging the contents of the book. I wonder whether he ever shared his views with Durga Das. Maybe he did. On the pages of the book the general had something to say about everything, much of which I am trying hard to decipher.

The reasons behind him not donning the hat of the army chief remain cloudy. The official version that is generally bandied about is that he was indeed asked, but declined and instead offered General K.M. Cariappa’s name as Cariappa was senior.

Another version that’s available on the Internet is that at some point in time the then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru wondered if a Briton should be made the army chief for sometime as none of the senior Indian army officer was experienced enough in the new nation to make the grade.

Singh apparently questioned Nehru’s wisdom and wondered whether a Briton should also be made prime minister as no politician then has the experience of running the country. That made him unpopular with those who mattered.

The first chief

The general, however, mentioned to my father that he was against the division of the country and had put a gun to Nehru’s head demanding the decision to create the new nation of Pakistan be withdrawn. That obviously didn’t work in his favour when the new government went looking for a new army chief!

In Durga Das’s book there is no mention of Singh. He writes that the choice “lay mainly between General K. M. Cariappa and General Rajendrasinhji. (Then Home Minister Sardar) Patel favoured the latter, but Cariappa was chosen as the next C.-in-C. in view of the strong views expressed in his favour by (then defence minister) Baldev Singh and the Defence Secretariat. Rajendrasinhji, a kinsman of the Jam Saheb of Nawanagar, had his innings when he was chosen as successor to Cariappa.”

There are three question marks in pencil against that paragraph — no other comment — which I believe were put there by General Nathu Singh, the original owner of a book that landed in my hands through a quirk of fate.

I wonder whether General Nathu Singh wanted to say more, but didn’t!