Hajj To The Heart

 

13.5x20.5 inches; Watercolour, pen and ink over graphite pencil on handmade paper (Click on image to enlarge)

SOLD. In private collection

Another painting I did for a dear friend and patron. Dr. Scott Kugle, has been reproduced on the book cover of his latest publication – Hajj To The Heart.

This piece is my vision of legendary voyages across the turbulent oceans in quest for physical and spiritual survival which transforms and awakens people to their greater purpose in life.

About the book -  

“Against the sweeping backdrop of South Asian history, this is a story of journeys taken by sixteenth-century reformist Muslim scholars and Sufi mystics from India to Arabia. At the center is the influential Sufi scholar Shaykh ʿAli Muttaqi and his little-known network of disciples.

The story expands across three generations of peripatetic Sufi masters in the Mutaqqi lineage as they travel for purposes of pilgrimage, scholarship, and sometimes simply for survival along Indian Ocean maritime routes linking global Muslim communities. Exploring the political intrigue, scholarly debates, and diverse social milieus that shaped the colorful personalities of his Sufi subjects, Kugle argues for the importance of Indian Sufi thought in the study of hadith and of ethics in Islam.” - quoted from the publisher's note regarding the book.

If you would like to purchase a copy of the book please follow this link:

Hajj to the Heart | Scott Kugle | University of North Carolina Press (uncpress.org)

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

Narcissus

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

Narcissus

Reclining by the pool’s end,

You stay lost, gazing at your own face.

Your mind unable to spend

The reasons for such beauty to grace

This unworthy world around...

No, nothing is worthy of you,

No one is good enough for your love!

Trampled they lay like the dew,

Hurt and broken like the arrow shot dove,

Scalded by disdain in you they found.

A love sick sigh escapes, coral lips

Parted in a moist need to kiss the twin

Reflected in the dark pool which sips,

Licks and nibbles at your heart to ruin

And bleed vanity out aground.

Does remorse strike you now?

Remember Ameinias... Echo, you recall?

Feel the sweat gather on your brow

While you await the torment to befall,

Same as a stag cornered by the hound.

No matter how many times

The sword of Ameinias opens you up

Or your cries echo like the chimes,

Your love will not fill your empty cup

Or in your embrace be bound.

You slip into the watery bed

Imagining love waits there with open arms.

Tears of pain and rapture you shed

While being consumed by the siren’s charms,

A flower floats ashore and kisses the ground.

- Rudra Kishore Mandal

Desire And Despair

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

Those cards

Boxes of chocolate

Smell of your soap

On my birthday

The touch

Under the blanket

A strand of your hair

On my pillow

The movie ticket

Our hands

In the dark

Mouths

On the roof

Sultry afternoons

Rain drenched

Like the crows

Sound of

Punctured bicycle tyre

Of pleasure

Maybe guilt

Surely Pain

Caught under

The mosquito

Net

Of desire

To learn French

Do French

Seduction

Wine on our

Skin

Thin veil

Of modesty lost

Liberation

In a bathtub

Dancing

Naked and sticky

‘Baby skin’

Whispered

Tickling my ears

Leaving behind

A trail

Sorrow

Of holding

Hands

In public garden

Eyes flirting

Mouths watering

A shared cup

Of ‘Irani chai’

A bite

Of jealousy

On my nipple

Dripping

Honey words

Poetry

Of laughter and

Longing for

Despair

Heart break

Distrust

‘Dry your tears!’

Bitch

The world

Never ends

To the music

Of dance beats

Sweat

Circling

Measuring

Teasing

Pulling each other

Groin to groin

‘kambakht Ishq’

Old monk

In my vein

Passion

In our loin

Kissing

Till the faithful

Are summoned

Morning prayers

Warm embrace

Enchanted sleep

Deception of

Separation

Distance untraveled

Unwanted

Complications of being

Uncomfortably numb

With failure

Dejection

‘What went wrong?’

Nothing went right

Expectations

Stifled and buried

Dreams

In between

Right and wrong

Flows a river

Of longing

Infested with

Ghosts

Drowned possibilities

Piranhas

Of guilt

And a leaky boat of

Salvation is slowly

Ferried by despair.

- Rudra Kishore Mandal

Guilty As charged 7 - Gluttony

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

Gluttony is an emotional escape, a sign something is eating us.

-Peter De Vries, American author and editor

Guilty As Charged 6 - Avarice

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

Greed's worst point is its ingratitude.

- Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist.

Guilty As Charged 5 - Vanity

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

‘Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.’

- Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

Guilty As Charged 4 - Envy

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

'The flower which is single need not envy the thorns that are numerous.'

- Rabindranath Tagore

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

Guilty As Charged 1 - Sloth

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

"I am overcome by my own amazing sloth…Can you please forgive me and believe that it is really because I want to do something well that I don't do it at all?"

-Elizabeth Bishop, Poet Laureate of the United States from 1949 to 1950, the Pulitzer Prize winner for Poetry in 1956, the National Book Award winner in 1970, and the recipient of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1976.

Promises of Promiscuity

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

Our eyes avoid meeting

Like moths evading darkness

But words keep spilling around

Leading us by the hand

Into meandering alleys

Dead ends...

Of old forgotten cities.

We recognize the charade

Yet, we indulge

For the sake of appearances

A fleeting glance meets

Catches flame!

We see each in the eyes of the other

Burning, a mirror of mutual shame.

Don’t take off that mask of words

The fine web of silk will tear

Revealing the dark circles

Under our smiles.

Cracks will show

In the walls of our hearts

The emotions all piled up in a row.

Keep the doors and windows barred

The curtains down, shrouded...

For fear our precious image gets tarnished.

A masterpiece so carefully crafted

With half truths and ruse

By the dust of dreams, the bile of regret

And spotless virtue, as our muse.

- Rudra Kishore Mandal

Tiny Deceptions 4 - The Golden Fawn (Mirage)

3.5x5.5 inches; Watercolor and Pen drawing on executive bond paper (Click on image to enlarge)

Under a sheepskin, a wolf may hide

Under a flower, a snake

Yet the fault lies in our pride  

If we can’t spot the fake

- Rudra Kishore Mandal

Tiny Deceptions 3 - The Red Herring (Fallacy)

5.5x3.5 inches; Watercolor and Pen drawing on executive bond paper (Click on image to enlarge)

Ruthless mind brimming with unspoken words

Misleading glances hide cruel intent

Cloaks make the cuts deeper from pointy swords

Reality hurts when dreams are spent. 

- Rudra Kishore Mandal

Tiny Deceptions 2 - Two Faced Snake (Double Speak)

3.5x5.5 inches; Watercolor and Pen drawing on executive bond paper (Click on image to enlarge)

Tell me this and tell me that,

Don’t reveal the fault

But riddle it with fat.

Serve it hot with a pinch of salt.

- Rudra Kishore Mandal

Tiny Deceptions 1 - The Little Birdie (rumor)

5.5x3.5 inches; Watercolor and Pen drawing on executive bond paper (Click on image to enlarge)

Words waft in the wind

Like dandelion seeds

Searching for a fertile mind

To germinate into cruel deeds.

- Rudra Kishore Mandal

Water Ballet

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

The first time I had seen a swan was in a depiction of Goddess Saraswati, sitting and playing the veena on a beautiful white bird, in a calendar image. I had fallen in love with the milky whiteness, the curvaceous neck and the beautiful depiction of plumage. Somehow the image of that bird got stuck in my memory. Somehow that bird symbolized serenity and grace for me. The story of ‘The Ugly Duckling’ only enhanced this imagery in my mind. So many times I have scribbled the letter ‘S’ and transformed it into an idealized design of a swan in my school books. I kept seeing the swan in logos and designs on packets of sweets. The logo of Ramkrishna Mission was very attractive to me once. I have only seen a couple of swans once at our local zoo, and yes I was mesmerized by the way they were gliding around in the artificial pond. Then I watched the ballet ‘Swan Lake’ on television and I was completely enamoured with the beautiful concept. The beautiful imaginary tale ignited my passion for the graceful bird once again. I also read a story about Zeus taking the form of a swan to entice and impregnate Leda, quite an erotic tale it was.  Today, when I look back at my obsession with the lovely bird in my growing years, I feel I was searching for the swan in me all through those years. I guess we all have our swans hidden inside us and only a few can perceive them when they look at us and hence what is ugly to the world becomes so beautiful to a few chosen beholders. I am not yet sure if I, ‘the ugly duckling’ have matured into a swan yet, but this painting is my humble offering to those birds who glide and dance in water captivating me with such beauty, grace and tranquility.