The Twilight Is Yellow

The Twilight Is Yellow
Observe the magenta sepals of the lotus bud streaked
with slime. It is late dawn. Pale pollen stippled petals are
opening over trembling water. The performance has
begun. The eye strokes the page with the intimacy of
reading Braille, lingering over each detail. Notice the
outlines are drawn with a single squirrel hair brush; the
line is delicate but firm, demarcating an inside (translucent
first light) and an outside (dark water) which you hope is
your reflection. The face of the lotus is looking up at you
looking down at it, the way you look down on certain
things and certain people though the flowers’ fuzzy gold
centre hints at potential that you can’t or won’t see — like
wheeling star clusters during daytime. The downward
glance at lotuses, fish swimming in lacy rivers, the lynched
people lying on pavements, leaden gutters is the first or
bottommost register in a miniature painting. All that’s
below is propped up for a better view, like a newborn’s
head and neck is lifted to show its crumpled mauve face.
Like you prop yourself all through life so that your neck
doesn’t snap. You hover above the setting, supported by
fear and perhaps a smidgeon of boredom, to avoid being
contaminated. Touch is lethal.
You know the second
register. The middle ground, of being face-to-face with
life yet dodging it as you pass a durbar in a world capital
or a ghetto of which there are many in the eight holy
directions. You scroll through the daily malaise that is ever
new and predictable as rosy fingered Eos. He, the painter
and he, the dreamer and you know how the narrative will
end, even for you. You’re resigned to it, so you tell
yourself. In truth you pretend the middle ground doesn’t
Priya Sarukkai Chabria
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exist as you awaken, your eyelids fluttering blank frames
of evasion, exploration, forgetting. But something is
wrong. Something wails – perhaps it’s the opal elephant
rampaging through a palace courtyard, scattering
courtiers and chasseurs towards gateways and ramparts;
perhaps it’s the hissing woman in that corner carmine
room on her crimson bed, her hair and limbs pin-wheeled
against the congealing blood of her wayward lover;
perhaps it’s the siren of an ambulance entombed in traffic
just behind your car. You try to flee though you are
immobile in God’s theatre, Srirangam, sri-arangam, where
he dreams this small heartless play. The curtain is always
up, the terrain is always strewn with star shadows. Your
eyes fill with the gloaming of an eclipse but you aren’t
hushed enough to notice the stirring around you so it
doesn’t imprint on the wet cement of your heart.
A ribbon
of Krishna blue and smoke curled with gilt edged clouds
of lighter hue floats at the top as the scene’s third register.
Below this, pronged lightning. Below which pairs of egrets,
tiny yellow beaks open against the wedge of white wings,
lift towards thunderheads and you wonder why they fly
into a gale instead of cowering in the palmyra fronds that
tousle the sky; you wonder why he created such a narrow
strip of heaven when you long for boundlessness.
You want
things to fit and form patterns even if they are broken, like
the jangling glass pieces inside a kaleidoscope that, when
rotated, make and remake endless and profuse designs.
This gives a remote solace, the kind you experience when
considering Polar wander.
But you are forgetting the
ruination that you already are, you, all of you, every cell:
your right arm is that tree, your left arm the car parked
beneath over which it will crash to become a sculpture of
metal, leaves, trunk, glass and gasoline, its roots in the air
like drained veins; your toes are that cat with her litter
climbing inside the bonnet for shelter from the storm;
your ankle the beetle crawling near the tyre, your knees
the weeping-laughing island of mad woman on the road
who ties twigs to her arms as talismans; your belly the
Priya Sarukkai Chabria
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flyover twitching with lights; your sex the crepuscular sky,
your nape the train with its secret load of bombs; your
nose this small droning plane that will bloom into a rose
of flame against monsoon plumes; your hair the
stratosphere; your mouth those satellites circling without
any sense of beauty or fear.
Perhaps you still want to be
eight years old, straining to hear your voice echo as you
stand on a mountain beneath its peak of whipping snow.
But the mountain hears nothing. Not the sun, not the
avalanche, not the dynamite that was bored and stuffed
into its body so that its inside explodes first. Then the
grand slide into rubble.
But where has the painter
disappeared? You don’t want to think the director too is
asleep with a ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on his nose. Light
burns as he stirs. He sleeps on many things including
samay, quotidian time and
kaal, deep time. You don’t
know the reach of everyday time. You don’t know how
distant distance can be. But you aren’t prepared to give
up; you want more, more, more, your arms are spiralling
galaxies. In a shower of soot petals you wonder what lies
behind more but more carnage. You can wonder about
the pain of a shattered ankle, an ant with burnt feelers, at
the slow starvation death of bleached coral, the earth’s
curvature caving in implosions, blowing as explosions; the
world scotch-taped in blind pain. Perhaps cercity is a
stipulation for living.You remembered the burning house.
Did you think it was home?
What’s your home but this
slide, this way of looking into what lies beneath pain,
paint, beneath base coat and burnish? What lies behind
the endless rolls of white in your screen? What lies
behind this bounty of white? Could it be love?
Is this
the bromous glow you see adrift in the painting’s edge or
near the catwalk or perhaps in the corner of your dream?
You cajole the dusty starlit fog with yantra, tantra, mantra;
this is the one performance you repeat every day because
Priya Sarukkai Chabria
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you know there’s no date to ruination, no time before
decay began.
There’s no time before hope. You are
adamant, adamantine. You are eight again, holding a
budgerigar in a cage and you can’t bear its imprisonment
so you leave the cage door open and walk away. It takes
a long time to hop to the door, waits, and then flies away
leaving behind bird-stink. Now you are older and you
want to fly away, you want to apply Indian art’s reverse
perspective to yourself and the world so that you step out
of the painting, like so many figures do effortlessly in cave
after cave in Ajanta. They step out to greet you. First they
step on the uneven basalt floor, then on unseen lotuses
submerged by rain, their cups brimming with drowned
bees and swollen pollen. Petals overlap deep beneath
their soles. You could walk out too. But you have
forgotten how to walk on water.
And the sun can’t
decide whether to set or rise.
This is why the twilight is
bruised mango.