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Masks in an Indian City / Tripolia-Exploring India-Arun Gaur’s Indian Landscape Images |
Those masks told the almost identical tales |
I wandered among these masks of a modern Indian city. I wandered in the morning when the sun had just risen and no one was among them. I wandered around them in the dusk when almost every other human being had deserted their vicinity leaving them all alone. Still staring with their own stolid or passionate fixed gazes. I also wandered among them when it was high noon and late morning and late after-noon when the people milled around them, jostling them, pushing them, laughing at them, sneering at them, crying at them, pouting at them. They pushed these masks and these masks tumbled on the ground, mixed with the dust, shattered at the hard and rough stone faces and when everyone had left, they brushed their cheeks afresh, strained up into the standing and sitting postures with pushes of their palms against their knees. I was with them during all these hard times and they did not bother. They were not disturbed by my presence. They opened their lips to say something, but did not. White of their hair spread all around in the open air. They put their forefinger to their cheeks to strike a delicate posture, but could not. It appeared as if their hands were not their own. Their fingers were not their own. They were quite separated from their bodies. Cheeks puffed up in the dusk of the pink evening and eyes turned blind half pink half white. They were lost in the thickness of bottle green that was fast enveloping. Their figures became blurred. Some were still sharp. The red blood color of the opaque mass of the glass of the bangles on their head were like thorns but they did not feel the pricking sensation. The expression aghast, the shocking recognition sprang from somewhere else. That sensation sprang like a mauling tiger. And it mauled them. Then the pink faces of the women tilted. No one else was there to see the tilt, the change. I was there to witness it all. I saw it. I swear, I saw it all. I knew it was coming. Was it aggression or fear on your face, in your eyes, O the carrier of blue bangles. Your white eyes bulge too much. They have their tracking ghosts, the blurred figures, their doubles, their better halves or their worse halves. Like Shakespeare’s or Marlowe’s or Webster’s tragic heroes, and tragic duchesses, always accompanied in their background by their presiding deities, their guiding spiritual principles, spirits and Platonic ghosts and demons. Then they make procession. They depart in the sun. They depart in the gold of the sun. They depart in the dusk. They make processions. They decide and they depart. I cannot catch up with them. It is dusk. The night falls. |
He looked askance. Wanted to say something to me but then suddenly looked away. His lips remained opened in a strained distortion. White was spreading on the top of his head. Perhaps, he wanted to talk about the descending of the age. About the tale of the dark. |
She had her skin tanned. Her forefinger was her. But it seemed to belong to somebody else. Her eyes were darker than those of others. She was on the verge of bursting into a beauty to be recognized world over. Well, she tried to strike a delicate posture. I thought to some extent she succeeded in her attempt. |
Her cheek was puffed. She wanted to drape her head with a matching hue but with a blotched design. Her nose sank back into the outline of her puffed cheek. She seemed to look intently, but her eyes! Where were her eyes? Was she blind? There was too much delicacy of pink in her cheeks. |
There was a host of them. Rain came in the evening and it drenched them well. But they kept on standing in the rain. The background became gloomy green. Gradually, water sank into their skins, their eye-orbs and their firma-matter. Half of their bodies were soaked in water. Half of it dried up. |
She carried the weight of broken red bangles on her head. Her eyes dilated but not that much. She was not expecting the things, though, happening around her. Was she the carrier of, along with her male and female companions the mythical, the legendary crown of thorns? She was blood that was infused into the darkness of air. |
She was one of the women of stones, still, impassive, suffering, with a little tilted head. She too sank into the gloomy green back-drop. But grit was writ large on her wizened face. She had no puffed cheeks. That smoothness, some would call it feebleness, eluded her. Her cheek bones protruded, cheeks sank, nose was sharp and chin too. This all made her powerful. Powerful in suffering. |
She was the carries of red bangles. They had gathered all the broken pieces and joined them together. The blood red was their color and became more bloody red as the evening sun fell on her face. The sky was not black but ominously dark ink blue and huge branches of the tree spread over her head like the coming of tentacles or the web of the spider. Was the spider hunting? |
There was too much whiteness in his eyes. He reminded me of the dwarf-men of the Gupta temples of the mediaeval ages, who were woven into the base of the temples to lift the huge masses. The head and the upper portion of his visage was too broad giving me the impression that he belonged to the same cadre, those Dravidian Indian races who were subjected to the different acts of torture perpetrated by the so called superior Aryan races. So dark and so white! |
He or she had a double, much fairer lurking in the background. How intently they look into the same direction.
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Is it the Me Myself? Thinking, pondering, brooding, gazing. Philosophizing with the mock gesture of a philosopher--the lover of truth? Wandering in mind and body but sitting at a place, glued, static for ages? Trying to progress, but not progressing. Apparently dynamic, but essentially and inwardly, static, glued to a mere bunch of static, universal fundamentals? |
Is it another Me Myself? How much can I follow Walt Whitman or Wallace Stevens in the celebration of the inner self? That William Carlos Williams was another one who also picked up the images here and there. This monkey, or Me Myself is joyous. He smiles and waves his tail as normally the monkeys do not do. His eyes are white but not blaring. He is enveloped in whiteness that makes him almost ethereal. |
Her throat is too thin. It is too long. She is almost ugly. There are blotches on her skin that are un-eradicable. She is too stretched. However, she is also a fundamental part of the bevy of images. Fearful, downtrodden suffering from malnutrition. Spiders would make webs over her face, her neck and she can't do anything about that. |
He is handsome. Smart boy of the clan. The eyes that are not placid, but not terror struck. May be a little thoughtful, but not sad. The expressions are just appearing on his face, in his eyes. His skin tone melts nicely into the tan of the background.
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By now we know her well. She carries her glorious, luminous double, shade and shadow. Her face and head has been set separately by the enveloping darkness that spares no one.
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Now this is another example of the face that melts into the surrounding gloom and the features are so superbly etched that she seems almost not belonging to the clan of dismal figures.
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In spite of the grace of the profile, stretch her a bit and she seems to be losing much, nay, it appears that she has almost lost everything, every act of grace, every tint of grace. The neck has stretched un-necessarily. After all, there are so many things in life that elongate too much and that too, too unnecessarily. |
Now peer at her more closely and she is too the lost case.
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The have decided. Determined. Everything, everyone has to depart from this place. This is not our place. This is no-one's place. Let us make an orderly procession, accept the facts and depart while the sun lits the face and the background becomes increasingly wavy, tumbled, web-struck and inky.
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There is no place of resistance. The sun is bright for all. What has that great bard said? Something like that, if I remember correctly: "Fear no more the heat of the sun, nor the furious winter rages." So fear no more. The sun is bright for all.
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The great bard has said. "Life is but a waling shadow. A tale told by an idiot signifying nothing." I found those statues departing making an orderly procession, while there was still some light left. But they were not happy.
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