Coma

For want of a better word we may call them etched, but they are much much more, they’re some sort of time capsules, encapsulated in the memory, without any rhyme or reason, devoid of justifications. 

We later weave a logical structure around them, eager to preserve our sense of sanity, or maybe to put them in neat logical catalogues, for future reference. We run away from our own serendipity, creating comforting maps of dark solid lines, so it be.

They come back in flashes, destroying our presumptions, laying bare our fallacies of having fathomed the subconscious; they come as if they’re happening now. Memories, are they or loops of time, played again, sometimes trivial like the memory of the school desk on a random day, I  vividly see the name of earlier students carved with the pointed divider from the compass box. Sometimes substantial like the moment you saw her, the gleam in her eyes, only that, rest all is hazy, before and after.

Try and you won’t be able to get them, elusive and mercurial, try harder, you hit the haze. 

But sometimes you witness them forming-germinating-engraving in slow motion, and you know, they will be there with you forever. 

I was looking at the paintings, the curator had done a good job, neatly deriving sequences, drawing themes and postulates around periods of transition in the painter’s life. The woman had died young, lived her life vigorously, loved and hated with stark transparency, and painted like one possessed; enough for a lifetime, albeit a short one. The transformations were marked, countries, contemporaries, schools and movements, objects and subjects, tones and techniques, differed from one to another, even her self portraits reflected her mercurial self, metamorphosing through her own reflections, her own brush.

The ‘Indian Period’ was the section which was true to the text, a clean break from the formalistic aspects of western ‘school-art’, raw and earthy, philosophical and intense in the same stroke. Buffaloes, rural women, musicians, rural folk, all antipodally away from the clinical anatomical nudes of the earlier periods.

Then came the last exhibit, an unfinished painting, the description said, “She kept mumbling about colours, blues, reds, greens and violets. Subconsciously she was still thinking of colours in light and shade. Then she went into a deep coma.”

It all went in slow motion then, the blobs of colour, slowly seeping through my mind, people around became blurred, sounds reverberated, slow and elongating at first, then ebbed into a fuzzy hum. I started slipping into the frothing coma of colour blobs, warm and comforting, the sounds danced with colours in a languid psychedelic smudge, oozing-trickling-dribbling-bleeding through my consciousness, connecting me to her in her final moments. She wasn’t struggling to stay, nor hurrying to go, drifting with the fractured rainbow, she was slowly sinking.

She would periodically wake up, the colours would intensify, dark violets, blazing blues, streaks of glowing orange; then her breath would again settle to comforting browns and soothing greys. There were no words, no people, no wants and yearnings, just a flow of pure awareness, pristine and untouched.

Suddenly the bell rang, the sound cut through my head like a chopper blow, it cut my connect with her coma, I was back, breathing intensely, as if out water, just after drowning. The gallery was shutting down, the incessant clang of the warning bell kept sawing through my mind, a splitting headache told me that I was alive.

Her last painting, her coma, was a part of me now, engraved-etched-encapsulated.