at (and around) the indian art festival, hyderabad
before entering the gallery we have two cups of irani chai
at morine café: a palette of taste simmering there under
the boiler-shaped canvas: tealeaves, sugars, and milk
from the buffalo: the real holy beast of this blasphemous
trigger-happy country. then an alu samosa and a mirchi bajji
with chopped onions sprinkled with chaat masala
on a plastic orange plate covered with a newspaper
covering the election results: our hope wriggling there
in the brief cocoon of relieved breath.
what happened when we entered: the air conditioned us.
we had nowhere to keep our heavy bags except on our backs
then on our eyes as we saw, looked, gazed, scanned, scrutinized,
and watched the colors fly, shrivel, crunch, thump, burp,
bustle, swim, dry, text, mix, fuck, feel, thrive, survive,
die, cry, croon, swoon, and buy bye buy bye.
in yusuf alakkal's paintings the texture reaches out.
in 'the light' the hero is the dark. when an artist abandons
a lonely character he befriends loneliness. pamarthy's caricatures
make me smile: there's one with two men, fun oozing out,
with a goat in between whose neck is longer than its life.
halfway, a man asks me: are you guys, by any chance, artists?
i spurt out no and walk away. before we leave we sit down
to watch 12,000 years of indian art. it's boring into the past.
while turning away from it i see a woman, who cleans the place,
talking to someone on the phone, but the phone is hidden
behind the sheet wrapped around the garbage drum, such that
it seems she's hiding her voice from someone or that she's listening
to the heartbeat of that which remains to be curated or disposed.
~ ajay
11/6/2024
