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...

  

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

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

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?

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.

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!