Perfect Lines

I crossed my arms and leaned against the doorframe. Ahmedabad was surprisingly cool this morning. Not that it made a difference. No matter what the temperature outside was, Amma always made a kolam after breakfast. She was standing in the veranda with her hands on her hips, a couple of pieces of chalk clutched in her left fist. She was envisioning the kolam for the day, which had to be finished before Nanna left for office. They were usually planned during her siesta the day before, but she would improvise sometimes – just to mix things up. Their intricacy depended on the occasion. This was the month of Shravan, which meant they also merited coloured chalk instead of the usual white. 

Any kolam is preceded by a grid of dots. These act as a reference, a skeleton, and she marked them freehand. The lines would be drawn all around and through them. Although most kolams were symmetrical, I had seen many artists experiment with avant-garde patterns and stencils. Amma hated stencils. She spent the occasional evening coming up with new designs on pages salvaged from my old notebooks. With a ballpoint pen too. She said pencils were too light to see in the sun. 

The newer kolams would be put in rotation after a few designs from the existing line-up were eliminated. I watched as she ran out of breath hunched over the tiles, trying to ignore the droplets of sweat running down her brow. Her dainty hand clutched at a hurting hip while the other continued to work on a… grotesque and unruly kolam. A feeling of alarm crept up my body as I stepped forward for a closer look. She usually erased any wonky lines, and only ever called for a wet rag if the mistake she made could not be rubbed out with her thumb.

As her son, I strived to stay true to the Platonism she had shown me a glimpse of. In every activity I pursued. Not that Amma had ever read Plato. But she’d somehow also arrived at his theory of Forms, and tried indefatigably to drill it into my brain. Maybe her efforts were connected to middle-class Indians and our relentless striving toward a better future in which the progeny succeeds at life better than the parents did. My mother had not been allowed to become whatever it was she had wanted to be. I knew that whatever it was would have been sui generis. Perhaps success was tied to perfection somewhere in her mind – not because it would ensure a greater probability of success, but a smaller chance of failure. As her favorite, I had never understood why her eyes teared up with righteous fury when it came to the standard of my work. Being perfect in every aspect was proper for Amma, and to be proper was, well, you understand. Her constant lambasting affected my growing years terribly. She taught me time and again that if I intended to do something, I had to do it perfectly. Whatever it was had to be perfect. Brows furrowed in frustration, her glaring eyes challenged “Why bother otherwise?”. 

Then what was I seeing on the tiles? My mind flashed an image of the sign. The moment I’d glimpsed the Platonic ideal of perfection in. It had taken me sixteen years and a course in philosophy to understand what she’d tried to impart – what I had regarded as perfectionism was a profound belief that there existed perfect, ideal versions of whatever it was one was trying to create. A belief Plato shared; but Amma also believed that the things outside the cave could be made real with enough effort. 

 The sign had been created to be thrown away. What had made her afford such care for it? It began in the second grade – I was assigned homework for Christmas Eve celebrations, and had to bring a ‘Merry Christmas’ sign for the classroom door. I forgot to mention it until bedtime. That was when I received the first true scolding of my life. After the sign, Amma rebuked me for being an incorrigible procrastinator every time I started a project late. I used to grit my teeth in anger. But she was right – I had not accorded my work the respect it deserved. Watching the piece of chalk in her fingers stumble over scratched tiles, I recalled how she had worked on the sign until it was done, letting me sit by her side to watch. I had never stayed up past midnight before.

I brought the sign back home before the ayah could throw it away; much to the consternation of my father. He had not seen her make it – every move she made had been perfect. Slicing the thermocol with a knife, cutting the chart paper – even the glue had been applied to the very corners of the picture. She cut Santa Claus out of one of my picture-books, and not a trace of the page it had been cut out of remained. The green sketch pen wrote letters virtually indistinguishable from print, and there were no overlapping lines anywhere. The colour was one even shade across the sign. The object seen in its true Form. Her effort an otherworldly act of creation. It was indescribably beautiful, that world of Forms. It was so perfect that I could not, and still cannot, conceive it. It remains a half-faded memory.

The curve of rose-pink chalk was ugly. I stood and watched from a corner as Amma drew a Celtic knot in the centre of the grid. It was intricate enough to be a kolam on its own. I told her so. She drew flowers with three petals at the corners of the grid. I applauded. She started drawing the fillers. A layer of clockwise spirals, another of little leaf-like shapes. The third was a row of drops connecting the flowers and spirals. My arms, which had been on their way to another set of courtesy-claps, hung limply in the air. She would never stop unless I told her to. The fillers were all leeches that took away from the graceful knot in the centre.

Had she betrayed Platonic perfection for its earthly, self-defined form just as I had finally grasped the beauty of her pursuit? In a world of WhatsApp statuses and YouTube channels run by young artists and newlywed wives with thousands of new kolam styles and followers, Amma’s success depended on what others said about her art. Not only my father and I, but the neighbours, her kitty party group, relatives – anyone who could look at her status. She was no longer playing the game for the sake of the game, and did not understand that the internet had an insatiable appetite. That an invisible audience’s satisfaction could not be gauged. When had the aesthetic become more important than the purpose? I knew what she had forgotten – that nobody had ever needed her work to be perfect. It just used to be so, nevertheless. But what rage could I muster in the face of immense tragedy? I could not fault Amma for the one thing no one had power over. Old age does not care for the body it degrades. It only makes the body it inhabits try to veil its traces from others, watching gleefully as the host loses itself. Its self. Itself. She looked up and asked me how it looked. I sustained the illusion and praised her. 

I worried soundlessly, red-eyed, following the border of potted plants around her kneeling form and stained arena. I wondered when she would reach the point at which those who strive to perfect, or perfectly do, erase the canvas of their failed struggle into a void where it can be started anew. I hoped she was unwilling to birth something imperfect, ill-tempered about the effort needed to do so, sure, but exuberant about the self-prophesied mana that awaited. I wanted this to happen so that she could be proper; follow the rules she had seen and shown were necessary to sustain satisfaction for one’s art. As important as the pursuit was, the trick was to know when to stop and proclaim perfection to the whole wide world. Amma had tried to go beyond her own impossible standard – and found nothing but the madness of dissatisfaction. Only the validation of others could soothe it. I wanted to yell at her. “Amma, there’s no point if you don’t stop! Please, stop!”

But how could she? To stop striving would be the cardinal sin – Amma’s kolams were perfect because of her relentless attempts to make them so. Attaining Platonic perfection along the way was not what mattered. I saw, leaning back on the doorsill with a heavy heart, that it had never been the case. But Amma kept the improper lines and masked them with mistakes too minute to be seen by casual glances. She did not call for the wet rag. 

A tear swelled in my right eye and almost fell to the chalk-pocked marble that separated the two of us. It threatened to do so every time she shaved off a smidgen of errant chalk with a trembling thumb. I reminded myself of the glorious ones I had seen her make all my life. Especially for Holi and Sankranthi, which always merited rangolis. Kolams bursting with pastel-dyed powders that were poured by hand over the course of an entire day. Once again I saw the sign still hanging on the classroom door, memento mori of her fine handiwork and prowess. Nanna walked past me and started putting his shoes on. He smiled at her as she stood up, looking sadly at the kolam. “Done?” he asked.