Apparently these false teeth hampered the free flow of black bile regurgitating out of her, so when I sat pinned down on order in front of mother listening aghast once again to yet another story embellished with her twisted lies, mother would put her fingers inside her mouth, grimace and katak, she would remove a set of false teeth and casually chuck it beside the sleeping cat on the side table. The cat’s fur would jam itself to wet teeth resulting in hairy teeth. Appalled, my hand would instinctively search for car keys to scoot out of the house where upon my fingers would touch something wet. Looking down I would see four teeth snarling up at me beside an ash tray. Screaming! Commotion! Indignation! I would flee out of her house with my own curly hair standing on end. Then one day on a visit, I picked a chakkli from a plate on the table to find yet another set of teeth menacingly lying in wait for me. I stopped visiting mother.

One day mother died. She was sent to hospital to be embalmed. As I cautiously stepped into her house once more, the phone rang. It was the hospital. “The teeth!” screeched a voice at the other end of the phone, “send across your mother’s teeth!” It was then that I accomplished what must have been the bravest feat of my entire life –I single handedly scoured through mother’s house in search of her frightening teeth. Hands trembling; I combed through her collection of 31,453 souvenir bells covered with the incessant black dust of her lies, I burrowed by torchlight around barriers in the cellar where her husband had walled himself to his death six months before, I braved through fumes of cat shit, nearly suffocated in the pungent aroma of vases crammed with tuber roses, scraped through muddy window ledges, searched frantically under pots filled with rotting plants… I finally found the sets of teeth. One was deposited in the bowels of her large handbag, buried deep under stacks of her poison pen letters; the other lay predictably under her evil cat which spat at me and the third one I found mysteriously jabbed into a banana in the fruit bowl on the fridge.

Mother and her teeth were quickly buried with much relief at the cemetery. Life is now peaceful and good.

As the lockdown steadily swallows the year, there is a marked reduction in the daily choices I make — most of my interactions are with my screen which is my primary source of food, connection and stimulation. I am aware of a chilling reality happening in the distance, there are those who are making a harrowing walk across this vast country towards a distant destination, but although I observe this vicious phenomenon, the truth for me as for my peers is that this is yet another horror which is viewed online but ultimately too nebulous to actually relate to.

In my illustration the person sitting at the laptop within a boat is an analogy for my life now. The boat symbolizes the desire to move and get out but the pond within which the boat rests imposes its restrictions. The starkness of the picture is reflective of a vulnerability in the face of an unfriendly and dangerous enigma. The empty space between the person in the boat and the faceless migrants in the distance moving out of the page en masse mirrors the huge chasm between the haves and the have nots. Never have I felt as together in a situation as now with every single one of us affected by the virus and yet never have I felt more apart because of the status quo emphasizing the privileges which cushion me and those who cannot have them.

The writing and accompanying illustration were published in The Indian Quarterly magazine July/December 2020 for the theme Together/Apart

Notice how the pattern in his shirt echoes the way he has beautifully and lovingly arranged his fruit. See the pride and serenity in his face. Also notice the symmetry of the house in the background. We are a city constructed by patterns. Everything that can be arranged into order and precision must be used to carefully line the flimsy boundaries of our worlds and our sanity in a neat, decorative reassurance against the chaos that exists just beyond; rows of potted plants all in the same height, neatly arranged packages on grocery store shelves, complicated rows of patterns on our saris and shirts, sloping pyramids of precisely arranged fruit, beautiful grillwork on our balconies with each shape painted a different colour.
As long as we can live within the comforting confines of the beauty and neatness of our arrangements, as long as we can collect them in our social media grids, we can convince ourselves that all is safe and well.

A decade later, when I moved to Cooke Town, I noticed a nice barber shop close by and one day during my walks I spotted the barber standing outside. He seemed like a decent, approachable fellow, so I went up to him and asked, “Neevu namge head massage kodthiraa?” He agreed, so I went inside, he put a greasy towel over my shoulders and asked me, “Softaa, mediumaa, hordaa?” I said, “Mediumuu” and he poured coconut oil over my head and proceeded to give me a head massage, first the kneading of my head, then the making circular motions with his fingers, then pressing his thumbs from my eyebrows to my temples and then holding both his palms together and giving me small karate chops all over my head — all with Medium pressure.

When my head felt as if it was bobbing gently in a calm sea the barber stopped and then returned with a black glove, on the glove was attached a machine. I was mildly alarmed, “What is this?” The barber replied, “Idhu Vibratoru”. This seemed to be a new development since my first visit to a barber a decade ago. The barber inserted the glove into his hand and when he plugged in the machine, his entire hand started vibrating and then he placed this vibrating hand on my head. The effect was incredible, I could feel my brain vibrating drrrrrrrrrrrr within my skull. Then the barber placed one vibrating finger inside my ear and a chill ran down my spine, then the other ear, then he placed his thumbs over my temples, and then the base of my skull. Then suddenly it was all over. The vibrator stopped and the towel was removed. Thirty minutes over. When I returned home, I felt my brain still vibrating in my skull. I felt incredibly relaxed and slept very well that night. I was alert and productive all week.

I returned to the barber shop several times after that and I have been to other barbers when I’ve moved homes. I have always been welcomed and treated with great respect. It seems to be a matter of pride to a barber when a woman visits his shop and asks for a “Head Massage”. Every single head massage I’ve been given has been excellent and all the barbers have used the Vibrating Glove.

~ Priya Sebastian

At a market in Rome, I remember I bought a perfect fig, black in colour and handed to me reverentially on one of those ruffled doilies that one uses to serve a Rumkugel or our local bakery apple cake. I say perfect because it simply was — an exactness of ripe with a sweetness that hit a bullseye with my tastebuds. I understood why it was handed to me with such care, and when I looked at the bitten fig between my fingers, it was deep red inside. This is what Eve would have eaten in mythical Eden, I remembered thinking, not apple but fig.

So there is this book called “Climbing Mount Improbable” by Richard Dawkins. The last chapter is called, A Garden Inclosed. In his inimitable and engrossing style, Dawkins analyses the fig for us and tells us that a fig is not a fruit but a flower garden turned inside out. It is a hanging garden and one of the wonders of the world. By the time I’d finished reading the chapter and closed the book, I could not help but marvel that every time I bit into a fig, I was eating an entire garden.

Here, back in my Bengluru, I walk under fig trees with bunches of tiny figs at Lalbagh garden. Outside at the gates, there are carts full of bigger green figs, fibrous and not very sweet. I don’t bother with them. If you are lucky, you might get some purple ones which are riper and sweeter, but by the time you take them home in the plastic bag in which they are chucked and weighed and by the time you wash them, they are pulp in your hands and hardly inspire thoughts about Garden of Eden.

The painting of this black fig was made by me long before I went to Rome. I’d never seen a black fig before, and the picture was entirely imaginary. This painting reminds me of one of those rare and memorable occasions when what you draw turns real, which is what happened at that moment when I was handed the perfect black fig in Rome.

The strangest of circumstances swallows up the year 2020 with the slow grim determination of a boa swallowing prey. I am in my studio insulating myself from the baleful situation outside my four walls. There is a marked reduction in daily choices that I make. I handle everything with care. I take nothing for granted anymore. Questions take root and arise from the ground beneath my feet, spreading their branches around me and insisting they be reckoned with. Ultimately, they all lead to one insistent question: What will become of us all?

I draw in order to live. When I say this, I do not necessarily mean that I draw for monetary gain, instead I mean drawing is something I have always done. It is non-negotiable. However during times when an individual life seems as fragile as an egg kept on a narrow ledge, I cannot but ask myself about the relevance of what I do. Shouldn’t making art be the least of my priorities? During these times of self-imposed isolation, we turn online to find answers, to make a living, to reach out and connect, to numb ourselves of anxieties and to deaden the feeling of pervasive dread that this year has served up; but if we are honest with ourselves, can we call our hours facing a screen as “life”? Is passive activity in front of a monitor something that we have resigned ourselves to call “living”?

As artists we are story tellers. We must express ourselves or implode into black holes and emptiness. But if we want to express then we must constantly fine tune ourselves to feel the myriad currents of emotion coursing through us. As artists we use these currents when we tell our stories so that the voices of our creations echo outward from the self-created islands of our aloneness. What is the catalyst that creates the currents within us which reverberate outward? What are the echoes saying?

It is not the artist’s job to document the life around her and place it before the audience. Rather the artist is a gatherer and translator, someone who has learnt to tap into the language of the environment — situations, incidents, lives, nature, emotions, colour, sounds; an artist taps into the language of living. Creating art asks us, the artist, to listen to the echoes from our soul smothered under the weight of quotidian existence. When an artist creates, she is not producing a product, rather she is creating energy, energy which transmutes into stories which send out tendrils, beckoning its audience to grasp and behold.

Six years ago, as an immigrant, I experienced my first winter in an island on the other side of the world. I was told it was the coldest ever experienced there since 1845. For me straight out of the tropics it was a slow descent into hell where all around me the flowers slowly froze and turned jet black in the icy air, the trees reduced themselves to skeletons and the sky matched the white of the snow beneath my feet. Some mysterious force had turned the desaturate option all the way towards the left leaving me quite suddenly standing alone on that island contemplating the meaning of my existence while life around me seemed to have retreated somewhere unseen. The isolation I felt led to a complete flattening out of hope, spirit and joy. If there were emotions, they were the kind I had never experienced before, they were completely unfamiliar to me.

I recall making this picture above to illustrate how I felt. You might think this illustration is Black and White, but it is colour, the colour that was all around me. And then now, six years later I have realized with incredulity, that I am living through similar strange emotions once again back home in the tropics. Although I am in my own world amid lush trees bursting with colours and song, I could be the person in these words I extracted from a book by Orhan Pamuk which I wrote down in my journal long ago -

See how beautifully he’s painted me, lost in the forest, among the trees, the branches, the grass. As I wait, a wind begins to blow the leaves tremble, one by one, the branches sway. I’m worried. How does the artist’s pen manage to reach so far? The branches bend in the wind and rise again, the flowers grow and fall, the forest swells like a wave, and the whole world trembles. We hear the hum of the forest, the world’s lament. The artist patiently re-creates the world’s lament, leaf by leaf. It is now, as I sit in this windswept forest, that you sense I am trembling with loneliness. If you look even closer, you will see how old that feeling is, to sit alone in the forest, a feeling as old as the world.

It is instinctive for artists to retreat into our metaphorical islands periodically. We do it when we need solitude to create and during times when the world becomes senseless and confusing. We alternate between islands of isolated dreaming and intense activity. We retreat and then we reach out. That is how art is made. While my Winter illustration and Jethro Buck’s painting may be completely different in approaches, they both have aspects in common — they are both echoes of feelings that have coursed through our bodies during phases of existence. They both are expressions drawn out of being alone. Seeing Jethro Buck’s painting, Forest, I recognize the emotions, they are what course through me these days as I sit in self-imposed isolation with the trees at my window offering me camaraderie. In my painting of The First Winter, those who have experienced winter or a deadening of the soul, will recognize a coldness of surroundings and silence of spirit.

In Cherrapunji, India, there are systems of living bridges made entirely of roots, aiding villagers in crossing the many rivers of that land. When the need arises, the villagers create them by guiding the roots of Rubber Fig trees into the formation of bridges. This is an exercise in patience as these bridges take more than a decade to become functional, but once they do, they become stronger over time and some of the older bridges are several centuries old. This harnessing of nature into a necessity which creates connection is an apt metaphor for art, it shows us why art is a necessity and why we must keep creating.

If we look hard and long enough, we will find that every single aspect of human condition has been expressed in the arts, all arts, ever since the beginning of time. The voice of the artist takes root and grows over centuries, connecting the past to the future even as we experience it in the present. The echoes of our stories have always reached outward forming connection and weaving a rich tapestry of experiences much like the root bridges of Cherrapunji, where each succeeding generation of villagers guide the newer roots into strengthening the bridges and creating stronger, richer and more complex connection systems. We ourselves are stories and what has happened to us has always happened before. However what sets each story apart is how we choose to tell it, what we choose to include and what we discard. Tell our stories we must, so that they become a part of the bridges that run through time bringing about the movement of growth and change we want to see in our environment and ourselves. Much like the Living Bridges, our art lives and breathes through us and into those who receive it.

Around us in our world now, questions that could once be avoided sit before our faces in stubborn defiance. Civilization has been ruptured spectacularly decimating our arrogance into an impotence of cowering behind face masks; monstrous heads rear up before us with increasing frequency, murky waters lap closer onto our doorsteps, bodies are burnt in the dead of the night, data is mysteriously wiped into non-existence, dictatorial fists turn levers that slam down laws, dissent is obliterated into frightening chasms of darkness. What do we do? What can we do?

Carmen Maria Machado’s prescient short story Inventory is about life during a pandemic, the narrator writes about her encounters with her various lovers over the span of her life. The pandemic that is slowly eliminating humanity makes its presence felt only on the edges of the story as a low sinister growl. The vein of sadness running through the rhythm of the narration echoes and resonates within the reader. Towards the end of the story, the narrator, possibly faced with the end of her days, retreats to an island, moving away to create, to make inventories of accumulated experiences of her life. She gives us what she has to offer in her story raising waves of unanswered questions within us.

The most enduring and powerful art does not give us lessons or reassurance, rather it disturbs, it gives rise to questions which compel us to probe and acknowledge uncomfortable emotions, it insists we face ourselves. It makes us reconsider our choices and rethink our interactions so that when we in turn resort to the act of creation, there are tectonic shifts that create movement and change and progress.

When I created the picture of The First Winter on that island six years ago, I expressed my emotions as an immigrant at that time. The resulting echoes from that image compelled me to question the stories that I had received in my lifetime up until then, I questioned my status quo, I began to reconsider my choices and I finally released a story I had clung to which was taking me nowhere. I allowed myself to create a new story. I began my journey home.

Whenever I look at the story in my subsequent painting The Return, I am more often than not compelled to ask myself where I am at this point in my life in my picture? Sometimes during moments of uncertainty it seems I have only begun my journey, other times I feel like I have reached the other end and yet other moments I seem to be precariously right in the middle of that tightrope and going nowhere, in between islands, surrounded by echoes reverberating from the souls of all who made this journey before me.

One learns through living that there is no one reality but multiple ones formed from experiences, dreams, imagination, longing and interaction, all of which are truth. In the world of an artist there are no answers in the form of tidy endings, there are only the echoes that arise from our art, at whichever point in our journey it was made. It seems that when I am conscious of the currents of emotion running within me it leads me to make art which asks the right questions and those are the moments when I am seduced further along an eternal living bridge, interweaving myself into the complex, layered richness of the tapestry of life.

~ Essay by Priya Sebastian

© Priya Sebastian
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