Mohini

 

20.5x28.5 inches; Watercolour, pen and ink over graphite pencil on handmade paper (Click on image to enlarge)

I dress up for the night. I have washed myself in a bucket of water. A necessity that feels more like a luxury as water is precious. The municipal tap flows for two hours every day. We are a home of eight. That bucket of water was the ocean to me. I rose from it to become Mohini from Mohan.

I put on my makeup. The face powder, I bought with my money. A gift to myself for my last birthday. The kajal pencil, now a 2 inch stub, was generously donated by Padma. The red lipstick I stole from a shop that has pretty ladies working as sales girls. I wish I could get a job like that. Yes, I do earn a living, being a bride for one night to strange lovers, but the money is barely enough for rent, clothes and food.

I look at myself in the mirror. I admire the illusion of beauty I see there. The light from one naked bulb bathes my form in bright light and deep shadows. Like a solar eclipse when Raahu tries to devour the sun. I pluck a stray hair on my upper lip and a wayward eyelash with a pair of tweezers. I place a black dot on the left, over my upper lip, mid-way between the corner of my lip and nostril. Perfect.

I take a band of long soft cloth, cut from an old cotton saree and wrap it around the lower part of my chest. A little tightly, not tight enough to cause trouble breathing. Then I push the soft fleshy upper part of my chest from both sides near the armpits, upwards and inwards towards the centre of my chest. I feel a shiver as I see my cleavage take shape where my chest hair used to be. I adjust the tightness of the band of cloth to keep the cleavage in position.

I wear a sleeveless white blouse with a deep neckline. Deep enough to reveal the cleavage I created but not the means holding it in place. I have a pair of balloons filled with water, something Bobby had taught me. I insert them each in the two empty tents in my blouse which were meant to house soft breasts. The water filled balloons create a bounce that mimics real breasts better than sponge pads. It has its risk too if the balloons burst, but I still prefer it. I roll my shoulder and adjust the strap of the blouse checking the bounce.  

I drape a pearly white chiffon saree with conch shell design embroidered with sequins, the latest fashion popularized by the actress Bhanumati, over my bleached white petticoat. Bleach to keep the spots and germs away. I wish I could bleach away the germs inside me too but that is another story. I look at my reflection in the mirror again. I put on my beaded dangler earrings and a matching bead necklace, stolen from my elder sister, many years ago. The only heirloom I possess to remind me of the family I was born to. I begin to recognize myself now. “Me Mohini!” I whisper.

Now, to complete the transformation I pick up the wig Lakshmi lent me yesterday. She is not going out to meet clients for the next few days. She is not well. High fever with a nasty cough. So, I borrowed her wig; silky and shiny black hair styled in waves like the dark ocean raging inside me. I put it on and flip my head back to feel the hair cascade around my neck. I tilt my head, my eyes half closed as if I am drunk on the nectar of life and I blow a kiss at my reflection.

I pick up my handbag and check if I have the condoms and sachets of lube. A social worker keeps giving us these things for free. Keeps us safe from diseases, she says. There are many dangers other than diseases that come with the territory in the line of my work. I feel far from safe but at least she is trying to keep me safe from one villain. I throw in my comb, lipstick and an antiseptic ointment. I wear my flat slip-on sandals. No heels for me. You never know when you need to run. I switch off the light and I shout “I am going out!” and I step out into the night humming a song to myself.

“I am a bride for a night, every night!

A flickering flame for willing lovers

Who drink from my pot of eternal life,

Turning to dust on the bed covers

At the end of every night, every night!”

Dhatura / Datura

 

29.0 x 9.5 inches; Watercolour, pen and ink over graphite pencil on handmade paper (Click on image to enlarge)

Your face caught in the moonlight

Becomes a moon to the moon,

Two starry eyes glint,

Like pieces of flint

Striking up a fire.

 

The beauty of heat burns my night

My Moonflower trumpets croon.

Your hypnotic gaze

Drags me in the maze,

Fanning my desire.

 

Shadows fold us into earthy delight

Of bodies finding touch, we swoon

Drugged by the nectar,

In each-other’s spectre

Of sensory mire.

 

Psychedelic dreams burn bright

Stinging like thorns of a boon.

Urgency of our need

Scatters the seed

Dousing the pyre.

 

In parting you retreat from sight

No promises of “see you soon”,

Just a lingering heat

Of a shared heartbeat,

Fading strains of a siren’s lyre!

Mandragora

 

29.0 x 9.5 inches; Watercolour, pen and ink over graphite pencil on handmade paper (Click on image to enlarge)

 

Twilight in the park

Awakens the fireflies,

Liminal magical beings

Discard their shadows,

Glowing with urgent eyes

Desires that seek the dark.

 

A bush lightly trembles

Growing into life, lazily,

Like a long drawn yawn

Leaving your bed of leaves,

Flipping tousled head hazily

A smile tickling me crumbles.

 

The scent of pleasure

Conjures a potent embrace,

With promises of resurrection

Flowing in our excited veins,

Needy kisses drunkenly trace

The elixir we warily treasure.

 

Cracks open the shell

Bursting boils of repression,

Sighs escape turning us deaf

To screams in our tortured heads,

Grasping this moment of elation

Before hiding, back in our hell.

 

Oedipus

12x16 inches; Watercolor, Pen and ink on acid free textured paper (Click on image to enlarge)

Tragedy

Have you lost hope along with your eyes?

When you dug them out with your bare hands

Like cadavers from the depth of their graves

Rendering yourself blind, did you also dig up the guilt?

Had your eyes witnessed too much?

Had they...had you sinned?

Was it all your doing or was destiny your foe?

Or was it your father who set the ball rolling?

Were you not born to kill your own father and be the king?

The father, who driven by fear for his own life,

Had wanted to end yours by snatching you away

From your mother’s suckling breasts and tossing you out,

Out into the wilderness...

Years later, you killed him as a stranger

At the crossroads of your destiny and his.

Was it not poetic justice? Was it not sweet revenge?

Did he not want to cheat you of your destiny?

Did he not think he had erased the cause

And so, the effect?

Do you wish now that your father had not failed,

So long ago, to kill you as a babe?

Should we not compare moral codes and measure

How heavily it inspires guilt to torment our souls?

Take your mother for example.

Society would have her strangle you with your umbilical cord

Knowing that you will grow up to kill her husband

And sleep with her as a lover.

She did not. She could not!

Was that her sin? Did her love for you as a mother,

Stop the milk in her breasts from turning to poison?

Did she love your father any less?

Or did she just resign to her fate?

She did not know you when you came to marry her.

Was that her blame, the inability to identify her son?

Your father did not know the same.

Did she love you any less as her husband?

Why could you not recall her to be your mother?

Did you not know the smell of her breasts

While you kissed them? Could you not sense ‘déjà vu’?

Could you not remember being inside her once

When you were inside her again?

When you saw her hanging in death, did you call out to her?

‘My queen, dear wife, my love, darling... mom...mother...’

What appellation did you find proper to call her by?

For whom do you mourn the most – a mother, a wife or both?

Or do you mourn only for your own tragic life?

Don’t you wish now that the cunning Sphinx

Had riddled you with this instead – ‘Tell me gallant youth,

How does a son love his mother after he has taken her as his wife?’

You would not have known the answer clever one,

And she would have made a meal of you then.

But that was not to be your fate!

Is there any tragedy without the fall of the great?

- Rudra Kishore Mandal

Lajja Gauri

20.5x28.5 inches; Pen drawing on handmade paper with watercolour wash (Click on image to enlarge)

SOLD. In private collection

Lajja Gauri / Aditi Uttanpad

Aditi is the Primal Creatrix. The name Aditi means ‘boundlessness’ and ‘freedom’ and conveys the concept of liberty from suffering and bondage. In the Rig Veda, the name is mentioned Eighty times, denoting the importance given to this goddess in the early Vedic times. She is the divine mother of all the Vedic gods and thus the source of the entire evident reality: past, present and future, ‘all that has been and will be born’. She is born from what she gives birth to and is self procreative. Aditi’s womb is unambiguously identified with the centre of the earth and hence mother earth is another aspect of her cosmic presence.

She is considered to be a very ancient deity whose importance faded in the late Vedic period. As celestial mother of every existing form and being, she is associated with space (Vyom) and with mystic speech (Vāc). There is no hymn addressed exclusively to her, unlike other Vedic gods. She is perhaps not related to a particular natural phenomenon like other gods and hence unbound, unlimited and unfettered! Aditi challenges the modern idea that the early Vedic people were patriarchal. Aditi was regarded as both the sky goddess, and earth goddess, which is very rare for a prehistoric civilization. Most ancient civilizations regarded the sky as a male and the earth as female, which is not the case here.

This primal deity has been represented mostly in the form of the more popular ‘Lajja Gauri’ (also known as Aditi Uttanpad) in Indian goddess iconography. The image of a headless naked woman with her legs bent and opened wide to expose the female genitalia, is older than the Indus Valley Civilization. But in India the first example of such an image comes from an Indus Valley Seal. She is popularly associated with fertility rituals but such association must be a narrow interpretation of the original scope of this deity. The association might be directly related to the figurative representation of the deity. This enigmatic form of a woman with a blooming lotus for her head is usually portrayed with legs opened and raised in a manner ambiguously suggesting either childbirth or sexual receptivity. Hence, hinting at the creative and regenerative powers of a fertile womb.

Goddesses such as Durga hold symbolic objects to express their power in their multiple arms but Lajja Gauri’s elemental power of sexuality, fertility and creation is solely expressed through her body, the locus of her power. This body is devoid of any ornamentation except armlets and anklets formed of serpents which again are a symbol of regeneration, the eternal cycle of birth, death and rebirth. The lotus flower (in her hands and in place of her head) has been used through centuries, as symbolism of life, spiritual awakening, sexuality, mystic knowledge and enlightenment. Such a bold iconography of shakti (pure energy) which was not bound to any tradition or subservient to a male power was very threatening to the Hindu patriarchs of later ages because the popularity of this deity had not shrunk into oblivion and hence was ‘harnessed’ and appropriated to suit the changing moral codes of those ages.

Several myths exist concerning Lajja Gauri, but scholars consider them to be inauthentic, late attempts to replace the Goddess's original lore which was eclipsed by the rise of the power of male gods. Many of these tales involve a dominant Lord Shiva testing his wife's modesty by publicly disrobing her, whereupon her head either falls off or sinks into her body from shame, thereby proving her ‘purity’ and providing a Shiva-centric explanation of how such a boldly self-displaying Goddess got a name like "Lajja Gauri" (Gauri of modesty) which seems very far-fetched and forced. A typical tale concocted from the perspective of male domination, to bind this unruly feminine into the garb of a tamed wife acceptable by patriarchy.

If we want to search for her actual essence and get an inkling of her forgotten lore it might be useful to listen to folktales from the oral tradition of India that still circulate about her in rural India. Lajja Gauri /Aditi is often referred to as Maatangi in certain parts of Central and south India, who is the "Outcaste Goddess" form of shakti, known for ignoring and rejecting society's rules, hierarchies and conventions. She is also called Renuka, a low-caste woman beheaded by a high-caste man. Rather than dying, she grew a lotus in place of her head and became a Goddess, Gram Devi. These stories involving the deification of an outcaste/caste-less/low-caste woman seem to suggest the uncontainable Feminine Principle, its disregard of and ultimate superiority over any man-made social system that would attempt to contain or control its pure force.

Reference: 

http://shaktisadhana.50megs.com/Newhomepage/shakti/lajjahGauri.html

Book - Images of Indian Goddesses: Myths, Meanings, and Models by Madhu Bazaz Wangu

Guilty As Charged 3 - Lechery

8x8 inches (unframed); Watercolour and Pen drawing on Executive Bond paper (Click on image to enlarge)

A Shaikh beheld a harlot, and quoth he,

“You seem a slave to drink and lechery”;

And she made answer, “What I seem I am,

But, Master, are you all you seem to be?”

- Omar Khayyam

Sebastian

12x12 inches; Watercolour and Pen drawing on executive bond paper (Click on image to enlarge)
SOLD. In private collection

Sliced by the hands of fate

Criss-crossing lanes

On the palm

Of your hand

Each turn

A choice you make

Each twist

The noose

Around your neck

Either Slackens

Or tightens

Without respite

No way out

Of the maze

Living with the choices

You make

Or dying for them

Whether the heart

Or the mind

You follow

You are twice martyred

And you believe

You have lived.

- Rudra Kishore Mandal

Kundalini

13.5x20.5 inches; Pen drawing on handmade paper with watercolour wash (Click on image to enlarge)

Sleeping coiled like an embryo,

In the hollow of my crescent body,

You are distant and yet so close!

I breathe in your scent,

You breathe out my longing

Uncoiling in my loins, like a rose.

You hear my distant call,

A whistle of a train far away

On a silent night it echoes.

You stir and reach back to fumble

Deep into my throbbing memories,

Between my third eye and my nose.

You tingle and travel up my spine,

Igniting the seven spheres of my being,

Bliss like a cold fire in me grows.

You slither in my head like goose bumps,

I open my eyes and receive your lips,

A lotus of thousand petals blows.

- Rudra Kishore Mandal