The old bazaar was made anew. Planners had scanned the entire precinct down to the inch. Factory brick replaced clay, machine-rendered in an approximation of ancient hand-tooling. Amenity was brought up to modern standards with safety foremost. It wasn’t the same though, because the dirty old trading market was gone now, swapped with a new version for tourists to visit. They would no longer find any livestock or stink of manure. With access roads now paved there was no longer any dust to create shafts of sunlight. The textile galleries were quiet now that the riot of colour was subdued. Dangerous masonry and crumbling arches were removed. The main structure—tall gabled walls and tiled roof—was roughly the same but the arcades and stalls now had sanitation and airflow. Rent was subsidised. A better mosque was built as a showpiece with government sanctioned imams. But, like a television without a power point, a market can’t live without a larger trading network. Many of the original vendors didn’t return after reconstruction, choosing instead employment on the labour crews building the gleaming new city about to rise from the desert around the old caravanserai.

But there were many problems early in the 21st century that superseded the political abilities of councils and elders, even the famously effective provincial governor. But the policies sent down from the capital were clear: let’s be ambitious, not archaic. Now was the time for the men to trim their beards, keep their heads down and contribute to the city of the future, a smarter future. The old houses might be condemned but they would be replaced by a state of the art eco-city showcasing unprecedented innovation. This grave pledge was made as the ground was broken. Five years to bring a mirage to life.

The new market at the ancient crossroads was quickly submerged among a precinct of glass towers and multizoned residential complexes. Without promotions, tourist maps and minibus routes the casual visitor wouldn’t guess the bazaar was even there. The government tourism office had to subsidise vendors of dried figs and ethnic tat just to inject some economic activity into the clean brick arcades. The market featured prominently as traditional colour for the new city but tourism never really took off, despite well-funded marketing campaigns in distant provinces.
The design phase had seen a great spree, an era when famous architects, fêted financiers and engineers of ability had lived a glittering high life in serviced suburban enclaves— unforgettable evenings shared with municipal authorities and expensive escorts in the flashy new bars and restaurants where foreign managers had yet to learn the names of their staff. Money had flowed like water then, the byproduct of the city’s conception.

A distant place, west of the capital and south of great mountains—this was the deep desert. None of these new designers remembered what the old town at the crossroads had looked like. Without a single verandah or wind-flue in the entire city, the apartments and offices and malls demanded climate control on a vast scale—a million air conditioners generating a vast shimmering mirage. During early construction the regions aquifers became so depleted that water had to be imported by state highway. Large scale desalination failed to demonstrate its economic viability. The rail line never materialised.

When the nation was engulfed by the turbulence of the greater world the money blew away in the desert wind, along with all the experts and tourists. Goodbye to the food-wasters! Most of the migrant labour also left, to chase the future elsewhere. Only political dictate drove this dream of a city now, following long momentum from an extinct policy of national economic dominance. The plan still lived. And the provincial governor advised his distant masters that any major change in direction would agitate a delicate political situation—much of the indigenous male population were working in construction. The local crews still had their blueprints. Local project managers had built their skills. Salaries were still being remitted home to families. Anyway, the capital had bigger problems these days, so revenues from remote oil wells were diverted toward the continuity of construction. Everything had to slow down, what with materiel and supply being curtailed by economic crisis.

Time always returns to its original shape. So the workers soon fell back into their own rhythms. The needs were basic and human: the heat of the day was the time of siesta, when even shadows wilted. In the late afternoon the sound of tools would start up again, but at a leisurely pace, the efficient foreign foremen having long since departed. In many places they had to improvise any prefabricated engineering and without advanced manufacturing many building projects stalled, unfinished. The inspectors were gone anyway, along with the once-fearsome state security apparatus.
The workers took their daily meal in modest food markets in the cool gloom of underground arcades. When their shifts finished they listened to musicians in makeshift coffee shops that spilled from designated zones into the unoccupied spaces of shopping malls and office lobbies. Together they clapped by the glow of lanterns, cries and laughter echoing off unrendered concrete, with conduit and detached wiring emerging from bare walls like a secret spring from naked rock. They left late for dormitories, thin mats on the floor high up in unfinished apartment complexes chosen for the cool winds from the distant mountains.

Without irrigation the elaborate landscaping soon turned to dust. Eventually water could be drawn from the aquifer again and a few centralised wells were built for the use of workers—after all, ablutions were sacred. Beards had grown long again. The state security headquarters hadn’t been manned for a year, so when extended families began to arrive nobody demanded to see their papers. The city didn’t even notice this trickle of life. It was built looking toward the horizon but its design could never replace a thousand years of life. The vision was barren from conception, sewn with salt, a commodity for short-term gain. And, gradually, it began to occur to the workers that the city’s residents may never arrive to claim their place.

The unfinished city stood like a sundial on the plain, a vast glazed frontage that mirrored the sun’s ferocity. The central towers threw a zone of perpetual shade that became the thoroughfare for human ants at ground level. Distant ancestral villages returned to mud as families settled in the lower levels of ultramodern residential. For most, life was lived close to the ground and close to the water, save for the muezzin who made a weary climb to call the faithful from the elevator gantry of an unfinished office block. A new mosque had been improvised from the cavernous convention centre. An irrigation system was installed to water meagre crops on unfinished lots and sheep were kept penned in the lobbies of banks and government meeting rooms. Marble was scattered with dung. Flocks of fatbacks crossed five-lane overpasses in the cool dawn to dusty grazing lots. Children were taught at a collective school fashioned from a showcase media centre, sitting under the fading colours of advertising and the oblongs of dead screens.
But the people remained as squatters in the shadows of the great conurbation. The streets were so wide and the surfaces inhuman. Inferior asphalt quickly cracked apart. The earth dried and foundations subsided. Framing shrank in the incredible heat. Occasionally great sheets of cladding would fall into the street with a resounding crash that shocked the stillness. The wind whistling in broad boulevards created a loneliness. Once again the true heart was the bazaar, which drew the sparse residents into narrow alleys where human energy was contained, to trade and eat and hear news from the rare visitor from other provinces.

You can build the finest furniture to sit your arse upon, says a grizzled wanderer from the declining east who sits watching the teeming arcade. Some of the more curious night patrons had gathered around as the stranger drained his arak cup, but then your tree is dead. This was the crossroads of a network whose ancient thread crossed the great mountains themselves. Beneath the bazaar the earth was the scene of many crimes. The bones of other travellers lie buried here, unmarked and far from home. They saw much on their journey but left no report. What did it get them?

…

Lee Hana is a writer in Aotearoa-New Zealand, and has worked throughout East-Central-Southeast-Asia on post-conflict development and peacebuilding communications.