When I decided to walk...

I walk through the street, that... which did not exist for me until a while ago...

My camera is justly dancing over me, spraining my neck with its string... holding itself up to my left eye as the one on the right shuts to take a placid moment into its lap...

Life gets funny sometimes. It drags you on to the road on a cold dreadful night... strips you naked in the midst of a crowd and gives you nowhere to run, until one morning you wake up and realise it was all circumstantial...

I woke up one fine morning with two fractured feet, fat, jobless, mission-less... with no place to call home, no money that was my own and no shoulder to cry on. My whole life walked past me like a lost opportunity. I was thinking hard in reverse gear, wondering what note of the symphony I had missed...

‘Papa I want to paint,’ I heard myself say when I was 5, when I was 9, when I was 16 and once when I was 18 and then I forgot all that I ever said to papa...

All the flashes then on were those of a flight missing and me running... a flight to catch for life... and in that haste, I forgot to walk.

I looked towards my plastered feet, decided to get them walking without the cast... called up Kalyan Joshiji, son of the National Awardee – Shree Lal Joshiji, in Bhilwara, Rajasthan and said ‘Sir, I am coming there for a month.’

I had never been to that town, I knew no one there, my parents were shocked and Sumeet was slightly upset at my lack of planning... Lesson learnt... if someone doesn’t think 24 years of planning is enough then that guy must surely be an engineer. Check!

Bags packed... from Delhi to Jaipur with plasters on... from Jaipur to Bhilwara with Bata chappals. This time I will walk! Check!

There is nothing to take home to, in terms of the beauty of that town... at first glance it is just another lump of filth like anywhere else in India... that doesn’t mean I don’t love the filth... there is an uncanny sense of character to it... atleast it smells of something... In London here nothing smells... all is the same.

Kalyan sir decided to put me up for the entire month in his sister’s house... kind people! Beyond the knowledge of understanding, there is another knowledge called generosity... that is the only knowledge we Indians know... seasons are many, but our hearts are always warm...

Preeti Bhabhi and Pawan Bhaiya's two daughters!

Their son Krishna!

Auntie, Pawan Bhaiya and Preeti Bhabhi and their three kids kept me with them for 28 days without any expectation or more... it was the kind of generosity I did not understand. There was a point where I stopped getting overwhelmed... it became a permanent state of mind.

Kalyan sir’s home was roughly a km away. As I walked the street, that... which did not exist for me until a while ago... My camera justly dancing over me...

Unnamed faces cropped up, unknown voices were asking me to ‘take my picture didi. You are journalist?’ I smiled and thanked god for technology... atleast I don’t have to act economical here on the number of pictures I take... what if I was still living in my dad’s era with those Kodak camera rolls... and then I wondered why? Why do we want strangers to take our photographs when the only place where that picture will ever end up is in the bosom of an unfamiliar space... from where we would never be able to retrieve it....Why do we ever smile to a stranger’s camera... when the story behind that smile will never tell itself to people we will ever know?

Bhilwara is known as the city of looms... !

 

Thinking as I walked along unstitched streets of old Bhilwada... streets that were creased with loud excitement... rikshaw pullers waiting for their next customer... cows hosting round table conferences in the middle of human fervour... men in white going for their morning namaaz... beggars busy at what they do best... shop shutters opening with a sound that was frightfully similar to an aircraft crashing... vegetable sellers crowning the space right next to the gutters with their buttocks and a basket full of greens... women with their heads covered crossing the road surprisingly with more precision than men with their eyes wide open... the violent sounds of oil beating the bottom of pans as Bilwara’s famous kachoris flew out of them one-by-one, hot in the October sun, sweating with cholesterol... I walked past the prying morning into the home of my master...

  

The entrance gate was an obligatory fixture... like a school girl off to party in a see-through dress. Kalyan sir’s mother frail as an autumn leaf... dressed in her customary Rajasthani lehenga choli and maang tika that was intertwined with her hair as one... welcomed me with a smile as she continued mopping the floor... sometimes as I write I stop suddenly and start to wonder. How do I write of such experiences? How do I explain?

Tachki and Gotiya... Kalyan Sir's two daughters!

Kalyan Sir working on a 32 feet long Phad on the terrace!

It was a modest house, yet there was so much space... Tachki, Gotiya and Pollu were Kalyan sir’s three kids... then there was Bauji or the great artist to whom once M.F. Hussain had said, “If I am the king of horses, you are the king of elephants....” Shilp Guru Shree Lal Joshiji had weathered with age. His coughing would run through the house like rabid tremors but his fingers still ran like magic through canvass. I touched his feet and walked up the stairs for my first lesson in Phad Painting.

'Bauji' National Awardee Shree Lal Joshiji

Like a moment that got captured in its own freedom... like a star that became the victim of its own glory... like a beam, a sun-beam that caught fire off its own heat... Rajasthan’s Phad Painting lost itself somewhere on the way. Its intent to remain an art for the few became its nemesis in the tide of popular art forms across the world...

Phad’s originators were the Joshi (Jyotishi or astrologer) clan from Rajasthan. They made these 32 feet long scrolls of art narrating life stories of local deities Pabuji and Dev Narayanji. These were heroes who had died saving the cattle of the pastoral communities and were later deified... Here people are dying saving nations... what irony!

The long Phad scrolls were purchased by story tellers called 'Bhupas' at a nominal price of INR 1000 as they carried them along enacting stories from the painting to enraptured rural populace.

Women were not allowed to learn the tricks of this art so that it would not get out of the household when they get married... now this is an interesting alternative to patenting, however historical.

Bauji stood against the fortress of time, shattering purported vanities and taking women under his tutelage. I being one of the few lucky ones... there came a time in Bhilwara’s memoires where women got extra wedding offers if they knew a thing or two about Phad.

Phad’s style, faces, expressions, expanses, monarchs, monarchies, feminine fragility and an oft pawn-like flaccidity ... all have not wrinkled nor maimed over years and years of art and thought... thought has gone into changing mediums, canvasses, lengths... but all else remains the same... no face looks ahead, no! The art form hasn’t looked ahead either...  

After a Phad would age and the paint would start to wear off, the painting was passed into the Ganges following proper rituals.

The only appalling variations to this ancient art came with students such as myself. My first few lessons with sir went by in bobbling and inept doodling... the next few in the fear that very less time is left and the remaining in the heightened fear that almost all the time is gone. In between of these torrential fears, and hammering mental workouts, my stomach often grumbled and Kalyan sir’s wife sensed it like a mother would. She fed me with the most unbelievable Rajasthani lunches... so full of love and oil!! My heart yelled with sinful pleasure as did my belly.

Dinners were mostly at Preeti Bhabhi, Pawan Bhaiya and aunty’s place. Preeti Bhabhi had a rawness to her beauty that was both refreshing and silently robust. As she would serve me rotis coated with streams of desi ghee every evening, her face partly covered, partly peeping out of the saree’s pallu... whispering just nothings and somethings to me... her careless kindness would fill up the surroundings. I often would implore her to speak in a normal pitch as all other people would do but in her part of the world whispering and veiling are totems of respecting superiority... be it your husband or your husband’s family. Many call it servitude... I call it an alternative reality.

Preeti Bhabhi!

My lessons started to help shape the movements of my hands into something coherent... soon turning into paintings and then bigger and bigger ones...

Some of my initial work!

More!

Radha Krishna!

Kalyan sir gave me decades of this knowledge in the form of faith... he gave me faith in an artist’s inane goodness, belief in the powers of speechless expressions, trust in the ability of telling histories with a single stroke. I learnt from Bauji and him, Gopal sir and Rahul sir (Kalyan sir’s brothers) not one but many arts... the most profound of which was the art of progeny. That which is born of you is not always a child... but could be a moment, a minute, an hour, a life-time...

From me in those 28 odd days was born a lifetime of love for folk Indian art forms and that shall be my progeny. To nurture it with my milken love is the job he left me with at the end of our journey. As all the family members shed a last tear of repressed sorrow at my leaving... as they dropped me to the bus stand... as they bid me good bye... I prepared myself for another kind of life... a life that has just given itself a lesson.

On my way back to Jaipur in a sleeper coach bus... I made to myself several promises... promises of staying in touch with all that I have left behind, promises of calling them as often as I can, of inviting them to UK when I have the funds, of hosting an exhibition soon with my guru-Kalyan Joshi, of living many more dreams and desires... unto I die. Promises are residues of experiences... I have to admit I do forget to put them to good use sometimes.

Nevertheless, for now I may call myself an artist... not one, with art at her behest... but one whose behest is art!

While my granny's earlobes hung to the grills!

Were only half the seats in life just half as comfortable as a toilet seat!

Often these days when I sit on a toilet seat using one of those hand held showers, next to a pot in nearly all Asian loos... to bathe... With two fractured legs that's the best I could do to keep myself suitably washed... and often in such dull moments I wish if half the seats in life were just half as comfortable as a toilet seat...

If providence would have it her way, I literally walked into a pair of plasters last week outside Delhi Airport’s Terminal 3. The diabolic fall has come with a life time of bed rest, an appetite that being the only personal item I had deliberately lost once upon a time and a feeling of walking into the bed each night with shoes on.

Yet before this unqualified twist of destiny I was tripping around Hong Kong. Now I am not a travel expert nor am I sparsely intelligent... least then I knew to differ the H from the K of Hong Kong before I travelled that side. Many of my well wishers however had cordoned off my lean attempts to think of HK as anything better than a “concrete jungle, good for shopping and eating out or maybe a day trip to Macau for some gambling,” that is what everyone said to me... except for my friend Yosha (who painstakingly designed an HK to-do list for me)... who would be my host for the trip.

That is Yosha (my best friend)

 

But the simple joy of pure admiration comes to the callous myna as it would never to the wise eagle even with years of flight having eroded its aged wings. I was new like a new born to the surroundings and I was gregarious at best. HK opened its cloak far and wide and I penetrated unreserved. 

My landing in HK was safe... the airport was chaotic with every people from fair to far. A bunch of Pakistanis, while complimenting me on my perfect Urdu as I spoke to them in adulterated Hindi, led me to the point where my hosts were holding their patience and a cup for frozen yogurt for me. I only put pictures of my neck above on facebook, creating a general impression of being thin... sadly however, when Yosha saw me at the airport she realised that there is much more to a suitcase than just the frail handle.

The taxi ride from Lantau Island to the main HK Island where Yosha and Tish (the Ghosh couple) lived in the centre of the city was uneventful, but for the constant Cantonese bursting into my ears from the radio set in the taxi.  The drivers are just or more pissed off with the world in HK as those in Singapore are happy or apparently content.

Yosha’s flat was unique in a naturally artistic way... such that nature had painted its canvas and fixed it to either sides of her house. Through the lavish openings of the rooms I often saw the vast landscape walk in, dressed in different strokes at varying hours of the day.

That's the view from Yosha's and Tish's room

This was the rainy day view from my room

This was the twilight view from the living room

This is the view from the study

Rainy day view from the living room

As I warmed up to the rabid showers and liquid sunlight dripping through the rain-drops... hanging like my granny’s earlobes to the grills of the modest balcony, HK managed to keep me indoors for several days. 

Yosha and Tish took me to the Victoria Peak one day, which controversially (the hub of controversy mostly lying between the Ghosh couple) is the highest peak of the nation... and I almost believed that this is the most of ‘nature’ that I can see in here... The peak tram on its way down nearly made me throw up on a couple of various faces... But I managed to save the throwing up for a latter part of the trip...

That's the tram going down so steep I was almost sure Im dead!

HK is much like the city of Troy... as real as it is hypothetical... as embedded in the heat of today as it is borrowing from its several histories... stories of the British Raj still walk around the uphill streets and whisper themselves through myriad meanings and imaginary realities. 

When I heard some of them, I built my own history of this country. The British left behind an entire nation that had lived thus far on simulated wisdom. The government now is careful to the point where even casual repartee is mostly disallowed... except for some irregularities where drunk tufts crowd the skyline with complaints on tax problems amongst others. Mind you, tax in HK is only seven percent of the total income... if that may be considered any form of ‘problem’.

This funny old man musn't have been photographed as much on his own wedding I tell you!

Government has rationed land disposal for habitation on a piece-meal basis. 40 percent land is dedicated to nature reserves and country parks. One such park is called the Sai Kung East Country Park. The geography is so complex that I can’t nearly attempt to lecture you on that but I can assure you that with or without a lesson on that, you will get drowned in the unabashed beauty of HK. 

This enchanting fairy land had only its fairies missing

My tour guide Martin Heyens – when I spoke with him for the first time on the phone, I was flushed with the horror of spending an entire day with a British and an old one at that... is just a bit too much of colonial hangover-dose for me. But Martin beat me at my prejudice. 

That's funny old Martin walking through the bridge from his times to mine!

 

He is quite funny and awesome... a police officer from the times of British-HK, Martin stuck around in here like a shell on the beach while the waves returned to their original abode. Old as the name Martin itself, his legs were such a repository of energy that our 12 km long walk that day, slipped through casually without knowledge of its own existence.

As we walked through Stage II of the 100 km long Maclehose trail, the sun, the skies, rains, sands, trees, toads, crabs, crows, butterflies, bees, snakes and plants and 50 odd years of stories from Martin’s world followed us. The canopy of God changed its disguise every few moments and introduced itself to me with different names. Sands and sounds from the virgin beaches sometimes came to me as Sai Wan or Ham Tin and other times as Tai Long or Tung Wan... The sensuous heights of the Sharp peak stood between me and the dizzying clouds...  and far away from sight, the silky turquoise waters of the High Island Reservoir blurred the horizons of my imagination.

That's the Long Harbour

Can you see the Sharp Peak?

On our way we met with abandoned houses of the Chek Keng village that wept to me with stories of their barren wombs. Soon my journey was about to finish... I walked into it with a blank, I returned with a page and heart drenched with experiences... I bid Martin adieu.

On my second last evening, the Ghosh couple took me to Macau to the Playboy club where laps were being readily graced by luscious asses full with joy and silicon. 

We brought in Yosha’s birthday with drinks and we bade goodbye to it the next evening with many more drinks and a pot full of nausea. As I flushed it down, I wished if half the seats in life were half as comfortable as a toilet seat...

That's us so drunk even the camera felt a shiver

 

In the flight back home I was upgraded to Business class for a price that I paid after getting out of the airport... the two broken legs... it is all good for as long as I have friends that can paint plasters better than most of us can paint pictures of our fractured lives!

Thanks to my best friend Parineeta Sharma for this one