for Rhapsody: Story of a Flood

N's idea. He wanted to build a story of a flood around some of Vasudev's copper reliefs. I was thinking of them as land and sea already and also eager to write a story. This is what emerged.

Story of a Flood


I woke up early in the morning and it was raining. Mother said I didn't have to go to school because there was water in the streets. The rain was falling everywhere and all our roads were hidden, shrouded, sunk. Nothing moved except the water falling in fat drops, submerging the city, drowning our dogs.

And still, it wasn't enough. For me. I was jealous of those people in the villages, a flood of their bodies rafting on debris, afloat on their boats. Their boats! What an adventure.

I woke up early in the morning and there was only the sea. The furrows and the farmlands, train tracks, turnpikes and traffic systems - all gone. The house was afloat but empty. The clothesline swelled with sheets and I set sailing down the street.

I had a feeling there were others out there. I heard their voices in the wind, I heard whispers of family and friends and I followed. Across a continent I flowed with the flood, seeing shadows underwater and the faces of the future.

Soon the whispers grew stronger. They tugged at my sails, shook the hand that held the rudder, spoke vainly to the water in an effort to churn it, turn it, to alter my course with a deluge of directions. But the house stood still.

There were no storms. There was no sun. When the water crept in under the door, I knew I didn't have long. I sat on the roof and waited.

Everything was all gone. Uncertain, alone, afraid, empty, I waited. What an adventure.

And then there birds drawing circles in the sky. They were swooping and diving and talking incessantly and laughing and laughing. I must be dreaming. I must be dreaming as the water touched my ankles. I must be dreaming with my arms extended my head afloat. A bird on my head. A voice in my ear. The breath in my body. My body in my bed.

I woke up early in the morning. I woke up. At least, I woke up.

for Rhapsody: on change

More writing inspired by the work of Vasudev. K told us a story about moving to another country and suddenly noticing change in herself and her surroundings many years later, triggered by a letter from an old friend. This one was written as homework for the workshop.

on Change


You look different.
You're exactly the same.
Something's happened to you.
Some of the things we say to each other after time apart.

When I'm close to you, you are much bigger. We are glued together. We sit on each other's shoulders. There is no room between us. There is no room.

So I wedge things between us to get a better view: jungles, buildings, distance, our differences. You do too.

I see you whole now, but I see little of you. There is so much more to see.

Now the land is strange between us. Now the sun above us is changed. The world only turns in one direction.

We cannot meet through the throng. We will have to find another way to each other. I guess we will have to walk all the way around, again.

for Rhapsody: on memory

We were telling each other a lot of stories from childhood with reference to Vasudev's work. It's turned out to be quite a treat that his exhibition is called Recollections, Reconnections. I found an old piece that I wrote during a workshop years ago and reworked it all except the first line.

on Memory


Memories are most treacherous things.

No memory is whole.

They are all bits and pieces, brushed on by feeling, and feeling never stops. And sometimes we forget what we remember, and remake what we’ve forgotten in the remarkable shape of what must have been. And we forget our inventions, or if we invented anything at all because, after all, all memories are true.

And often, memories are all that’s left behind and true or otherwise, they are real, no?

I woke up in a village. Big fields, small farmers, distant trees, clear skies, dirt roads, clean air, common wells, coal ovens, superstitions, robbermen, and lanterns in the night time. It is nothing like that anymore.

My father says I couldn’t possibly remember anything. Impossible, let alone improbable, for a two year old to retain such early sensory experiences. But he never lived there. My mother lived there, and she says nothing.

Some things happen to you before you learn to remember. Leaves, mud, sunshine, dogs barking, cows calling, fruit falling, real darkness, rainstorms, and being alone, buoyed up by the beat of my little feet running, running, endlessly running.

And there is love here somewhere, no? Of the things I've seen and sensed. Of my first burning. Of my mother's fingers. Of being awake. Love is the first thing I remember. I couldn’t tell you anything about it, but it is faithful. It is whole.

The whole in your heart.

for Rhapsody: fragments

A few fragments from my writing based on the work of Vasudev. These were written together but none of them went anywhere. These are the best ideas from that day.

All men are farmers
and all we seed is grown.
Our hands are thrown in every direction
and what is sown,
what is sown is everything.

My face is a fruit of no imagining.
My face is a flower in the future
peeled away like paper
fluttering in the wind but still not free,
like loosened leaf, like boyhood,
like birds, bicycles, and balloon rides.

I didn't put messages in a bottle and throw them to the sea, but I made little paper boats just perfect for puddlewater. No words. Just the impressions of my fingers. And the rains took my fingered fleet sailing through the gutters and down the drains, to where is unknown. And I would like to know what is shown. What is shown?

for Rhapsody: My mother's face

The second piece I wrote based on Vasudev's work. There's a recurring image in his work foregrounding the face of a woman surrounded by a host of little men. This is a true story, if that makes any sense.

My mother's face


My mother's face is in the moon:
the pictures of her young face are misplaced.

Grown men are weak-kneed in her memories:
heavy-handed and invertebrate, they
admired her every dimension, they
loved her eyes, her hair, her shoulders, they
scribbled passionately about her limbs;
late nights they sent her out for cigarettes.

She carried long distances in old shoes:
 her grandmother did not call my grandmother
 by her name, but by those of her children;
 even though she rescued her from an empty house,
 from kind strangers in a new country built
 on fine principles.
 She lived in a shed with newspapers piled
 with old food and news stories preserved
 in jam jars and tin cans.
 As a young woman they beat her because she could read.
 In her old age she spoke to the ghosts in the bamboo grove.
 She listened to the rain on her corrugated iron roof.
 She told her granddaughters secrets of real love
 to be kept from the world of men:
  Men are grim and grusome callous.
  Sailors, shopkeepers and tax collectors, they
  are beggars, hounds and dreamers who devour dreams.
  Merchantmen in the ocean of us, seamen on our surface
  in love with mermaids and the reflections in the water.
  Buccaneers of our bounty but terrified by our depths.
  Why else do you think they murder whales?
  The most you can do is keep them clean.
  Wash their hair, clip their toenails and clean their ears,
  so when their time comes, and come it will,
  you can let them sink without fear of pollution.

My mother's mother told me stories to keep me safe.
She made masks for my baby face, shaped my eyebrows,
pinched my tongue to teach me manners,
cooked my meals to make me strong, and
she grew older than she should have in front of my eyes.
She forgot my name eventually, even though it was important to her.
She taught me how easy it is to unravel.

She taught me there is no measure
to how much my grandmother loved me.

for Rhapsody: SUICIDE

Rhapsody & Other Movements is a performance based around the works of Vasudev, most particularly his recent work, built for his exhibition Recollections, Reconnections at the Lalit Kala Akademi galleries this month. I like working like this: borrowing inspiration from other work and writing serially along different themes. This is the first piece I wrote based on his work. It's a fairly literal interpretation of one of Vasudev's sketches based on the poetry of AK Ramanujan. Ramanujan's poem is titled 'Suicide', as is Vasudev's sketch, as is this poem.

Suicide


this is me at the bottom of the pond
you have forgotten, with the mud and little fish.

i wish you could see me,
at the bottom of the pond,
looking up now at the arses of ducks,
at the stooping drooping dogs and flowers,
and the village girls undulating above the surface.
oh, how I miss them all when they go away.

i can see the roof of the temple from down here,
freshly painted with glossy, weatherproof colours
that will stand the test of time
better than all the other freshly painted times.

i don't hear much down here
but every ripple is an utterance,
a story above me
in music and footsteps,
the wind on the water -
all that does not penetrate here
to me, my arms around my
beautiful bitter boulder.

and i do not grow older, no,
away from bird song and fox calls,
chicken scratchings and dances,
dark skin, dry sweat and drunkenness;
because

i carried this weight into the water,
when i thought i was leaving it behind.