Moving Windows
Portraits of Movement. Of men and horizons. Of roots and trees. Of Goddesses and humans.
I once met a man, Mr. Senthil Kumar Jacob, who had worked as a watchman at a tea estate for 45 years. I was lost and he was not. I was walking here for the first time and he had followed the exact same route a hundred thousand times. My gaze strained to see something in particular. His eyes looked around as far as he could see, one deep breath at a time. His fingers tapped the leaves that were ready to be plucked. He too would be leaving this place soon. From endless trails to a little cup. His already brimming dream trying to escape the little cup that he was going to move to. He had done all that he could do here, despite having lost his right hand in a freak machine accident.
‘I was lost in a day dream. I don’t regret them. Day dreams are all I need.’
He ended each day on a stone bench at the hilltop. He had no idea who had put it there, even though it was common knowledge that a large film crew had come and placed it there during a week-long shoot. ‘You were right here,’ said Madhi, our jeep driver, as we sipped on a pale cup of tea in the canteen, interrupted by the loud cleaning of vessels in the kitchen. I saw him many times on the trail, but only got to talk to him at the workers’ canteen. He was alert when he didn’t need to be. On the trail, he barely noticed me.
‘I would remember a film crew being here. Wouldn’t I?’
For a week, we met on the trail. Each time, I looked at him. He nodded slightly and always looked beyond me. On the last day that I was there, I stopped him in his tracks. He had trouble stopping. He looked as if he had overshot his steps and had now run into an invisible fence. I told him I was leaving. He told me he was leaving too. I told him I would come back soon. He said no such thing. He simply sighed. He was nearing retirement.
‘A few days more. No more paper in the calendar left to tear.’
He looked at my camera. I instinctively asked him if I could take his photograph. He stood stiff as he gently covered his right hand with his rain jacket. I imagined his face had grown serious, but then a little smile appeared. I asked him what he was smiling about.
‘If you can take a photo of the entire range of hills, please do.’
The range of hills. A stage for the dance of light and shadow, the racing of clouds and the bursting of rain. He wanted me to take a photo of the range and send it to him. He would frame it in his village. A flat land of paddy crop and thatched roofs. The only thing that stood up was a cracked water tank. Ten feet high with trickling water slipping through the cracks. He would go back to the plains after 45 years.
‘I would take a walk across the farms, make a cup of tea and sit in front of that photo.’
I smiled and I clicked nervously. Fully aware of how unequipped I was to capture his greatest day dream.
The Plumeria flower, especially its cream coloured avatar, seems to find itself in moments that are dream-like to me. I saw it once in a wedding ceremony near Mysore. The bride and groom exchanged garlands made only of cream-coloured plumeria flowers. ‘God’s Plumeria’, they were called in the local dialect. I remained detached to the joy being shared. I was being reminded to witness each moment, as I was the outsider there. The same thing happened during my father’s burial. He rests under a grove of thickly packed wild plumeria trees. I saw white flowers scattered around. Muslims believe that the plumeria flower is immortal because it grows even if uprooted. It is a sign that things live on beyond their time as we understand it. I was yet again detached, thanks to my troubled relationship with my father. I was yet again constantly reminded to witness each moment, as it was my last earthly glimpse of him. These reminders felt like invisible voices in a dream, that nudge you forward. One step forward and they disappear.
I was told of another Plumeria tree, living and breathing for a hundred years, that was to be transplanted from an old compound in Pondicherry to the Botanical Garden in Auroville. The house itself, a grand old structure of more than a hundred years old, was about to be brought down. I thought of Sebald.
‘Someone needs to draw up a catalogue of types of buildings, listed in the order of size, and it would be immediately obvious that domestic buildings of less than normal size - the little cottage in the fields, the hermitage, the lock-keeper's lodge, the pavilion for viewing the landscape, the children's bothy in the garden - are those that offer us at least a semblance of peace, whereas no one in their right mind could truthfully say that he liked a vast edifice such as the Palace of Justice on the old gallows hill in Brussels. At the most we gaze at it in wonder, a kind of wonder which in itself is a form of dawning horror, for somehow we know by instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed from the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins.’
This ruin was not left to fade away, but to see further humiliation in becoming a new soulless structure built in plaster and concrete. Its existence would be soon erased except for memories kept by the hundred-year-old plumeria tree. I stand at a distance from this hundred-year-old tree and look at a lone flower standing, speaking, listening. I wait for a voice to nudge me. To remind me that we are all constantly living out our day dreams.
I had a brief encounter with an artist named Gilij. He seemed to be one who was constantly in the grips of a day dream. Two men whisper to Gilij as he tries to sit still. Their quiet voices make him move ever so slightly. He closes his eyes, bites his upper lip, turns his neck, moves his hands and feet at their specific instruction. I find myself in front of him and he immediately wears a slight smile. If I knew how Gilij would transform over the course of a few hours, I might have said that I saw a careful unwrapping of Gilij as a person just as he was being adorned as a Goddess. Yet in reality, no such thing occurred. I stood mute, capturing footage like any filmmaker might, constantly on edge, afraid to miss important moments in an event I don’t know the order of, missing in the process just about anything meaningful.
Gilij spoke only when spoken to. His shyness soon disappeared in the layers of paint and ornaments placed around his neck. Yet he still didn’t possess the gravity of the Goddess whose form he was supposed to take. Soon, as dusk arrived, a fire was built from dried coconut fronds, two men held each of his arms, a priest led him to shrine of Goddess Bhagavati and a prayer was said with Gilij on his knees. Goddess Bhagavati is the most important deity in the Hindu Kalari Universe. She can be in one moment calm and in the other fierce. In the latter form she is known for her ferocious eyes. Gilij was now to take the form of the Nagakali, a snake goddess whose origins lie in the adornment around the necks of Goddess Bhagvathi and Lord Shiva. Nagakali in her avatar becomes an instrument to churn around one’s neck, from poison to nectar, from all qualities that are destructive to those that nurture life.
There is no one who can place a finger on when the transformation happens, but once it does, it is nothing short of astounding. I was surprised by every turn, jump, sprint and feat of strength that came out of this shy man. Gilij was a classical Carnatic singer by training, yet when asked to sing, his body crumbled like a dry leaf in the wind. No signs of Gilij remained in this frantic performance. Only the priest could tame him with his torch of bursting fire, yet the traditional drum beat drove him to jump up and down again. The crowd moved around him in circles that grew bigger. At the very end, he carried a wooden structure about 15 feet high on top of his head, and he danced as if it were only a turban that was tied tightly around his temples.
The performance ended as suddenly as it began. His head gear was quickly removed, metres away from the heart of the performance. Suddenly Gilij appeared again and nobody recognised him. They walked around him like strangers in silhouettes. Gilij simply stood, his shoulders bent, his eyes looking down at his feet. His lips might have been shivering or singing in a whisper, I could not quite tell.
‘Every movement of a true artist is a unique bhava or feeling’ - Kalari Gurukkal Govindakutty Nayar
As Gilij appeared more clearly and disappeared from the sight of everyone around him, I couldn’t help but think how the Divine is always constructed as one that is belligerent. Or maybe it is only so because the Divine feels imprisoned in a form so contained, so constricted by thought and worry, finding itself in a place where notions of time and space are linear. It is as if it were a moving window placed in the middle of four mostly immovable walls. I wonder if we too are constrained in our perceived notions of our body, and we must try not to define it further, but to make it lose all of its definition. To turn it into a fluid instrument whereby each movement and each stillness is transformed into a unique feeling.