Sunday, November 4
My days have begun to follow a rhythm independent of term time, tutorials and friends, it’s the calendar of the clay that determines mine. I think of shapes and colours waking and asleep, and instead of the books for my courses I keep reading about materials for making glazes and clay for pots. I’ve come across names that ring small chiming bells inside me. Quartz, feldspar, limestone, dolomite. Cobalt, chromium, titanium, petalite.
I’ve heard some of these names before. They are like notes that linger from a happier time. I know about the Dolomite range and owe a visit to a companion of my child-hood, Piccole Dolomiti – Little Dolomites – somewhere between Trentino and Verona, that my father told us about, wanting to share with us his fascination with the universe. Some evenings he went on reading aloud from books on geology oblivious of the fact that Tia and I had tuned out in the first five minutes. But his voice seeped into us, and his oddly soothing discourses on plate tectonics, much of which we did not understand, collected in me and Tia and shaped us in the way limestone forms unnoticed in warm and calm seawater from sediments of shells and algae that remain in it as fossils. We would fall asleep to the sound of plates diverging, converging, sliding past each other, in the process causing new mountains to rise, oceans to churn, and continents to form or rupture. My father lived to only fifty-seven, but the time frames in his mind were made up of billions of years. In his personal atlas, Pangea, Gondwanaland and Laurentia were continents as real as Asia and Africa, and a fossilised ammonite, its spirals unspooling for millions of years, was not very old. One Himalayan fossil he found was shaped like a shell with waves of water on its convex side; in another you could make out a sea creature of some sort. He was fascinated by the idea that the Himalaya had been under water, peopled by marine creatures, only about 60 million years ago. By his side it was easy to visualise the collision of African and European plates in slow motion to the crashing sound of titanic waves, when mountains rose up bearing gasping fish and octopuses that would slowly petrify.
If sea creatures lived on dry land as fossils, I think now, my father too has merely gone into another element, some-where I will find him again in another form. From warm living flesh he was turned to ash that we tipped into a river – and I thought that was the most final erasure of every trace of his physical self that it was possible to think up. But now that I am learning about glazes, I wonder whether he would have found it amusing or appalling if I told him I wished every now and then that I could turn his ashes into a glaze. Had he known that his rocks and fossils, even his own bones, could be used to colour clay? If only I could reach into whichever element he inhabits now, to give him tea in my just-made cobalt-glazed mug. In the solitude of the studio, I find myself in conversations with him, asking him questions about my materials, seeking advice on melting points and fluxes. There are no answers. There is no-one else in the basement, the other wheels are switched off. All I can hear are muffled footsteps in the church above and the staccato chatter of an electric kiln’s thermostat.
Tuesday, November 6
Today I was alone in the studio. Weekdays, especially Mondays and Tuesdays, hardly anyone makes it here. I come in though, even if briefly, for the touch and scent of damp, pliable earth which I need as other people need food and water. The feel of clay is the same everywhere and this cave with tools and kilns is a piece of my childhood transported to a faraway place.
I haven’t seen many other studios. All I know of pottery is Elango’s shed by his moringa tree and his wooden wheel. In my new, cold country, the scent of clay is a way of travel-ling through improbable stretches of time and space to his low, turquoise-blue house set back in a beaten-earth court-yard, the autorickshaw rides to school through which he made up long and fantastical stories about the buildings, rocks and river we passed.
He had been coming to our house for as long as I can remember and his autorickshaw was a school bus for six of us in the neighbourhood. One of the stories he liked telling the others was about the day he decided to teach me to make pots, when he came upon me in the quadrangle outside my house fashioning a duck from flowerbed mud. He would say with a flourish how he knew at that very moment he had to take charge of me or I’d lose the gift and turn into just another book learner. He would grin into the rear-view mirror and say to Fauzia, “Book learning is for girls like you! Me, I never want to see a book again. You think I can’t read? Let me tell you I went to college and school. I know Humayun came after Babur and after him came Akbar. I can recite English poems. ‘Twinkle twinkle little star, doesn’t matter what you are.’ Tables also. Five-Nines-Ah what? Do you know? Let me see, is it sixty-three?”
Our chorus would follow: “Forty-five, ’Lango-anna, you don’t know anything! You have the wrong answer again!”
The autorickshaw had a line of bells strung across the windscreen that tinkled when we were moving, and when we gave the right answer, Elango ran his fingers through the bells to make them ring louder. He would groan theatrically at his ignorance, slap his forehead in comic gloom, go on to another topic in which he’d come out looking like a fool to make us wild with happiness. The gateman called ours the noisiest autorickshaw among all those that brought in brats to the school.
My father had seen Elango around when he was a boy helping his grandfather, who sold pots door to door. He came from a line of potters, earth-caked, sweat-stained, until his father forsook the unforgiving family trade for education and a clerical job and in due course introduced his sons to table fans, electric lights, books. There were days when my father watched Elango putter away in his autorickshaw after dropping us home, and shook his head in disbelief.
“That boy...he went to school, he even went to college. But he knew all his life he wanted to be a potter like his grandfather.”
“Just like I know I want to be a singer, Appa,” Tia would pipe up immediately. “School’s a waste of time for people like him and me.”
Elango had been to other parts of India to display the enormous terracotta urns he was known for, and even done a workshop or two for students at the local art college. A Korean potter he had met at a Delhi exhibition sent him a postcard every year, and – once – a beautifully packed set of tools and brushes. Elango sent him a fat, many-stamped envelope in return, whose contents he refused to disclose. His ties to the world outside his slummy neighbourhood gave him the aura of a film star but instead of capitalising on his popularity he stubbornly carried on working alone, however little money that meant. He gave up neither his autorickshaw nor his street market stall and he still loved nothing more than rooting around in a pond for clay, knee-deep in sludge.
“He’s a crazy genius,” my father said.
“So am I. You’ll see!” Tia wasn’t short of self-confidence even when pint-sized.
In the early days of my being taken in hand, Elango brought small balls of clay and showed me how to make things in a corner of the back veranda where he set up a wooden board with a basin of water. My father loved to watch him teach me. With the two of them staring at me and correcting me constantly I am not sure I ever made anything worthwhile, but when I was older, I started going to Elango’s house to learn. He showed me how to prepare the clay before making anything out of it, how to wedge – to knead patiently until every bit of air had been pressed out from it. He showed me how his wheel worked. It lay at floor level and was made with wood and clay that was fashioned into a heavy disc balanced upon a grooved stone. He would turn the disc very fast with a stick and once it began spinning it was like a top: it straightened and kept spinning, I could not tell how. I would sit on my haunches and try to make small things on that big wheel. In the time I took to make one wobbly bowl, Elango would have a line of large pots beside him.
Excepted with permission from The Earthspinner, Anuradha Roy, Hachette India.
