When she watches contemporary dance...

When she watches contemporary dance...

She unwraps her sari and walks slowly towards a chair. She is wearing black palazzos and a tight black top.
She sits on the chair. She adjusts her position a number of times. Legs crossed. Right on top. Left on top. She leans forward. She leans against the chair. She covers her face a few times. She plays with her hair. She yawns. She looks here and there.
She opens her bag and takes a brochure out. She reads a few lines. She keeps the brochure inside her bag.
She leans forward. A mobile rings. She pretends it is not hers and tries to reprimand a man sitting next to her. The mobile rings again. She answers the call and speaks in a rather audible whisper. She keeps the mobile in her bag.
She changes the position and opens her bag again. She takes out an old projector. She keeps it on the floor.
She takes out a torch. She lights it and directs the stream of light towards the audience.

The sound system begins to play digitally remastered recording of a cat meowing and purring. Meowing and purring. Meowing. Purring.

She begins to speak:

Stand up slowly. As slowly as you can.
Do not smile. 
Take 3 steps forward. Stop.
Look to the left. Look to the right. To the left. To the right. The left. The right. Left. Right. 
Look up........
Lift your hands to your face. Keep your index fingers inside your mouth and stretch the corners of your mouth down to make a sad face.
Release your left finger.
Use your right finger to make a repetitive sound in your mouth. Clock. Clock. Clock. Stop.
Look to the left. Look to the right.
Release your right finger.
Run and exchange places with anybody you can see around. Stop.
Raise your right hand and with a fast movement stick it in your mouth. 
Bite.
Release the hand.
Raise your right hand and beat your chest thrice.
Hand down.
Fall flat on your face.
Lift your right hand and spread your fingers in a dramatic gesture. 
Make a dramatically sad face.
Shake.
Shake harder.
Harder.
Moan.
Louder.
Louder.
Louder.
Breathe heavily.
Keep shaking.
And breathe.
Stop.

She turns off the torch and keeps it down. She claps. She stands up. She goes out.

Lights

I love lights... and shadows.

Two rays of light crossing above my head.

Many years back I would light a candle in the evening and make small installations of object partially lit and partially hidden in the dark and then I would sit for hours, look at them and take photos.

They fall slowly on the ground.

I loved the evenings spent with a white wall, a bucket of water and a mirror. I kept running here and there to bring various paper cuttings, tiny bottles, crystals and we sat and watched the designs coming to life on a white wall in front of us.

The barrier of light dividing the space into here and there.

I loved the night when you put a tiny bulb into the water tap and when I reached the water station to quench my thirst all I could think of was the beautiful colour of the water, the ripples, the bubbles... Magic...

Lines of light crawling on the floor.

I loved those days in Rajasthan when we did not have electricity and had to rehearse in the light of huge battery lamps and whenever I would turn I could see my shadow on the wall laughing and playing with me.

Light and darkness, light and darkness, light and darkness...

I love watching how the light falls on the body making it even more mysterious than it actually is. A ray of light following your movements, the beams of light dancing on a man in front of me. A man dancing in the beams of light in front of me. Is it the light that is dancing or a man?
A flush of light on his shoulder... on his stomach... on his thigh... and suddenly each of these body parts becomes something different. Look at you hand in the yellow light, green light, red... Each time you will think that it gained its own identity. Like words written with different colours. Black ants. Blue memories. Green hopes. Red scream.

A thin line of light moving above their heads.

She used to catch the rays of light that were thrown at her. The elephant playing outside the temple.
I woke up in the middle of the night an my room was full of moving lights. I was mesmerised. I couldn't move for hours. Thousands of fireflies above my head.

Two rays of light raise from the ground and fly away towards the ceiling.

We leave the theatre. I stop to catch the net of lights one last time. I look up. You were also there. I smile. I leave alone.

Cities and people

Cities are like people, they both want to change as they grow older. The difference is that the cities focus on expansion and plastic uniformity, while people shed the layers of their make-up and begin to look inwards more often.

The sisters

I jumped over a rather important developments in the story, and since there is nothing worse in this world than the stories badly told then let me move back in time to the day when Nawafar was sobbing in her room...

Nawafar cried a lot that day, but no matter how much we would like the world to make notice of our little personal tragedies it always does go on with its own interrupted rhythm. No matter how much we wish for the world to stop still the sun does rise every day, the time flows past us every moment and the earth never stops rotating around the sun, and so it happened this time as well...
Nawafar lifted her tired head and looked towards the bright sun that was trying to make its way inside her room in order to dry the floor and her face after the deluge that happened the previous day. She looked around the room...  the cat was floating in the pool of her tears and even though the view was not funny at all somehow she began to laugh at hearing his meows and seeing how he tries to keep his tail above the water.
She floated to the kitchen and with the help of fevicol made herself a boat out of peels of bananas and oranges. She pulled the wet cat into the boat and floated towards the doors. She wrestled with the lock for a moment and as the rusted lock gave in she managed to open the doors and let the flooding waters flush outside with a great force. She sat on the wet floor and began to write a letter...

You see... you entered this story only recently, but the story had been here for many years... Nawafar and Rajkumari might have been different from each other and live in remote places of this land but nevertheless they were closely related by blood. They were twin sisters.

Nawafar had always been the emotional one, Rajkumari the reasonable one. Nawafar loved saris, Rajkumari had soft corner for skirts and bellbottom trousers. Nawafar would cry while being hurt, Rajkumari would rather hide her feelings and try to keep herself busy with work. Nawafar would whine and feel miserable all day, Rajkumari would take out her laptop and write, play the flute or draw. Nawafar always wanted to be found, Rajkumari always wanted to find herself...

And so, when Rajkumari read a letter that her twin sister had written she packed her bags and rushed towards the flooded debris of an imaginary house among the trees by the lake in order to rescue her sister from burying herself inside the mouse-hole.

Aren't we all like the twin sisters living under the same roof? Sometimes the emotional one takes over the house, but then there comes a day when the rational side of us prevails once again after the emotional turmoil is over?

painting

Nawafar untied her blue sari and watched it spread over the floor. It twisted and made a few turns here and there... Like a river, she thought.
Was she to jump into that river again and allow herself to be carried by the torrent to some far away places? Had she been ten years younger she might have done it, but not this time. She was getting older every day and each day made her realise that she would finally want to unpack her bundle, keep paintings on the walls, light the lamp in the evening and sit on a threshold with a cup of tea and a book in her hand. And she knew it very well that it will be a small house for one person only.

She was watching the stars last night. The Orion was just above her head and she tried to remember those days of her childhood when she would sit in the evening and dream about finding the imaginary South Star in the sky. A bat flew above her head and sat on a near by tree. She turned to see the Moon, but the view was obscured by the high buildings.
She was watching lines dancing and forming intricate patterns in front of her. Moments later she could see a cluster of bodies contort and mould themselves into various shapes... Like Gond paintings, she thought.
When the kaleidoscope of images came to a stop she took out her shawl and went for a walk to find the moon. It was hiding behind the clouds. Delicate clouds that looked like dancers on a stage of the night performing their acts for the audiences that were rushing below them too busy to look up towards the artists displaying their skills. She stood for a moment in awe of the spectacle taking place above her head. It was so beautiful, so ephemeral, so magical... It was one of those moments that makes one think of the beauty and mystery of existence... It was one of those moments that you would love to share with somebody... But she was standing alone. The boy was not there... He was just a mirage that she conceived with her imagination.
A single tear flowed down her cheek. It fell into the river and then Nawafar folded her sari and kept it neatly inside her trunk.

I woke up in the morning and rushed to the kitchen to make myself a cup of tea. It's been many days since I last sat on the threshold. I don't sit there anymore. The naughty children from the neighbourhood spotted the two caterpillars and they killed them one day when I was at work. It made me sad. I was waiting so badly to see the caterpillars turn into colourful butterflies in front of my eyes, but the silly children did not allow them to live...

I'm not sure if it is a metaphor or reality... Or maybe both. I am always confused on this one.
Don't you think that it is amazing how often our inner lives and the outer world exist parallel to each other?
And if you do, do you think you could paint a butterfly for me? The most colourful butterfly in the world. And the sky, the moon, the river, the trees, the parrots and the hand to hold while watching the sky at night...