Everything in between

NEW DELHI ~ He had been sitting on the roof of this restaurant in Lahore’s Hira Mandi on a cold winter night when he heard the voice. Across the street, and the mesh of wires, and a million other tangible and amorphous things, the Badshahi Mosque stood. Unmoved, and in between time. For it had crossed over, and was journeying to the next. Age of belief, or disbelief, of suspension, of freedoms, and clashes.

NEW DELHI ~ He had been sitting on the roof of this restaurant in Lahore’s Hira Mandi on a cold winter night when he heard the voice. Across the street, and the mesh of wires, and a million other tangible and amorphous things, the Badshahi Mosque stood. Unmoved, and in between time. For it had crossed over, and was journeying to the next. Age of belief, or disbelief, of suspension, of freedoms, and clashes.

It was debauchery. He said so. You’d love it, he added.

I wanted to go with him to see how an artist finds a muse, a theme. In everyday life. In mundane co-existence of everything. Arjun Saluja, a Delhi-based designer, and a friend, showcased his collection ‘Between Time’ on the third day of the WIFW held in the capital last week. In the audience, I sat, trying to find Aarzoo. Reconstructing from the conversations the person he had met that night.

She was walking with measured grace, a white dupatta draped around her head, setting the borders. In writing, we fictionalize. Reconstruction is a romantic idea. You can infuse, and diffuse, cut, and crop, and adjust the picture, and then add hues. For a writer, it was a story of potentials. But he revealed her to me in bits. She came to me in the way he saw her. Teasingly, fleetingly. I imagined her in her anklets. He would correct me. I imagined her falling in love with him, and this too, he would dismiss.

“Mirch ka salan lenge aap?”

We travel alone. In solitude. Each time, I go to a place, I often ask myself the same question. From the window of a plane, looking down at the clouds, you could be going anywhere, and nowhere in particular. Those are the journeys we ask questions of identity. That's when we are lonely.

He had looked up at this offer. Heady with the smoke, and everything that made up this night in this country that was across the border but mostly existed only in our imagination. In my case, fed by Manto’s stories. Borders become beautiful spaces sometimes. They were creations of time, holdouts of those that traveled between time. Intriguingly powerful. How do you divide humanity? Do you, can you? Does it work?

It was the voice that he had found interesting. He was in between time, and spaces, traveling on no assignment. There was no hurry. He let the gaze linger, and she must have moved away. What was doing here? Regression and progression, and the conflict of identity? Aarzoo offered him a supari later.

“A city that lives alternatively midst its history. The fragrance of dilapidation, the flirtatious uneasiness of the people, and the confusion diluting into a tempestuous romance. That's how Lahore opened up to me. In between journeys, in between moments,” he wrote.

She was in between gender. Saluja, a designer, told me her story long ago. Lahore, he said, came to him like that. You must be the victim of the city for it to embrace you, whisper its secrets, its million revolutions being staged in its dark corners, its conspiracies against faith and love. You let it take over. We are all in our time machines. In between here and there. Never in the moment, because the moment lapses into another. There is no present. Nothing that belongs to the moment only. Aarzoo, I thought, was intersecting with his own quest. Who knows what we all are looking for? Love is just an easy answer. Identity, another.

Who we are? Who do we want to be? That’s how I have seen his work. I had just walked into a dark theater at the fashion week two years ago. It was called Two Equals One (provoked by Jeet Thayil’s novel Narcopolis—Spring/Summer 2013).

Farida Khanum’s Dashte Tanhai played in the background, and a model emerged, draped in a burkha-sari. This was Saluja’s interpretation of the eunuch, Dimple or Zeenat, from Jeet Thayil’s novel Narcopolis, who had said: “Woman and man are words other people use, not me. I’m not sure what I am. Some days I’m neither, or I’m nothing. On other days I feel I’m both … Well, I’m both …”

That’s how I found him. I was a writer looking for answers in Kamathipura, Bombay’s red light district. Love, loss, and identity. I kept returning to Gulli No. 1 where Zeenath, a eunuch brothel owner, lived. She would tell me the stories of being in between.

He called ‘No ground beneath my feet’ in 2012, a struggle between ‘my roots and my environment.’

“’You see, I come here as one person but leave as another. Changed by misfortune or transformed with good. I must flow like a machine till one day I can weave my dreams into reality. Until then, I cannot build walls for myself or I will not be able to build yours. I must destroy my home many times to create yours. I must carry no weight other than hope. Until then, my name must be woven in and out of everywhere I have been, and everyone I have become. Until then, I can have no ground beneath my feet,’ he wrote, introducing his collection.

As writers, we look for material. Fashion could be art, could be business. Those debates are useless. I look for stories in art. There has to be one in order for me to remember, and relate.

Saluja struck me as someone who was fusing male and female, creating silhouettes that were like costumes. Androgyny wasn’t about making men wear skirts, and women wear trousers. It was a soul thing. You feel it, and you live it. Zeenath is androgynous. She wore a pyjama kurta and a skull cap to go pray in the mosque. At other times, she wears saris that glitter and glow as if a thousand fireflies were trapped in the net of the garment

I spoke to Aarzoo. She had just woken up, and we asked her if it would be fine for to share her paintings with us. She has since joined an art school and is learning to paint.

“A release,” she had told Saluja when he returned and sought her out again in the gullies of Lahore.

Leather, frayed, and stained almost, carried in its zippers and other detailing many stories of rootlessness, and melancholy. A lot of the city was manifest. An artist he had met during his travel told him she painted miniatures of skulls. She would go to the butcher shops in the city, and create characters that spoke of the battles of the soul, and religion, and of a place that imposed too much, and of freedoms that needed to be expressed. Another painted dandelions.

Abdul Raheem Baloch, who I found somehow in the online world, wrote to me about his creations.

“My work revolves around being involved and lost in stance a state of mind where words don’t anymore. The point where this condition rejuvenates oneself and merely separates one from all the painful factors without escaping from the reality. It is a journey, which starts from vacuum, and ends at filling about blankness … Just as when we see clouds, we see different shapes and forms. Same is my vaccum, which I try to fill … I know in real one can never behold the cause for isolation and nothingness that but no one can refute their feelings and emotions forever.”

Why we both sought him out is also a reflection of what we want to express. I wouldn’t call myself an artist. Not yet. But Saluja, Rahim, and others, are. Fashion, and its commercial aspects, are important factors. But the work must flow. Like a story, structured, and draped in layers, and then bind us. I sat watching the models walk down the runway in clothes that were melancholic, and layered. Some zips had been unfastened. Others remained closed. Huge silver jhumkas on striped silhouettes were like journeying back and forth in time, and in cultures. It was disjointed. But that made sense.

“Aarzoo is about those that are in between spaces, or time. Rejected, denied, and yet they swirl in a secret dance with their destiny. It is about the hidden areas, curled up sensuously inside the ‘maili chadar’, yearning to expose the past.

Walking down walled street, experiencing those sham-e-mehfils that happened for a fortnight, I felt that I was in between narratives, swapping places and allegiances, going back, and surging forward in time. You need to be the victim for the city to embrace you.

Suppression makes you think differently. Brushstrokes on bones, conveying the unspeakable through music, questioning the very womb that birthed you. And then, there is a dying craft overthrown by the brash idea of success in society today. But it is because it seems dead that it is even more haunting. Like being between the dead and the living, reconstructing with images, and nostalgia, and ideas.

Seeing her work in a restaurant, earning the dignity that society denied her, made me want to talk about progression. Was it a unique accident? Was this the conflict between progression and regression, or its confluence?”he wrote.

All along I had known the story. But to see it unfold like this was another matter. It is with our eyes, and souls that we perceive the world. I had decided to not speak to Rahim, and Aarzoo, and others until I saw how they manifested themselves here on the ramp at a fashion week in another city.

It was story well told. Sombre, and melancholic. Intense and heavy. Like the people it had in it, or the person who spent months putting it together.

It was about traveling. About falling in love with a place, and about finding yourself.

Pico Iyer, a writer and a traveler I like, writes ‘Writing is, in the end, that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger.’

His garments – black, red, green, and grey – also were like a note to strangers. A personal one. To each of us. People clapped, and a few gasped when a male model walked down in a jacket with a hood. Again,frayed edges, and uneven tones.

So far, I had seen it through his eyes. And now, confronted with it, I saw Aarzoo in each one of those. A person trying to reclaim her space but finding herself in between time. Saluja managed to get us there.

‘Where am I?" I asked myself again.

In between everything. We could go back, or forward. But that's our own time machine. In our heads, in different cities, and in strange times.

Lahore, a maili chadar……. he wrote.

About The Author

Chinki Sinha