Presentation : FN Souza: 'Uneasy on the Eye'

My engagement with FN Souza's art practice!


The talk takes the aesthete through Souza's 'Life of the Mind' : intersections of art, philosophy, psychology and science.

At the book launch: Full Disclosure - Anthology by Manohar Shetty

Poetic meditation and conversation with Manohar Shetty

A Poet Comes Clean - Thoroughly enjoyed the meditation & ultimately the literary dialogue with Manohar Shetty on his latest anthology "Full Disclosure"

A Poet Comes Clean

To read a collection of works of a poet is akin to reading his personal diary. Such is the experience when you read Manohar Shetty’s anthology of poems in his new book ‘Full Disclosure’. The collection (300 odd pages of heightened modern verse) contains eight volumes of previously published poems and a handful of recent poems. This publication is special, as much for the accessibility of a large part of Manohar’s work, as is his trajectory from the early 80s to present times. Covering a span of four decades, one finds Manohar evolve from matters of love, environment and home that trouble the young mind to more geriatric themes of ageing, loneliness and death.

The introduction is by the eminent late British poet Landeg White, who begins his comment with the following lines: “To watch Manohar Shetty take the podium at a poetry reading is instructive. Previous poets have left the audience soporific, but when Shetty begins reading, they spring to life. There’s just something in the authority of the diction and rhythm that immediately compels that this is genuine stuff.”

Remarkable in their steadfastness, Manohar’s poems seek the immediate and the personal. The microcosm of his intimate space, morphs into the universal in the poems. Bruce King (a towering figure in modern literary criticism) calls Manohar’s poems art forms. In his book ‘Modern Indian Poetry in English’ he writes - “his poems bring to light otherwise unshaped, often inarticulate, deeply introspective feelings.”

The hallmark of a poet is that he lives a life subsumed in reality and mines simple truths from it; enveloped by solitude so profound that he has the facility to hold a magnifying lens to the nooks and crannies of the surrounding world. At this Manohar is artful as he discerns the arriviste and the insouciant in his vicinity as also psychological shadows of prosopopoeia ‘for the condemned man in his cell’ or the menace of death that ‘grows in your coffin like a toenail.’

‘Guarded Space’, his first book of poems begins with ‘Fireflies’. Manohar deftly juxtaposes innocence and experience and echoes William Blake’s poems ‘Songs of Innocence and of Experience’. Gay fireflies like ‘flashing streamers’ or ‘wavering lanterns’ ‘stare like luminous dials’ when bottled by children. ‘Worried by coarse hands, the walls of glass’ they soon ‘wilted to lifeless specks’. The child poet didn’t feel much then - a small loss of a ‘boy’s ornament’.

But now,

Travelling my daily groove

In the hunt for food and habitat,

I remember their trapped blank lights.

In ‘Legacy’, a sheaf of love poems, Manohar dwells upon the man-woman relationship – a miasma of conflicting emotions, where love mingles with lust, filial relationship, sexual violence, hate and lacerations. These lines from ‘Foreshadows’ delineate the first flush of tender love, enmeshed with lust.

Waiting for the shy click of heels

on the stairs, I watch a deep

forest rise from my hands

to be soon enmeshed by lust and devouring tendencies.

A faint smell of musk enters

as I lope across the wall

My mouth exposes hungry tusks

and hands reach out like paws…

And then ‘Moored’ in a quintessential Souza-esque style of painting couples, does them in; the chafe, graze, scratch, rasp… 

They lie tied to swirling beds.

Toss in the restless darkness.

Cupped brows chiselled

For movement. They

Lurch closer, bodies chafe

And whisper, wince at each

Touch of the wind.

Shifting the lens to the brilliant craft of the poet - the marked economy, understatement and visual shape of the poems. The form is stanzaic, and lines appear to have regular length except for a few exceptions. Intermittent use of internal rhymes imparts rhythm, and rarefied poetic diction lends richness to the verse. The reader is compelled to reach for the dictionary, to reinforce the syntax and mot juste in his poetry. His metaphors are a delight to perceive and assimilate. They linger with the reader long after the poems have been read and put away.

Ants

Bodies like puffed rice,

Jaws grinding busily,

The swaying swollen heads

Lifting in flanked procession

The palanquin of flesh.

Animal poems form a large part of Manohar’s canvas. It’s interesting to behold that the technique is a synthesis of DH Lawrence and Ted Hughes, two major English poets who used animal imagery in their works to comment on the human condition. Ted Hughes wanted to write about the ‘crowness of the crow and the foxiness of the fox.’ Manohar sometimes brings in the mythic and ferocious lens of Ted Hughes to bear upon his animals. At other times, he uses a softer note, depicting them in their natural forms much like DH Lawrence.

Sting

The honeycomb is what

We are, an amphitheatre

Of geometric cells

Droning to an

Audience of one—

Head swaying like a wand,

The imperious queen

With a sweet tongue

Listening in, wings

Rippling in applause,

And killing us off

One by one.

Praying Mantis

her face

A swaying

Equilateral

Triangle like an

Alien’s, her

Panoramic

Quizzical eye

Rolling round for

A suitable partner.

His progression is structured and not necessarily linear. In no time an image that he begins with offers unconventional emotion through association. If ‘The faces drifting like apparitions’, has connotations of the precise imagism of Ezra Pound; ‘His face etched against the decay that rose and crammed the entire mirror’ leans towards Oscar Wilde’s, Picture of Dorian Gray. In his poem ‘Floorshow Bombay’ – ‘Smoke-screened sighs escape/From the redly-lit audience when she bends/Crabwise instead’, becomes a Mario Miranda painting and ‘Powdered labourers wait in a queue’, a Raghuvir Singh photograph. These are just some of the many examples of synaesthesia at work is his poems.

In the footsteps of Nissim Ezekiel, ‘Lexis Local’ is the poet’s exploration of evocativeness of Indian English idiom in poetry. Landeg is so taken in by the sound of it; he encourages Manohar to continue this experiment where the focus of attention is not the accent and stress but the entire syllabic length.

For Emily and Mahess it was,

As they are saying, love at first sight.

Self–portraits are revelatory, highly instructive and intimate. Human relationship to mirrors rides a layered love/hate crest and trough wave-like pattern. But, Manohar’s lens remains steadfast and clear on self, through elevated and despairing life strokes. His humility and introspective spirit is ferocious, pinning down tints and fractures alike.

In my drinking days, I never slept,

Only passed out and woke up

My eyes red as Mars, my head

A rattling alarm clock, amnesiac

His later poems smell of nostalgia, ‘when Macintosh was a raincoat and email a shade of blue. Inkpot, quill and curlicue longhand’ the ubiquitous writer’s companions. Fondly he recalls black/berries picked up on/a remote forest trail.’ He laments the obscurity of real scholars today contrary to the facility of the click of a mouse, which makes a dozen stand tall.

I bow sadly to my young

Charges and their instant knowledge

Borrowed with a simple click

Of a button from a universe

So ably charted and empirically

Established by my peers

And their prophetic wisdom.

Ensconced in deep thought he then begins a meditation on old age, a heavier step and a presence linked to absence. A deliberation not born of anger, injustice or pulsating fervours but slow observation –and a fierce scrutiny. The poet dwells on different ways of dying and is bewildered by the syndrome of people passing away, ‘without so much as a, take your leave.’

Blown away by Camus

And Neruda and on the road with

Ginsberg and Kerouac

Now his heartbeats are the falsetto

Of a goods train on a creaking

Bridge over a river rank with

Debris.

Cosy, intimate conversations with himself and his first family continue interspersed with birdy, snaky and spidery dialogue. Imbuing his verse with poetic fallacy, Manohar interprets the meaning of nature bringing ever new perspectives into folds of human comprehension. “Poets are natural born schizoids/And psychoanalysts/Have no answer to them.” His homilies, asides and marginalia presented between long verses are home truths, which jolt the reader with their stinging quality.

I don’t know the meaning

Of such homilies

As united we stand

Or we’re all

Part of a family.

Even the lamb

Is alone in its

Death rattle.

He made Goa his home in the mid-80s but didn’t write poems on Goa for a long time after settling here. With time the alienation abated, he felt better and ‘Returning home after a difficult day’, he wove poems around the Goan landscape, ‘the drifting wisp of thought and image…snatched miraculously from mid-air and made palpable on paper.’

Mining Gallery, Goa

We’re the avant-garde

Landscape designers

Leaving for posterity

A palette of red ponds,

Freshly dug earth

Sculpted into bald hills

And lunar ravines

The ream of new verse at the end of this anthology signifies that heart and hearth will keep fuelling Manohar’s diary writing and he will continue to show his readers the way towards some resolution of their inner scape in relation to reality.

FN Souza's Art Practice

'SOUZA PAINTED HELL': A REVIEW OF HIS LEGACY

https://selma-carvalho.squarespace.com/nonfiction-1/2017/7/26/souza-painted-hell-a-review-of-his-legacy

Souza painted ‘Hell’.  

Sartre said, ‘Hell is other people’, but Souza’s art laid bare the hell inside human beings that makes individual lives hell, which in turn is then visited on other people.

No doubt the world today is mired in war, terrorism and hate. 

Animal instinct versus human intellect has dogged the human race all along its evolutionary history. Human history started with Stone Age man devising methods to overcome his animal nature for better living. Using his brain, man has come a long way. Overpowering land, sky and earth, he has performed unimaginable feats. But the duality of his inner landscape, source of his intellect, as also his irrational energy catches him unawares, rendering him miserable and powerless.

Souza spent his childhood in this house in Saligao, his mother Lilia Souza e Ribeiro's ancestral house, where he was often left in the custody of his grandmother Leopoldina Saldanha Antunes. It was a household dominated by women and Souza felt adrift in it.

The human brain still remains largely unmapped, but illuminating studies by Sigmund Freud, Jean Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and the art of Leonardo da Vinci, Van Gogh, Egon Schiele, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, Francis Bacon and F N Souza is a revelation into the dark recesses of the ‘Walnut’.  

“I have made art my metabolism. I express myself freely in paint in order to exist ...” wrote Souza of his credo as a painter in the 1940s. “When I press a tube I coil. Every brush stroke makes me recoil like a snake struck with a stick. I hate the smell of paint. Painting for me is not beautiful. It is ugly like a reptile …”

The controversial alter ego of Souza pulls and repels in equal measure.

His first persona of a Goan-born Indian artist and a pioneer member of the Bombay Progressive Artist Group (PAG) is regarded well in the art world. He led Indian art after independence and imparted it a modernist idiom. A good writer with a powerful language, he became the spokesman of the PAG. He worked on a manifesto in which he stated, “They wanted to take art away from the sophisticated arty-arty crowd”.

Souza's 'Houses on Hampstead Heath'. These were signature townscapes painted by both the brothers, F N Souza and Lance Ribeiro. They lived in the areas of Hampstead and Chalk Farm in England during the 1950s, and these unpeopled houses with lighted windows were a frequent subject of introspection.

But his sojourn in Britain regressed from being a bright star of the British art scene in the 50’s to an experimental artist mired by scandal and the wrong colour of his skin. “Was the scandal that rocked the art establishment in London in the 60’s one where Souza became a scapegoat for artists' wayward lifestyles or was it racism?” wrote Conor Macklin, the director of Grosvenor Gallery, London, referring to his marriage in 1965 to Barbara Zinkant, just 17 years old at the time. Soon after, Souza migrated to New York and lived long years in obscurity interspersed with few surfacing expositions.

“The 1976 Dhoomimal Gallery exhibition of FN Souza art, inaugurated by the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi sold just one painting by Souza,” says Uday Jain, the director of the gallery. European art critics at best called his art derivative and  Jassawalla lamented, “the near indifference to his death - the mealy-mouthed praise” in an obituary.  

What is it about his painting, that he scaled just a couple of peaks during his lifetime? What makes viewers and art collectors uneasy when confronted by his art ? 

"Unlike other artists, his nudes showed no restraint. We did a specially curated booth at the India Art Fair in 2013, and even then many collectors said they were not comfortable hanging his work at home," says Jain. “No one wanted to hang a painting in their dining room whose figures looked as if they were about to leap out of their milieu and throttle you while you were eating dinner”, said Souza's daughter Shelley.  

No doubt, his work is grotesque, giving a free rein to the beastliness inside humanity. It is this second persona of his, etched in bold dark lines, a flat brush stroke and vivid colours, in distorted nudes and disfigured heads that people reject. It greatly troubles them. 

MF Hussain went on record and called him the most intelligent artist of PAG. He led a life of the mind, completely immersed in writings by Darwin and Freud. He closely studied ancient ‘Indian temple art’ and Western art titans of the Renaissance and Baroque period.

“Good writers, even if they show every variety of human depravity, are still good human beings,” said Virginia Woolf. Applying the paradigm to artists, then Egon Schiele, Francis Bacon, Pablo Picasso and FN Souza were creative minds who lived more than other people in the presence of reality. Though their personal lives were mired by socio-moral controversies, they culled from life and circumstance what  others overlooked, curbed, or punished and communicated it in their art as best as they could.

This kind of art seems to perform a covert operation on the senses; one sees more intensely afterwards; the world stripped of its hypocrisy and given a more intense life. People see their psyche mirrored in the disfigured morphology of a ‘Souza Head’. His ‘Passion Series’ exposes punishment, injustice and cruelty behind altars of worship. His works on women echo Schiele’s female forms - no more demure and downcast – they mirror the psychological outlook of a masculine human mind.

Souza’s ‘Passion Series’

Inside the Mae de Deus Church in Saligao. This would have been Souza's first brush with Christianity. He was baptised in this church. The richness of its interiors no doubt would inspire his Passion art.

Brought up in a Catholic family; he was exposed to Christian iconography from early  childhood. When he moved to Europe in August 1949, he saw the grand scale of art and sculpture mirroring Christian religious myths. He went on to paint the complete ‘Passion Series’ from the ‘Agony of Christ at Gethsemane’ to ‘Christ at Emmaus’. The critically acclaimed painting ‘Good Friday at Goa’ also forms a part of this series. “Souza died on ‘Good Friday’ and he got the pain and agony of crucifixion”, says Julian Hartnoll, art dealer and Souza’s contemporary.

Souza etched Jesus not as a divine figure, but as a human - fearful, sad and anguished. He made the scenes palpable with tragedy and trauma. People can identify with the tragedy, based on their own experiences in life. ‘Art reflects life, life reflects art’ paradigm brings them closer to Christ’s story. God is no longer distant, divine, and majestic. He is like us. He suffers, His spirit fights with His weak flesh. He goes through torment and battles to rise above His emotions, to meet His destiny. Here besides the other ‘Passion Artists’ of the 20th century, parallels can be drawn with the religious paintings (Christ riven with thorns and nails) of Bernard Buffet, whose fame dipped in the 50s’ as Souza’s rose to acclaim.

On the other hand, Souza’s paintings also indicate human apathy and cruelty. As Plato said, the analogy with Christ is that the best amongst us, the wisest, the noblest, the purest, the most righteous, we put to death.

Souza Heads

A Souza 'Head' on display at the Grosvenor Gallery, London, 2012.

Souza’s ghoulish heads go back a long way in artistic history to Leonardo da Vinci’s mutant heads. The renaissance artist who constantly ‘doodled heads’ to comprehend the irrational in there. A raging storm prevails - the psychic terror, dread, fear – its dark – the unknowable. Uncertainty, aggression and lust born out of this unconscious scape drives men to violence and cruelty.

Francis Bacon’s ‘heads’ are legendary. Diego Velázquez's Portrait of Innocent X and three heads at the base of crucifixion are examples that create a context for Souza’s heads – be it in his ‘Passion Series’ or self-portraits. His sketch ‘Head (Angst)’ 1968, embodiesalienation and anxiety echoing the existentialism and absurdism of Sartre and Camus in post-war world.

Souza’s ‘Futuritic/Mutant Heads’ may also have been influenced by his study of the American Scientist, Sanford Redmond’s thesis of ‘Nature in an Altered Perspective’. The scientific climate in the 60s to the 80s (spaceflight, landing on the moon, study of DNA) greatly impinged his mind – “It progressively turned me upside down and inside out.” (F.N. Souza, Diary, 4 June 1984).  

Thereby nature became his ‘Sole Principle, the principle of Life itself.’ His narrative became allegorical, imaginative and expressed altered energy patterns in head and body morphology. Hesynthesized ancient Hindu Sankhya Philosophy with Modern Scientific Theory. Further his sketches (especially the later chemical drawings) seem to indicate evolvement of the human head from ‘chaotic mass’ to ‘alternative energy patterns’.

Souza’s Figurative Art  

Souza’s deconstructed  images  are controversial and deny its viewers a precise  interpretation. Bitterness, misogyny and masochism bind his couples in an agonizing dance. He explores the sadistic play at work in these so called clichéd happily-ever-after love unions. The pain and torment explicit in the facial expressions and body language of the figures is indicative of the inner struggle with ego and demonic sexual energy.  

However, there is no denying the fact that the irresistible, irrepressible and incorrigible Souza, began his career by sketching his mother and himself in the nude in different episodes. His nudes were revoked by the public from the very beginning. The Bombay Art Society exhibition (1949) displaying his nude self-portrait was jeopardized by a protest. What people associated with shame, disgust, guilt and sin was being displayed in a bold colourful palette on his canvas. It was highly provocative and aggravating to the senses of a people brought up on a certain value system.

Here a comparison with Egon Schiele’s figurative art work would be most appropriate. His twisted body shapes etched in expressionistic brushstrokes relayed intensity and raw sexuality. Schiele, too, began with nude portraits of family first - of himself and his younger sister, Gertrude. Like Souza, he had been brought up in a family of women and was very close to his sister. His brushstroke is radical, and sketches open sexuality of human form with confidence. It’s as if he recognizes this potential energy very well, and paints it the way he perceives it, its power, eminence and despair.

Similarly Souza venerates sexual language of men and women in his portraits. His earlier nudes are voluptuous and erotic like the figurines in Lakshmana Temple in Khajuraho. Presently in light of scholarly studies by Vidya Dehejia and Cristin Mcknight on temple art and Dehejia’s writings, ‘The Body Adorned: Dissolving Boundaries Between Sacred and Profane in India’s Art and ‘Reading Love Imagery on the Indian Temple’, Souza’s nudes acquire an interesting perspective.

Later works of his evoke the posture and style of Lajja Gauri, the Goddess of Shaktism cult, invoked for her auspiciousness, fertility and prosperity. An example in case, the pregnant nude in the painting ‘Birth’ is said to be Souza’s then partner Lisolette who bore him three children.

Souza seems to have internalized Freud and his Theory of Sexuality. There is a frontal thrust on the libidinous drive of humans in his work. Souza lived for the autonomy of art: 'A true artist can never be pressurized by society. His compelling art shirks off all pressure, except the pressure of Art. The main purpose of the artist is to evoke an elevated response. Then only is the work meaningful and not a daub.'  

His relentless energy fuelled and fired him to lay nature bare in all its truth. Many a times his works made the faces of women recede, and made their sexual body parts prominent, which in itself is a vociferous commentary on human perspective on women, as solely sexual subjects. His intense, distorted figurative art first portrays the length, breath and height of human sexual drive, so that knowing what one harbours, one may devise ways of dealing with it best. Moreover, we cannot overlook the fact, that Souza is expressing his own energy, that of the male species. It’s out and out a man’s point of view.

A woman on the other hand may have the same sexual drive as a man, but a major part of it may be mitigated  through the  biological process of childbirth, nursing and nurturing babies. Not to forget her monthly discharge of heat and bloody fluid, which in a natural form dissipates her sexual energy safely. But what of the man who is culturally conditioned to project his masculine self – powerful and forceful with balls of fire - repressing his feminine side altogether. What of him and his reservoir of sexual energy?

Shankar Vedantam puts it beautifully, “Good people are not those who lack flaws, the brave are not those who feel no fear, and the generous are not those who never feel selfish. Extraordinary people are not extraordinary because they are invulnerable to unconscious biases. They are extraordinary because they choose to do something about it.” And Souza’s work completely orients the viewer towards this construct.  

Art of Growing Old

Where the Flowers Still Grow

http://epaper.navhindtimes.in/NewsDetail.aspx?storyid=19574&date=2017-05-28&pageid=1

                                

   Postcards from Kashmir

I went to see ‘Where the Flowers Still Grow’ - a visually vocal landscape of Kashmir by Bharat Sikka, at Sunaparanta Centre for Arts. You see, I was born in Kashmir, and though i didn’t want to go, dreading what I would see, I was drawn to it like a moth to a flame. Yes, I found flowers in a couple of photographic templates but they were minute, on spiked stems, or had fallen  - discoloured, shrivelled and torn, carpeting the earth enmeshed with stones.

The exhibition is inspired by Mirza Waheed’s novel ‘The Collaborator’ which tells the story of a Kashmiri man struggling to understand the past and present, and the sense of self in the ensuing context.  Bharat Sikka visited Srinagar in 2013, and came upon the novel.  Thereafter, he went 3-4 times in the following years, observing, listening and recording a story in his camera.

The exhibition has an eerie feel with no cataloguing essay. Untitled frames hang silently, as if robbed of expression. There is nothing left to say.  In this situation, Bharat’s photographic canvases capture existential Kashmir, exposing remnants of the enveloping violence in the region. It’s an ode to autumn, definitely, but  devoid of any colour.

The first frame at the entrance itself introduces the visitor to the inherent inversion of Bharat’s sublime statement on the state of affairs. The eye comes to rest on the silhouette of a man attired in customary Kashmiri dress with a shawl draped around his upper frame, against a grey mist, his back turned to the viewer. Others show men silently mounted on horse backs, staring fixedly with deadpan expressions. In another, a man stands rooted in a field of spiked tree trunks, hemmed in by the pointed stalks, immovable and imprisoned. An ash-marked bloodied hand subverts portraiture, occupying centre stage in the line.  A Rembrandt shot focuses on a man’s face surrounded by darkness. He is asleep or has he shut his eyes against the light, feeling hopeless?

A deafening silence clothes the entire landscape. Besides the inhabitants, nature too stands a mute witness to the continuing carnage - tree trunks seems eaten away from inside, hollow and disintegrating - their piercing branches sans the green foliage. Conifers stand like sentinels marking the horizon. Sometimes when the grey and black uninterrupted terrain is punctured by a green hill and a waterfall, it appears more an aberration, alienated from the rot everywhere else.

A complete absence of women and children from the frames is marked and forceful, an intentional choice by the photographer. The omission drives the point hard that this is now a ruthless man’s territory - cruel and colourless, where noise of cannon roars loud with no space for sensitivity, nurturing, compassion, innocence, or any other relevant feminine construct.

The gallery space is further haunted by a melancholic musical strain which stems from an installation at the further end of the corridor. It has a Steve Reich quality to it, a persistent beating pulse superimposed by electronic music that takes the story forward. But the impetus doesn’t change anything much on the lighted screen, where thick black clouds loom, moving in pace with the music. Standing in the empty room looking at the screen, the feeling imperceptibly seeps in - the grinding noise of cannon fire in the background and darkness are here to stay. They have become parts of the landscape.

If you pause to meditate within this deprivation, the juxtapositions built by Bharat and further enhanced by curator Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi become voluble. A torn and overused yellow and red  packet of 32” S&W revolver cartridges graces a wall,  a bloodied head of a goat on curled spikes symbolically completes that picture . A dark alcove from a dilapidated house with a zero watt bulb glowing on its wall ,  looks out to frames of bright light.  These and many more pictures are contrasted with the following  - sari hanging on a clothes line in a room, a miniature heart with very hard to read minute lettering – ‘be my valentine’, a postage stamp in the corner of a blank page  with the lettering ‘27^th Pacific Area Travel Association Conference’. The larger than life size of war objects against diminishing motifs of the softer frames is self-explanatory. 

Bharat uses visual metaphors and metonymy to express his personal sightings in the valley of death. He amplifies the war rhetoric with symbols - a wooden cross with a white sack tied to it embeds   the carnage in a much larger historical context. A polished walnut Trojan Horse packs in a punch of conspiracy and betrayal. A double rainbow outlines the mouth of a devouring shark. An empty inverted maroon velvet-lined chest box, becomes a vociferous statement about looted treasure. Ubiquitous chalk-white boulders lining rivers and pathways have acquired a mosaic pattern that on a closer look reveals itself to be dried blood and excreta. A loud speaker mounted on a tripod spews out words which no one seems to hear.

The entire bricolage gives the landscape a museum-like quality, on which we gaze for hours, drawn by muted rage, its ugliness and dismembered power. The greys and blues, indicate a mood of suffering that’s intensified by the red and yellow of the raging forest fire in the background, or is it a burning pyre? Predatory birds appear and contradict the non-existent livestock.

Bharat conveys the final blow with the showcasing of postcards from Kashmir in a customary glass-cased window. Nostalgia hits hard, for instead of pictures of colourful ‘shikaras’  on Dal lake, brightly clad women in ‘phirens’, tall handsome men adorning Kashmiri topee, gardens full of gorgeous Chrysanthemums and Dahlia’s  – the postcards are a muted grey with silhouettes of grey scrawny trees lining the breath of the page. Every postcard is a replica of the one before it and they together complete the exhibit in the show window. The irony is further exacerbated by a set of colourful ribbons worn on a soldier’s uniform, with medals encoding – ‘Satyamave Jayate’ and the ‘25^th Independence Anniversary Celebration’.

That finally nails the story tier in the storyboard permanently. I can feel a heaviness pervade my senses, which isn’t going away anywhere, I know. I will be back to meditate again!