Invisible Objects
The women in my family, my mother, aunt and late grandmother, while nurturing and quietly tending to the lives of those they love, also have a barbed sense of humour. When it’s just the three of us, the decorum that endures in front of the family patriarchs, dissipates and we dissolve into sharing our respective anxieties, resignations, fears, dreams and a sense of cruel optimism for the future. We surrender to it, like shedding a layer of skin.
My grandfather was a cruel patriarch. Perfectly lovely to me, his only grandchild, he raised two girls along with his wife and ruled their days and moods with an iron fist. His love, while fierce, translated to not allowing my mother to wear jeans outside their home or her younger sister to date or even his wife to do much outside his company. My Nani’s life was relegated to the kitchen and her family and my mother, who had a dizzying career, eventually had to give it up to raise me and to be with my father in a foreign country.
We moved around a lot and I never quite found the grounding pleasures of a family home, especially once my grandparents passed away. The house that had been in the family for several decades was sold and the various odds and ends of our lives were herded into four-five apartments across the globe—my parents in Dubai, my aunt in New Delhi and I, in Prague, Pune, Dehradun, Berlin, New Delhi, Mumbai & Goa. Currently, I own some clothes for summer and winters, formal clothes for weddings & workshops, lots of pyjamas, a good amount of books (I can’t seem to transition to a Kindle), shoes for hiking, badminton & the beach, a Fujifilm x100s, maybe some perfumes, a waterproof mascara, lipsticks, a Macbook Air, an iPhone (the cheapest one, pretty sure they don’t make it anymore). Objects which are entirely utilitarian. Since I shift cities every few years, I don’t necessarily have souvenirs from travels, tchotchkes from quaint stores from my time in Prague & Berlin or even Dubai, no totems reminding me of the various lives I’ve lived. I have my stories and somehow, that’s always felt enough for nostalgia yet never adequate for the moments I lived.
Assigning value to objects is not something that comes naturally to me. When I was younger, I had the tendency to misplace a lot of things— keys, phones, sunglasses, debit cards, watches; not books, never books somehow.
Recently, I suffered a soft tissue injury and I’m bedridden for the next few weeks. I can’t do yoga, go to the beach or to a bar or play badminton; all the things that keep me sane. At this time, I find a certain inexplicable solace in the mundanity of everyday routine and I observe how that translates to objects. Objects without a history, probably mass-produced, but ones that leave me with a feeling of structure, warmth and meaning. I turn to these objects with a renewed need I’m unashamed to admit.
Even as I write this, I realise I’ll never have anything like my Dadi’s stainless steel paan ki dibbi. I recall receiving her at the Dubai airport, wrapped in a white & blue chikankari sari, her paan ki dibbi nestled resolutely in her delicate, ageing hands. I watched her with fascination as she set about making one of her several paans of the day— she’d apply the silver paste or chuna on the fresh betel leaf, sprinkle it with chopped betel nut, add a dash of red katha paste (from the Khair tree), garnish some chopped areca nut, fold it into a perfect triangle and place it between her teeth, red juice staining the cracks in her lips like day-old lipstick. She’d stroke my head softly and shaker her head ‘no’ when I asked her if I could try one. I’m not sure where that dibbi went after she died.
My nani’s embroidered cotton handkerchiefs. They always smell faintly of sandalwood, minty-lemon of her homemade soap and the muskiness of YSL’s Opium, the only ‘modern’ fragrance she owned, a gift from my Mom, that stayed in her handbag for decades. She’d dab it on her wrists and behind her ears only on special occasions, like her granddaughter’s birthday and her future wedding. My mother bought her several more perfumes in the years to come but my nani preserved that small, round bottle with a dogged ferocity and a lack of rationality. When she passed, my mother reconstructed her silk & cotton saris into scarves, which she then gave to my aunt and I. That signature smell remained for years to come, preserved in the silken folds of the scarves. When the contours of her face faded into a sort of abstraction, I could hold onto the fragrance and remind myself of who I really am, what I’m made of.
My mother’s antique pocket mirror, embossed with semi-precious stones and ceramic chips the colour of Bellflowers. My mother, although a working woman, not one to fuss about her appearance, carried the mirror with her across terrains. When I first moved to Prague, she handed it to me and later, I found a note slipped in its cold interior. That note carried me through the truly rotten days.
My father, a reluctant Muslim, and the tawiz he once gave me. A silver amulet tied to a black string, blessed with verses from the Qur’an, to be worn around my neck or wrist. I, conscious of honouring my post-modern disaffection towards religion, slipped it into my wallet. We rarely ever get to meet, my Dad and I; we’ve had an uncomfortable relationship through the better part of my adulthood but the tawiz reminds me that he’s always with me, even if sometimes, his ego comes in the way of his love.
I don’t possess any such talismans; perhaps I’ve simply not lived long enough to excavate wisdom from my possessions. But, I do see the unexpected beauty in the daily objects that remain in my life like a nurse, tending to my body and soul and lending it dimension, texture, purpose.
According to philosopher and Japanese folk-craft pioneer Soetsu Yanagi, who formed the Mingei (“folk-craft”) movement in the late 1920s and 1930s in Japan, everyday objects should be viewed and treated as things of beauty. The movement aimed to rewire people’s perception of beauty to include the utility of an object, not just the outward appearance.
My wooden hairbrush with space between its short, blunt bristles that straightens my mood and my hair every morning. A woman I once met told me to brush my hair every morning to be happy. And, it works. Especially, if I wake up jittery or full of self-judgment, my To-Do lists already jumping at me from my phone or notebook.
The terracotta bird-feeder with tiny yellow birds painted along its edges that’s home to gorgeous treeswifts the colour of pale blue silk, little cuckoos with beady eyes and hoopoes with crowns made of feathers. At dawn, I watch the birds and breathe easy.
A wooden incense stick holder and the smell of vetiver in my home, the earthy fragrance, an unobtrusive reminder to ease into the night.
The ornate cupboard made with rosewood that holds A’s shirts and shoes, our bedsheets and towels, the various vestiges of our life together.
These objects possess no particular beauty nor are they rarefied. They could even be considered low or common. It is said that someone living in proximity to a flowering garden grows insensitive to its fragrance. Likewise, when one becomes too familiar with a sight, one loses the ability to truly see it.
I see the same stories and histories, the same routines and interruptions occurring through the objects that I live among. They take a life of their own and they become sirens for both pain and joy.
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