The boy was clean. His eyes were bright and his smile came easily. He asked me for money to buy food.
I have worked in many geographies and contexts, across many sectors. I have seen the sublime and the grotesque at close hand. Usually they keep a decent distance from each other. That boy carried both. There was nothing grotesque in him. The grotesque was that a face like his should have to ask.
By grotesque I do not mean simply ugly, disgusting or absurd. The grotesque, as I mean it here, appears when things that should not meet are forced together: beauty and hunger, the sacred and the obscene, abundance and want, a human being and what a system has made of him.
Cultures have long found ways of giving that collision a place. On an outer wall. Above a door. In the margin of a page. Placed there, the grotesque did two jobs. It marked the limit of what a society could bear to accept, and it pointed to a road beyond that limit for anyone willing to look. The grotesque had an address. The anthropologist Mary Douglas called dirt matter out of place. Shoes are not dirty on the floor, only on the dining table. The grotesque is a close relation: the body, the act or the sight that will not stay where it has been put. We still sort the world every day, in who may sit where, whose food smells, whose body is in the way. We are only less willing to admit it.
Indian tradition gave revulsion a place of its own. The Natyashastra names bibhatsa as one of its eight rasas, to be shaped and savoured like love or heroism. Chamunda, emaciated and garlanded with skulls, is adored rather than hidden. Some aghori ascetics make the cremation ground their home, seeking a state in which nothing disgusts them and so nothing binds them.
The Chandelas built the temples of Khajuraho, in Madhya Pradesh, between roughly 950 and 1050 CE. The erotic carvings are a small share of the sculpture, but they go far. On the southern side of the Lakshmana temple’s base, a man couples with a horse. Beside them a woman covers her face with her hands and peers out between her fingers. The sculptors carved the scandal and its witness in the same stone. It is not hidden. Much of it is displayed on the exterior, in daylight. Inside, the sanctum is bare and dark. The devotee moves through the whole range of human appetite and arrives at an empty centre. Kama is honoured as a legitimate aim of life, and then it is left behind. The grotesque is a threshold, not a destination.
Above the doorways of many Indian temples sits the kirtimukha, the face of glory. In one version of the legend, Shiva creates a ravenous creature to devour a demon, then spares the demon. Left hungry, the creature is told to eat itself. It devours its own body until only the face remains. Shiva is pleased, and sets that face above the doors of his temples. The monster at the threshold is appetite that has consumed itself. You walk beneath it to reach the god. A society that hangs such a face over its doors knows something about hunger: it is to be faced at the entrance, and passed through.
The word grotesque was born at the edge. Europe kept such figures there, as gargoyles on rooflines and monsters in the margins of holy books, so that the centre could keep its shape.
What would we carve on our outer walls today? We hardly need to. Our malls, airports and screens are covered in appetite, rendered as advertisement. We have reversed the old arrangement. Appetite goes in the shop window. Hunger goes out of sight. What has gone missing is the other half of Khajuraho: the bare, dark room at the centre that all that appetite was meant to lead to.
Modern cities have margins too. We send to them what the centre cannot bear to see: the dump, the slum, the sewage plant, the migrant workers’ camp. Those who live there know exactly where they are. Those at the centre need never visit. A city’s map is also a moral document. The old margins framed a text and guarded a sanctum. These margins guard nothing. They simply hide.
U.R. Ananthamurthy’s “Samskara” turns on a corpse. Naranappa, a Brahmin who broke every rule of his caste, dies in the agrahara. No one will perform his rites for fear of pollution, and by custom no one may eat while the body lies unclaimed. The learned men search their scriptures for a ruling as the corpse rots and rats die in the lanes. Praneshacharya, the most learned of them all, finds no answer in his books. The smell does what the scriptures cannot.
I thought of that novel after the boy asked me for food. A village goes hungry while its learned men consult their texts. We have our own learned debates about poverty, and our own careful categories. The boy was simply there, hungry, while the arguments went on.
In Mahasweta Devi’s “Draupadi,” Dopdi, raped in custody, refuses to cover herself. She walks towards the officer who ordered it, and he is afraid. What was done to her out of sight, she carries to the man at the centre. She gives the grotesque its address back. Such work makes a demand. It says: this too is human, and so are you. The old grotesque stood where you had to pass it, and it looked back. Our screens bring horror closer than any temple wall ever did, between recipes and cricket scores, and leave us exactly where we were. Spectacle has a simpler message. Keep scrolling.
On the eastern edge of Delhi stands the Ghazipur landfill. I know it well. I was involved in building India’s first Euro IV compliant Waste2Energy plant there, and it remains one of the more satisfying projects of my working life. At its height the dump stood almost taller than the Qutub Minar, a second monument on the skyline of the capital. If dirt is matter out of place, at Ghazipur the matter had stopped being out of place. It had become the place.
But the mountain was not what made it grotesque. Every day, women and children trudged up its slopes to mine it for anything that could be recycled. I was told that small children were particularly useful to the trade. Their fingers were nimble, and they could be taught to sort.
When we began developing the project, I felt a revulsion I have not forgotten, and not only for the heap. Some of that mountain was mine, or might as well have been. Like everyone at the centre, I had my rubbish taken away without ever asking where it went. I came to Ghazipur to make the problem smaller. I had been feeding it long before I saw it. The satisfaction and the revulsion sat side by side, and they still do. Meeting the boy brought both back. Human beings should not have to spend their lives scraping a living from a dump. Children should not have to sort our garbage.
Ghazipur is the visible end of a long chain. The grotesque of our time is rarely placed. It is displaced. The consumer sees cheap clothes. Someone else sees the factory. The shareholder sees returns. Someone else lives with what the accounts call an externality. The city sees its rubbish collected. Someone else’s child climbs the heap to sort it.
The optimists have a strong reply, and they are right about the averages. By almost every long-run measure, from extreme poverty to child mortality to literacy, humanity has never been better off. But the grotesque was never about averages. It is about nearness: abundance and want within arm’s reach, and a growing skill at sparing those who benefit from ever having to look.
The boy has stayed with me for that reason. He was not an exception to the system. He was the system, close enough to touch.
A system organised around a single measure, whether growth, efficiency or return, stops seeing what that measure leaves out. Its grotesque no longer sits on a wall or above a door. It has no address. It is everywhere and nowhere: plastic in the deep ocean, carbon in the air, the long chain behind a cheap shirt. Even Ghazipur is not an address in the old sense. It points to nothing beyond itself.
The old addresses all pointed somewhere. The outer wall led to the sanctum. The face above the door led to the god. Khajuraho’s lesson was to see appetite fully, and then walk past it to the still centre. The question for this civilisation is whether it still has a centre to walk towards.