Memento Mori

 

Everything ends in a photograph. And everything exists to end in a photograph.

Texture Paint

People don’t colour their walls anymore. It’s all about the texture, the way it needs to feel when you touch it. I often wonder why one would want to touch the paint when it is only meant to be smelled, and maybe, seen. I touch the golden paint on the one wall of an otherwise white room. It feels uneven, the painter has done a shabby job my brother complains and I agree. There is no clock in this room, I need to buy a new one. But with the one thousand and seventy six clocks available to purchase from, I don’t like any. I miss the old, ugly, yellowed with time clock, whose hands were as slow as this city, and numbers as faded as my memories. This is a smaller room, but it has a sense of space that the bigger one did not have. This one looks bigger from the inside, smaller from the outside. Somewhat like us, don’t you think?

When the wall art is ready we will decorate it, the laughing Buddhas Ma is so fond of will have a place to live again. Ganpati statue encrusted with fake gemstones will be dusted, and the cycle I bought at a mela with my first salary will once again find parking space. Things will find their own place. And their own space. Meantime the gold of the wall shines in its ugliness. I feel like if the insides of my skin are peeled and washed they will shed the exact colour. The color of rot and filth. The paint is years away from chipping. Ma has plans with it. She could draw something on it. Flowers and leaves. That flow in an almost serpentine manner. Her favourite pattern. Or she could put up a painting. The fake MF Hussain being sold at LifeStyle store. They know everything we need. From oxidized flowers to ornamental photo frames. From curated tribal art work to calendars that would be collector’s item, their edges painted gold, with pictures of women too busy in the humdrum of daily life to care about the calendar. All this decoration on the wall. Ma used to be too poor and too short of walls for any decoration in the house that she grew up in. In the house of fat spiders and thin people, the walls were painted with the yellowness of jaundice. That house doesn’t exist anymore. It is a shopping complex now. The yellowness remains, however. On our golden wall Ma wants to put up everything that doesn’t smell of poverty. That doesn’t resemble the patterns misery can so exhaustingly carve. This wall has been texture painted to reflect the images of its passerby or its visitor. This wall that the painter did a shabby job with is where Ma writes fiction. This wall is a liar and a storyteller. This wall is the chronicler of things yet to happen.