Passage Brady is an interesting experiment in lying. Like every other arcade in Paris, Brady spills over two different streets on either side: 22 Boulevard de Strasbourg and 43 Rue du Faubourg Saint-Martin. Depending on which the side of the arcade one lives, one quickly starts believing that side to offer the one true opening into the arcade and the other opening is reinscribed in their minds as a deferred exit, a potential crossing. My first encounter with Brady, and every encounter since, was through Saint-Martin, a narrow road lined with Kurdish sandwich shops, a nineteenth-century bouillon with a scandalous crème brûlée, Turkish épiceries with pre-cut watermelons, and cafés ranging from those serving vegan beetroot burgersto old-world rugged tabacs featuring lottery ticket dispensers. The long street stretching all way to Gare de l’Est is gentrifying at a pace so slow, a violence so prolonged, that someone walking around for the very first time, or the hundredth, could still spot the unevenness of its transformation. ‘It is like seeing the Galapagos Finches transform in real time’, I once overheard a tour guide say to his coterie while describing the shift from the Gothic to the Neoclassical facades on the street.
It is not the two interchangeable opening of Brady, though, that make it duplicitous. Rather one faces the lie inside the arcade, as one enters and encounters on either side the heavy woodwork, lattices, ornate balconies, and painted windows. Everything weakly imitating, one way or another, Indian palace architecture. The iron and glass, staple of the Paris arcades that caught Walter Benjamin’s eye almost a century ago, are not entirely gone in Brady. They still subsist as the glass sky roof sparkles and delivers afternoon light to the tiled floor of the arcade and the iron columns rise to support this transparency. But these materials, which Benjamin thought in their conjunction had created a new form of market economy based on spectacle, have been written over in Brady with the wooden frames erected in front of Indian restaurants that wish to give their clients, or potential clients, an immersive, some would say kitsch, experience of pre-colonial and monarchical grandeur. The lie that one is invited to believe in an arcade, regardless of the nineteenth century glass or the twentieth-first century wood, remains the same. Another world is possible, perhaps a better world. Something that is belied almost immediately by the deep racial segregation on either side of the arcade, with one end opening onto Chateau d’Eau, a predominantly Black neighbourhood that a friend once carelessly, or deliberately, described as ‘funny’ while we cycled past on our way to the Auchan at Voltaire.
First opened in 1828, Passage Brady, along with every other protected arcade in Paris, has thrived on its doubleness, giving a safe and free passage to its entrantsfrom natural elementsoverhead while also replacing these elements with the supposed harmless comforts of the marketplace.One of the more generous google reviews of Brady describes it as ‘a visual, sensory, and aromatic journey’, a journey through a transient landscape that leads one back to Paris. Besides the restaurants there are numerous Indian, Pakistani, Mauritian, and Reunion businesses based in the Brady, including hairdressers and nail salons, who come together in the act of setting up, assembling, recreating this landscape day after day. The lie is built not just on architectural rewritingbut alsomanifests itself through various regional and caste references totheIndian subcontinent and, unsurprisingly, to French colonisation: La reine du Kashmir (The Queen of Kashmir), Palais des Rajpouts (Palace of Rajputs), Le passage de Pondichéry (The passage of Pondichery). Benjamin’s famous quip from 1928, ‘the arcade is a city, a world in miniature, in which customers will find everything they need’ is intensified in Brady, where the customer encounters a world in miniature that does not exist, or rather exists only in the arcade as pure fiction. No restaurant in India, to my knowledge, has the architectural ambitions or preference for the kind of lattice facades mounted in Brady, and I knew the moment I got a takeaway from La reine du Kashmir that I was amidst a new architectural form that while cheaply duplicating the palace and mausoleum motifs of North India had managed to become its own thing, or its own lie.
The lattices acting as facades for restaurants in Passage Brady have been plastered onto to the concrete arcade walls with nothing to see behind them. Even though from a distance it might seem that there is depth behind all the miniscule perforations on these wooden blocks, as one approaches them to enter the restaurant their vacuity is immediately visible. These lattices known in Hindi as जाली (pronounced:/jālī/ or jaali) refer to any latticed screen, with perforations on stone, wood, or even steel. Some of the more elaborate lattices in Indo-Islamic architecture use calligraphy and geometrical and natural patterns to depict natural objects, such as trees or birds, or an idea. Representation was not the goal of these lattices; they were supposed to allow light and air into the building while thwarting the heat of the sun and the rain, as well as to ensure good ventilation. When made of sandstone, as was typical in India, these lattices were both structurally dense and semi-permeable, allowing for those within the palace or the mansion to remain in touch with the sound and fury of those without.
Bringing together two biomes, the home and the world, these lattices are not entirely out of place in Haussmann’s vision for Paris, which was built on controlled transparency. The idea itself played out in the construction of the boulevards and the rise of the vitrines or shop windows that displayed the latest wares while also keeping them out of reach to those occupying the street. Like the vitrine, the lattice relishes this false transparency. The repurposed lattices in Passage Brady, however, do more. They invoke grandeur and may even simulate for their customers a context through which their food becomes legible to them. What perhaps made them even more appropriate for the arcade, if that was even a consideration for the migrants who opened these restaurants, would have been the fact that these lattices further intensified the sense of ambivalence between transparency and hiddenness that is provided the glass that covers the rest of the arcade.
For Hindi speakers like myself, this ambivalence comes inscribed in the very name ‘lattice’. It opens a genealogy of lying that cannot be any more suitable for the lattices of Passage Brady: the word jaali also refers to fake or counterfeit products in modern Hindi. Without implying that Passage Brady is simply a simulation or a forged version of a street in North India, one has to consider the fact that forgery remains formative to one’s experience of the arcade even as it offers something entirely new in its final shape. Referring to modern forms of lying, especially the lies produced by political institutions, Derrida once made the poignant claim that ‘the modern lie is no longer a dissimulation that comes along to veil the truth; rather it is the destruction of the reality or of the original archive’. Passage Brady is not exactly a lie in this sense, as it relies on forgery and doubleness rather than an outright denial of reality; but in simulating an architectural motif and introducing new elements into it, the lattice also replaces its original archive. In that spirit, it may be that one should come to Passage Brady not to witness a lie masquerading as the real thing, but to see how a lie might survive and generate newer forms.
This series of texts, guest edited by Ben Libman, is being published in the run up to minor [i]ncident, a night of readings and discussion happening in Paris on October 12th, 2024. You can find more information about the event and its participants here.
Mantra Mukim is a poet and essayist based in Paris. His recent works have appeared in Georgia Review, Datableed, Spamzine, Almost Island, Poetry Review, and Rialto. His debut poetry collection, Reserve, will come out in 2025.
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