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024 For Him magazine 02/09

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02502/09 For Him magazine

Pieces of me...on kaliedoscopic patterns formed by memories and the birth of art.

When I turned 10, I realized that my cousin, Kiki, a girl, and two years younger than me, was suddenly an inch taller. I was inconsolable. Until a few months ago she had been the ‘little’ one. Suddenly we seemed to have traded places. Mom tried in vain to explain to me that around this age girls tend to gain a few quick vertical inches and stop there, whereas boys continue to grow steadily past that age too, and I would soon be taller than her, just like before. But I wore out my 2B pencils.

It was the twenty-fourth small pencil gash since the last paint job. I pressed my nose against the living room wall and crossed my eyes to see if dad had made the mark in the right place above my head. I struggled to keep my heels from leaving the floor when I stretched, but heels have an uncontrollable inclination to cheat in such situations. The new gash hovered a good half a centimeter above the previous one. I tried rubbing out the lower marks with my ink eraser but the pistachio green paint came off.

When I was seven Calcutta used to be a particular favourite of the Hooghly during the monsoons. The river would swell like a vessel of chai on the boil, and gorge into the veins of the city. Wheels of every kind would jam to a halt, sometimes for days on end. And a nature-enforced holiday spirit would eddy through our lives. Standing in my first floor balcony was like standing on the deck of a slowly moving steamer ship as the flood waters flowed gently past below. Dad would get out the stack of old newspapers with a twinkle in his eye.

In the hope that the bowels of the city would gulp in the excess water, the metal lid of the manhole in the street had been propped open by a bamboo stick. My boat was pulled by the current and disappeared into it. Pappu swam in the middle of the road, trying to catch tiny fish with his bare hands. Mom sliced boiled potatoes and sprinkled salt, pepper and sev on the slices. Dad tore another sheet of newspaper into four and folded me another boat. The headlines read ‘28 die in Hooghly ferry capsize’ and ‘Indira Gandhi to visit today’.

Fresh off the Howrah Mail, Mumbai greeted me with a mid-morning breathless battering as I rode my first local train from Dadar to Goregaon. Home, until now, had been the one place I came back to every evening for nearly 25 years, a place that housed my parents, my bed and my Amar Chitra Katha collection. Suddenly now ‘home’ could be anywhere. Anywhere that would allow me to rest my aching limbs at night. From Bandra to Goregaon East, to Andheri East, to Andheri West, to Borivali to Versova, from a PG to a 1 room kitchen shared with four others, to a shared 1 BHK, to a single mattress in a living room to my own room in a 2 BHK. I shuttled.

He wouldn’t rent the flat out to a Muslim, he said, and asked me for some proof of my identity. There was a hairline crack in the kitchen wall. It looked like a geographical boundary line from some map. One of the paper thin walls sang a throbbing Marathi folk song. Every window let in a different smell. If the doors aren’t latched,

he said, they slam in the breeze. The drain was laced with a cobweb similar to the steel grill covering it. The entrance faced the south-west.

At 18, in a co-ed college, after 12 years spent cocooned in an all-boys’ catholic school, daily priorities start to helplessly flip-flop. Up until now, ‘evening’ had always meant homework, a book, some TV and karate. But suddenly one evening I found myself lying on her bed as she pottered around with her grandfather’s collection.

The orange in its wings licked up in flames as if consuming the green near the tips. The one next to it looked like a pair of painted eyes from some freakish masquerade. They were a row of pretty multi-coloured blotches. She had lain them single file down the centre of her bed. We lay quietly on either side, looking at the procession. The phone rang. She said ‘hello,’ looked at me, smiled into the receiver and added, ‘we’re in bed with butterflies between us’.

I think our lives, and the people and moments that inhabit it, are the source of what we create. And creation is nothing but expression. Images, words, tunes, incidents, faces, colours, smells, feelings, textures leave their imprint on us when we’re not looking. And the ghosts of those imprints haunt us when we put pen to paper, brush to canvas, finger to fret-board, foot to tune or even in a conversation with a stranger on a train. Blurry pieces from our different pasts collide to take on a finely defined whole in the present, to become a piece

of the past again when that minute goes by.

Moments from my past stream in and out of my mind whenever I try to express myself through anything… graphic, verse or film. I don’t always realize it then, but later, much later, a word from a poem I’d written when I was 28 glints with the truth of a moment from when I was 9. An image of a bird in silhouette in blue from yesterday traces its antecedents to a green pet parrot I set free when I was 12. It is in stray silent moments like these that I realize why I need to express myself; to urgently share with the world what is furiously mine.

So my output, my thoughts, dreams and conversations are filled with a happy confusion of pencil gashes on walls, pinned butterflies, floating city lights, paper boats sinking, gaping windows, small hands dug into large mounds of grain, stray comic panels, speech balloons, women in sarees in mirrors, my tall eight year old cousin and

railway station

crowds. And I go through every day adding to the jigsaw and playing with its pieces, emerging with a new picture every time. FHM

Devashish makhija is a Kolkata bred, mumbai based filmmaker, screenwriter, poet and artist. He has worked on films like Black Friday and Bunty Aur Babli. He is currently directing his debut film.

occupying Silence is a coffee table book format collection of 16 full-colour plates of Devashish’s graphic verse that were first shown at Kolkata’s gallery Kanishka. the book is available at leading

bookstores and can be ordered from www.gallerykanishkas.com