Let us sit down here on this seat. We had it made as a sample for a temple in Junagadh. Now it has a place here at home. We call its back the kakshasan. Do you know why? Because the backrest supports the kaksh or the armpit, when you lean against it while sitting, just like this.The seat on which an invitation was extended to me for a conversation around temple-building practices in June 2019 is no ordinary piece of furniture. It is key to the lifeworld of Balakrishna Amritlal Trivedi (b. 1932), a hereditary temple builder resident in Ahmedabad [1]. With a prolific family-based experience of temple design, production, and restorations, younger family members turn to him for his memories of working with immediate ancestors, calling him 'Balubhai'. And it is to him I was introduced by his nephew in 2013 - as Balubhai - for lived accounts of repairing the ornate twelfth-to-thirteenth-century classical temples of Dilwara at Mount Abu, Rajasthan, between 1951-63. The seat is located in a space open to the sky in the front yard of his home. It is used by family members as part of everyday life, fitting into the daily and seasonal rhythms of home and work. Balubhai often sits here with his grandchildren, after school hours, conversing over cups of coffee, while they sit on or straddle the backrest.
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