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.

The Portrait of a Lady

Ma always wanted to put up lots and lots of portraits on the wall. Family pictures, the photographs from her wedding, the photographs that chronicle the years of my childhood, our individual and collective insanity on the wall. Captured with a borrowed camera, for we couldn’t afford our own. Now that the wall is ready, she wants it to bear testament to our years spent mourning the loss of a wall big enough for all her miseries. My brother complains that he doesn’t want to be a part of this display of madness. He wants to be an address written on a piece of paper hurriedly, and kept somewhere, forgotten, and always thought about. He wants to be the carefully misplaced memory, marking its presence through its absence. He wants to eat, sleep, die, live, exactly in that order. And not be chronicled. Leave a blank square for me, he tells me.

Ma is the chronicler of the family. I go through her diary of recipes and decide to bake biscuits as she fusses over the golden wall. She takes her measurements and I take mine. This green diary has all the recipes she has never tried. Wrote them down and forgot about them. One must write recipes, Ma says. And leaves it at that. As if I don’t need to know why one must do such things. I don’t ask but I bake the cookies instead and she chooses her photographs telling me stories about them. This lipstick that I am wearing belonged to a friend of mine, she tells me. I borrowed it for my wedding. This saree your Maushi bought me for her wedding. Look at me in this one, standing in front of the dressing table your Atya gifted us on our wedding. I am looking at myself in this picture. She is looking at herself. She always is. The cookies are done. And so is her selection. Brother has been included in the pictures. He doesn’t get his piece of square space. He gets a frame instead. My picture has me and Baba smiling at each other. And a few others from the time in Kodaikanal. Fog, homemade chocolates, a disgusting beanie on my head, and me swaying, with one hand holding a ridiculously thin tree; this picture nauseates me. A picture of me in Ma’s saree. A picture where my brother is dressed as Buddha. One where Baba’s broken teeth can be seen. And one where we can just see Ma’s face with Baba’s lurking in the background. When the guests come visiting, they will be greeted with so many faces, each one different from the other. Some friendly and some hostile. The wall is a map. It is flat globe. It is loud and it is garish. It is disputed property. The ones standing in front of the wall, will see their reflections on the frames, and not just the faces occupying most of the frame. When the occupants of this golden wall die, and the frames are pulled down, brother will get his square space. After all the happy, hostile, wanted, unwanted faces are pulled down, the wall will be a cemetery.

Mirror, Mirror on the Wall

I am a new addict to lipstick. I wear dark shades that can’t be hidden. I wear shades of red. I wear it, I look at myself in the mirror, then wipe it away. Then I wear it again. On days I sit next to my water dispenser wearing my brightest of red lipstick. My arms dangle mid-air, resting partly on my knees that are bent in the shape of a steep bridge. That spot is neither in my kitchen nor in my living room. I occupy that space. In that square of a mirror hanging at acute angles on the wall of my room, where dust particles fight for space with every new visitor, I fix my make-up. Grandmother who died a few days back finally came in my dreams today. She was dead in the dream. My grandfather on the news of wife’s death committed suicide in the dream. He was as old as I remember him. He chose a corner of their room to hang himself. Not the old fan for him.

I saw him suspended from a beam. Making a strange angle with the wall. I couldn’t decide if it was acute or obtuse. No one was in a hurry to bring him down. The mirror on the wall showed me his swinging body, swaying with such peace and such grace like it had all the time in the world. The dead after all are in no hurry. Not my grandmother, though. She reminded me to grind the elaichi to get a better flavor in my chai. The woman was a horrible cook. It was funny that she should come in my dream after dying and remind me of grinding the elachi. Properly, she said. Properly, I repeated. In the meanime grandfather continued his dance with the angles. Acute-Obtuse. Obtuse-Acute. The mirror knows everything. My lipstick today is maroon. The stick is broken I use my index finger to dab it evenly. The mirror where grandfather continues to sway makes space for me. I wear my lipstick. It doesn’t go with any of my clothes. So I remove all of them. My breasts have dried up scars from all the boils I burst like water balloons. My stomach has stretch marks from the belt of the school uniform which was always a little too tight. My underarms are dark and unshaven. I darken my lipstick. Smile at grandfather and occupy my space. The way I am supposed to. My square inch of vacant, empty space. Right next to the water dispenser.

 

Manjiri Indurkar writes from New Delhi. Pursuing an M.A. in English Literature from Ambedkar University, Delhi, she is the founder and editor of web-based literary and cultural magazine AntiSerious. She has been published in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, The Newer York, Motherland Magazine, Kindle Magazine, The NorthEast Review, The Four Quarters Magazine, and The Bangalore Review.