White Night Red Fort

White night was gorgeous, with its crowds of benign people (maybe it got feral later, but we were long gone by then), its giant projections of convoluted tattoos on the forbidding walls of the National Gallery, its brightly coloured renditions of Flinders Street Station, the Forum and all the buildings in between, its rows of neat food stalls, fluro-waistcoated security people everywhere and efficient garbage staff emptying bins right from the start of the night.

I went with three of the kids and we had fun, wandering wherever took our fancy, starting at the gallery, bopping to the silent disco and sketching a life drawing model while drinking hot chocolate. We began before night fell, and as the dark came down we worked our way slowly north with various side trips along the river and down laneways where we glimpsed the flicker of projection.

It took me back to my first experience of artistically manipulated light – the Son et Lumiere (Sound and Light) show at the Red Fort in Delhi, sometime in the late sixties.

We didn’t have much in the way of technology back then. Hot water came from a boiled kettle or a metal bucket with a coiled immersion heater suspended in it. We had electricity (when it was working) we had a fridge and ceiling fans and, around about then, our first phone that was shared by most of the houses in the mission compound.

We saw three movies (‘Going to the flicks’ Mum called it) in my childhood: The Sound of Music, Mary Poppins and My Fair Lady: quality if not quantity. We played the songs from each of these musicals endlessly on our reel-to-reel tape recorder; I can still sing along to every word.

That was about the extent of my exposure to hi-tech entertainment; small wonder the sound and light show blew me away. I had no idea what to expect as we settled in our cane chairs and the daylight died swiftly, as it does in the Subcontinent. Then it started, narrated in mellow, BBC-Indian English (the Hindi version was on after).

All my imagination needed to fire up was lines of black words on a cream page, but this was something else. Lights came from all over the fabulous, ancient buildings, as their history was told. The fountains and waterways of the fort in its heyday were described, and we could hear water flowing all around, starting behind and to the right and spreading away, in front and far to our left. My eyes followed the invisible sound; I could see those tinkling streams and fountains every bit as clearly as I could hear them.

The history of the Red Fort in Delhi is glorious and glamorous, brutal and bloody. Sons murdered fathers and armies besieged and rampaged. Dancing girls cavorted and queens and princesses were sequestered behind pierced stone screens, occasionally managing to meddle in affairs of state. The music of the dancing girls, the laughter of the ladies in waiting had me convinced they were actually there. One story was of a reigning monarch who had his eyes put out by his victorious foes – I can still hear the two blood curdling abrupt throaty screams – one for each eye.

Never had history come alive for me in this way. Later, I remember saying to Mum that I couldn’t believe the people weren’t actually there, that the water wasn’t actually flowing, the battles fought, the music listened to.

I saw another Son et Lumiere a few years later, as a young woman – the story of Mahatma Gandhi’s life shown at the Ashram in Ahmedabad, where Gandhi lived for many years, a peaceful place high above the Sabarmati River, a quiet oasis in a mostly mad and chaotic city. My husband and I were visiting there in 1984 the day Prime Minister Indira Gandhi – no relation to the Mahatma – was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards. The attendant at the Ashram where we were happily pottering came over and told us we should probably get back to were we were staying and stay put – there was bound to be trouble inthe streets.

The Sound and Light show at the Ashram wasn’t quite as spellbinding as the one at the Red Fort. Maybe the subject wasn’t quite as juicy, or I was older and more sophisticated in my tastes. The only bit I remember clearly was the narrator pronouncing ponderously, ‘The Mahatma, 72 years old, nay, 72 years young!’ – other details have long fled my mind.

The Red Fort is much more vivid, even though it’s a place I have only visited once since then, whereas I have visited Gandhi’s Ashram dozens of times.

Wandering round White Night in Melbourne last weekend, in the densest crowds I’ve experienced outside India, brought it back. The magic of sound and light and creativity in the darkness of night where anything can happen. All you need to be transported is imagination and a sense of wonder.