As an outsider in the art world Ruchira Gupta paints hope
Painting gave me hope, while isolating from COVID-19, in the foothills of the Himalayas
By Ruchira Gupta*
January 27, 2022
From your blossoming garden gather fragrant memories of the vanished flowers of a hundred years before. In the joy of your heart may you feel the living joy that sang one spring morning, sending its glad voice across a hundred years. From The Gardener by Rabindranath Tagore, 1913.
As COVID-19 spread through India in early 2020, jobs in cities and towns had vanished, trains had stopped, workers were hiking thousands of miles trying to get back home after losing their jobs and millions were starving.
Life in India, where I belonged, seemed to be slipping away.
Then, in the middle of 2020, I joined other members of my family and returned to our centuries old home in Forbesganj. It’s a town of about 60,000 people at the foothills of the Himalayas, in Bihar, near the India-Nepal border. The British rulers had named the town after Alexander Forbes, a colonial official, to honour his role in brutally suppressing the Indian army mutiny of 1857, called the first war of India’s independence.
More than a century ago, my paternal grandfather, his brothers and their families had migrated to Bihar from Rajasthan, to escape a famine. The brothers set up rice mills In Forbesganj. My grandfather built a family home with a garden.
While I had spent all my childhood summers in Forbesganj, as an adult, pursuing a life of social activism in cities, I had stopped visiting. Then, after the COVID outbreak, for five months overlapping with the monsoon season, we sought isolation in Forbesganj.
Our old house came to life with reassuring patterns. My sister and I began the morning with a walk in the neighbourhood, which is lush green during the monsoon. One morning, I met sixteen living creatures on the walk - snakes and snails, a mongoose and a cat, birds and butterflies, dragonflies…
Every morning Sarita came to sweep away the leaves in the garden. Her family and my family had together migrated to Bihar. Sarita and my father greeted each other in Marwari, the native dialect from their village Bhadra in Rajasthan, six hundred miles away.
Sarita, whose family migrated to Forbesganj with my family, sweeps the garden.
The garden gates are always open. My mother says the squirrels, snails, birds and even the rats and mongoose must feel that the land belongs to them as much as to us.
In the garden, that my mother planted half a century ago, I re-connected with my own body and spirit. Often, when it rained during the day, I walked barefoot in the slushy mud, as I did when I was a child. I let the water trickle down my arms, while inhaling the smell of wet earth, one of the most joyful scents.
A few days into my stay, I began to remember fragments of my childhood in familiar images – drying clothes on a wash line; mangoes pickling in the sun; the beautiful harshingar flowers scattered across the grass; the air becoming still in the summer heat; and butterflies and squirrels disappearing at the first rumble of darkening clouds. Sometimes I saw the ghosts of my grandmother and my aunts; maybe even a fairy.
Bahadur, the Nepali caretaker of the house, snapped his fingers before plucking the leaves of the Tulsi plant to prepare it for the pain he will inflict. Every morning, we ate Tulsi leaves with a spoonful of water, after sharing with the gods and goddesses. It is called Charnamrit (nectar from the feet of the god/ess.) Every evening Bahadur’s wife, Shanti, lit a Diya (earthen lamp) which she placed in the alcove of the brick structure specially made for the Tulsi plant.
Late mornings, my family retreated to our different corners to read until lunch time. My father and I sat down to write our memoirs. It was prudent to finish most work in the daytime before the mosquitoes take over.
Ruchira Gupta sits down to write her memoir
Manoj, the cook, prepared a lunch of vegetable curries, dal, rotis and rice. We ate on stainless steel thalis engraved with my grandmother’s name. After lunch, it was nap time on a big bed. Waking up, with a cup of hot strong Darjeeling tea, my mother and I played Chaupar, a game played on a cloth mat with conch shells and silver pawns. My father and brother played carrom, a popular tabletop game in India, on the porch.
My father and brother play carrom.
The routine and rhythm of my childhood kept the hostile outside world at bay. All my favorites were right there with me in Forbesganj. My family, my mother’s garden, my books, my writing, my blue dress, the red umbrella, and from the outside world via WhatsApp, exchange of messages with my husband and seeing our dog in New York.
After a few days, our moldy bookshelves and the dusty books were cleaned and arranged. Forgotten objects surfaced – old books, photographs, board games, rugs, and bits of old embroidery. I opened my childhood books. I found my school drawing book, two broken brushes and six poster paints – left untouched for 45 years. I began to paint.
As I painted, I felt grief and anger: about the police interrogations and arrests of my social activist friends; the death of friends from COVID; the hunger and death caused by the lockdown among the women and girls in the red-light areas, that I work with; and the rape and murder of Asifa, an eight-year-old girl, by a group including some policemen, in Jammu & Kashmir in 2018.
My drawing book became a way of holding on to family and life itself. In turn, my Forbesganj garden holds me and gives me hope for the future. Indeed, I am very fortunate to have such a garden.
Through my watercolor paintings, I sought to capture a sense of re-awakening, of the possibility of life in defiance of disease, death, age and government. In these very dark times, I would like to share my watercolors images.**
*Ruchira Gupta writes, teaches and organizes indigenous communities against inter-generational prostitution through ApneAap, a philanthropy she founded, and affiliations with New York University and the United Nations. She was awarded an Emmy for outstanding investigative journalism. She divides her time between New York city and Forbesganj, a town in Bihar on the India Nepal border.
**Water colour and gouache on paper by Ruchira Gupta at the online viewing room of Art & Soul gallery, Mumbai, curated by Prabhakar Kamble.
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