The Tree at the Limit

By Aamer Hussein

The woman, brown haired, fine lines around brown eyes in a face that’s smiled a lot. Brush in hand, body in a stained painter’s smock, turning away from the window. Tree shapes through the glass, branches outlined against a grey afternoon sky. Bare branches of tall trees. At the lower left corner you sense the presence of a canvas you can’t see. The colours are mild, like the back of a fallen leaf.

That’s the first miniature.

In the second painting, the same scene, with a slight shift to the left. You see the large canvas she’s been painting. It’s a seascape. Glinting water, platinum on blue; perhaps an estuary. Boats with red and white striped sails.

There’s a slight smile on her face.

The third painting is of a window. You see the sea through white gauze curtains.

The first two miniatures are called Marya, Painting.

The third is called Boats in Karachi.

The exhibition takes place in an old palace by the sea. From one of the windows, you see a scene similar to one depicted in the painting.

From the exhibition catalogue: 

Marya Mahmud was born in Rome in 1917. She studied art privately. She met the historian Mazhar Mahmud in 1937, probably in Paris or Berlin. They were married in a religious ceremony a year later and travelled all over India during the last years of the Raj. Marya began to paint scenes as she saw them. Professor Mahmud was an ardent nationalist and Marya, an anti-Fascist in her native country, matched his fervour in her adopted land. In 1946, a year before Independence, they moved to Lahore where under the influence of Chughtai she began to paint scenes from legends and from history. In 1947, the Mahmuds moved to Karachi where Marya entered the most prolific period of her painting.

The fourth miniature is of a woman’s naked back; the canvas cuts her figure off just below her hips. She’s lifting her hair off her neck with one hand; the other hand holds up a mirror. She’s obviously balancing on one foot, as the other is raised, its heel grazing a buttock. You can see her profile in shadow. It’s the woman from the tree paintings.

Through the window, the sea’s a deep blue field, even though it’s night. You can see a white waxing moon in the night sky. Stars are reflected in the waves. They look like yellow fish.

In the fifth, again a slight shift in perspective: seascape, window, woman and a canvas in view. It’s a painting of the woman taking a pause from painting trees.

The two paintings are called Missing the Sea 1 and Missing the Sea 2.

Between two sequences of paintings there are walls, festooned with photographs. Marya, young, before she changed her name; she was still called Maria Maddalena Serra. Marya on her wedding day with her husband, both in traditional bridal dress. Marya, in some Indian city, in a sari. Marya painting, cooking, on a bicycle, on a march, at a reception, meeting the Shah of Iran, meeting Nasser, Nehru. Marya, older, in Europe. There are photographs of the houses Marya lived in: Karachi, Rome, London, Cambridge.

From a review of the exhibition:

Marya’s Oxford-educated husband, the renowned historian Mazhar Mahmud, wrote a controversial book in 1959. It was called Aspects of Myth and Legend in Islamic Society. In it he questioned the literal existence of angels, saying the Quranic word for angels didn’t denote supernatural creatures with wings but only spiritual impulses trans-mitted to man from divine sources. The iconography of angels in later Islam was inherited from the churches and from Zoroastrian sources.

Lucifer, too: in the Holy Book he was a jinn who refused to bow to the newborn Adam, and was exiled from the Kingdom. But as he left he asked God to let him tempt mankind and give them the test of faith. Thus in some medieval legends and poems the Devil becomes God’s faithful creature, a fallen angel, banished from heaven for the sin of pride, whose mission is to sift bad men from good and select the best for God. In some of the great poet Iqbal’s poems, Lucifer is both adversary and admirer. But in the Book the Devil is not the Great Enemy. He’s only a whisperer and a tempter, a creature of fire, not of the light that angels are made of; a character with no power of his own and possessed of only the power that men invest in him.

‘Papa left Karachi in 1961 and Mamma went with him,’ their son says, in an Italian documentary made in the artist’s ninetieth year. It’s showing on a monitor, with earphones appended. ‘Papa felt the climate wasn’t right for his book and there were rumblings from the orthodox parties. In those more tolerant times it was only a frisson but he knew he’d overstepped the mark when a critic from the other side accused him of denying the power of angels. He was told he was to be transferred to a ‘hardship’ posting in the Gulf and he thought the time had come to work abroad. He wanted to carry out his research freely. They went together to Rome, where he worked on his book on the martyred mystic Hallaj, who some called a heretic. When an offer came to teach in Cambridge he left his government job and they set off for England. He would never have called himself an exile, but he thought he couldn’t write the kind of books he wanted to, so he was in a way in self-exile. But he felt at home anywhere near a vast library, a group of intelligent students, a colleague or two to talk to – and in Cambridge he had a Fellowship and his old friend Dr Giles Hollis, with whom he was going to write a book about forgotten heretics and schismatic Sufi sects. Mamma wasn’t happy away from Karachi. She painted rarely and when she started to paint again her work was so bleak.’

The sky through the window is misty. Two treetops rise above the haze, in a violet space of sky: one’s tall, the other shorter. No leaves on either. It’s a winter scene. The frames of the windows are heavy, dark: painted with more detail than the mist, the haze, the treetops, the branches. The miniature is called The Library Window: Cambridge. There is no date.

‘Reminds me of a pair of figurines I had on top of my TV in New York,’ someone says. ‘A God and a Goddess. He was really tall and she was little like that tree. I think they were from Bali. Then you know I came back from holiday and found one of them gone? The little one, the lady! Obviously the cleaner just dropped it and swept it away.’

Scorpions in the desert sand. Cactus trees in an empty city street. Strange-shaped skulls, bones on empty beaches. A purple-skinned woman with three heads and three star-nippled breasts. An ephebic boy dancing with a dinner-jacketed skeleton. A woman, naked, staring at a long wild cat with a humanoid face.

Charcoal sketches. Paintings blanched of colour.

These are the paintings from England that she’s best known for today.

‘But who has curated the exhibition?’ someone asks in a shrill tone as they move from the stark surreal canvases to jauntily coloured pictures of folk figures from the fifties: ‘Why isn’t it chronological? Surely these are earlier pictures?’

‘It’s thematic and generic,’ her companion says. ‘Can’t you see? These are Marya’s watercolours.’

A deft, lightly-coloured sketch of a man kneeling, his bleeding head held in his hands. In the background, hazy figures of a throng. It’s called The Stoning of the Heretic, 1960. You can recognise a resemblance to her husband’s features in the man’s, particularly his acquiline nose, but maybe that’s just the eye’s imaginative licence.

‘Papa and Mamma had never officially separated,’ her daughter says. ‘He just began to grow away from her. He spent time in Iraq and time in the States with Dr Hollis. Mamma would take the ship to Karachi and spend months here. I was teaching art at a girls’ school and then I married and got pregnant. My brother Murtaza was working in Canada. The old house in Clifton, with its view of the sea, was rented out and she didn’t like PECHS, the suburb where I lived. Too far away from the sea! Then Papa followed Hollis to Columbia on a year’s research trip and she just lingered on in the Cambridge flat, painting those desolate scenes. But then when my second child was on the way she said she wanted to move back to Karachi, for at least a year. She said that as she stood on a railway platform waiting for the London train she’d seen a falling leaf whirl by: it fell at her feet, a dead thing, all withered and crumpled – and she knew she couldn’t take another cold season. Though she hated flying, she took a plane back to Karachi in a matter of days. She took calligraphy lessons and held drawing classes at home. She attended exhibitions but mostly stayed away from Karachi’s other painters. Later, she taught art and French at a mixed school and later still she worked at the University. She moved back to the Clifton house and often went for long walks, collected sea shells. My brother moved back to Pakistan in 1963 and Mamma went with cultural delegations to China and Central Asia and Egypt but she never stayed away from Karachi for any length of time.’

Through the library window, you see snowflakes, whirling: but look again and they’re interspersed with leaves. Or they might all be leaves. The snow on the ground is a carpet of leaves.

Look again and the leaves seem to be tossed on the waves of a
turbulent sea. There’s a near-absence of colour that intensifies the greyish-white of sky, the deep brown of trunks, the silver-white of flake and leaf-carpet and sea.

In the catalogue there’s a detailed enlargement of a leaf.

The miniature is called The Tree at the Limit.

From the exhibition catalogue:

The miniature alludes to a legend of Sidrat ul-Muntaha, the tree in paradise that marks the limit. It is said to bear as many leaves as there are people in the world. Each leaf bears the letters of a name. In the middle of the month of Shaban, the eighth month of the year, the tree shakes and sheds the leaves on which are written the names of those who will die in the coming year.

The exhibition opened on Marya’s ninetieth birthday. She will not attend in her wheelchair but there’s a message she’s recorded on film.

It’s November, 2007. There’s a slight breeze and the sea is calm.

‘The strange thing is, that Mamma made that picture before he died in  1964,’ her son says in the documentary. ‘He was in Iraq, with Hollis; he’d promised to come to Karachi from Iran after visiting Baghdad, Basra and a couple of places in Azerbaijan. No one knows where they were going, or why the plane crashed in Baluchistan. There were stories of sabotage and spying but there’s no likely truth to any of them. The strange thing is, that Mamma made that picture as if she knew…’

The last miniature in the exhibition is also the first example of Marya’s new phase: a piece of calligraphy. A leaf seen through glass, framed by a window: a retake of the leaf-detail you saw earlier, but painted in a dense gold. Look carefully and its veins are composed of Arabic letters. The catalogue tells you they spell her husband’s name.

The painting is called A Leaf. It’s on the cover of the catalogue.

 

“The Tree at the Limit” originally appeared in the anthology Still (Negative Press London, 2012).

Aamer Hussein was born in Karachi in 1955 and has lived in London since the 1970s. A graduate of SOAS, he has been publishing fiction and criticism since the mid-1980s. He is the author of five collections of short fiction, including “Insomnia” (2007), and two novels, “Another Gulmohar Tree” (2009) and “The Cloud Messenger” (2011). He has also edited an anthology of writing from Pakistan called “Kahani” (2005). He is Professorial Writing Fellow at Southampton University.

Featured Artwork by Sara Sultan.