The quiet path of poets

In a Shanghai stuck between an ancient past and modernity is the lane that once housed Tagore

Nothing seemed French about the French Quarter​, with its shops selling marinated barbecued meats and waiters setting afire the asparagus on my plate, and nothing seemed Chinese about the large mall, which could easily have been in any large Asian city. Nothing seemed authentic when a hawker offered me a Montblanc pen that looked exactly like the Montblanc pen in the shop behind him, where it was sold for a hundred times more. Nothing seemed ancient in a city where each building was a skyscraper taller than the one next to it, and shone like it had been just unwrapped. And nothing seemed modern in a city where on weekends in a public park hundreds of men and women talked animatedly, exchanging photographs of their sons and daughters, arranging their marriages the way their parents had arranged theirs, and their parents theirs, and so on, uninterrupted, generation after generation. Despite the apparent spontaneity of those conversations, the moves were rehearsed, the dialogue planned, a bit like the city itself, where the centrepiece at the museum of planning was a miniaturized model of the metropolis, as though everything, including this sudden growth, was exactly as the Party intended and the city had planned.

Modern times: In the Shanghai of high-rises, the past can be found in museums. By Thinkstock

You could see some of the old Shanghai at that museum—the Shanghai that was among the last to fall to the Communists, the city which provided China with many intellectuals, the city that looked to the East, but was China’s face to the West. And you discovered that old city in large canvases of old houses from the colonial era, with gardens and foliage implying a permanence which empires believe they possess, until one afternoon the revolutionaries arrive, razing everything (on the other side of the same hall, they displayed large photographs of its port, ships and construction activity, looking mechanical and prosaic. There are probably bureaucrats who are prouder of those photographs of modernity, and not of the stillness of the canvases recreating the old).

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