The Cinnamon Peeler

If he were a cinnamon peeler he would leave the yellow bark dust everywhere he went and everything he’d touch would secrete the sweet, pungent taste of cinnamon.

His trade is similar. Everything he touches turns to black and white, never to be forgotten, doomed to haunt, secreting that familiar scent of nostalgia for things unloved, lives unlived, moments that will never repeat themselves.

Like his self portrait in a room he once called home. His eyes are drooping, recovering from some trippy, hazy night, his cupboard is unlocked and his body is open and inviting. He’s looking into the lens inside-out and outside-in. It could have been an epiphany, it could have been that precise moment when he first discovered his manifesto for beauty that is fragile yet intense.

I look for him in every image but he is elusive. Evasive. He is nomadic, wanderlusting from one space to another, observing, living without always entering the realm of the living. Peeping through a hole, a lens, looking with a sense of wonder, and surprise. Perforating. He is the nomad who knows too early that there is no promised land. He sees the miracle in the familiar, the ordinary.

Like his bathroom shelf in New Delhi, 1984- a clutter of assorted things: a packet of detergent, an ashtray, a coffee mug, a shaving brush (bristles gleaming in the morning light), a razor blade lurking behind a bottle of water, scrubbers and soap holders and a tube of some mysterious ointment.

Or that vacant room he called Home, New Delhi, 1972- A refrigerator, an unkempt floor-mat, books, from a time he used to read. Or those little truths that flicker in wooden circuitboards, or youth trapped in a six-string guitar or a pensive pair of knitting needles.

How do I peel the cinnamon peeler? How must I undress him? Strip him down to size and frame and composition? Grind him into cinnamon dust to arrive at his manifesto?

He captured her revelry. As Nommie danced she whirled her hair and became the center of the universe and shed cosmic tears.

Everywhere his eye gazed, his scent was sure to follow. And he remains almost invisible for he looked outside-in not inside-out like you or me. And yet he’s etched himself everywhere, swallowed three cities whole, and lived to tell the tale.

He’s exposed their lovely little secrets, the orgasms and the opium, the bell-bottoms and knitting needles, the hair speckling at fiery points, silver bangles aligned on a tired wrist. And bodies- a mixed bag of bodies, some open and exposed, warm and luscious, resplendent in the light of a hidden lantern, fertile bodies with babies at their breasts, fragile bodies reclining on an armchair, adolescent ones, closed and confused accompanied by a cigarette.

And then there was Veena, poised at some corner of Connaught Place, clutching a bag and a shawl, stricken by some spell, worried.

And there was Pooh with her fiesty, provocative body looking boldly into his lens with her kohl lined, almond shaped eyes, looking at him inside out and outside in.

And then the kiss. Two tongues outstretched on the verge of a meltdown. Tongues tainted by lust, corrupted by the sin of knowing too much and too little, looking outside in and inside out and forgetting to see.

They are a part of me now, those figures from his youth. And now I peep into forbidden spaces, I eavesdrop on silences. I, too, swallow cities whole. I feast on them and churn them out in dreams.

I never left that gallery that fated Wednesday evening in Delhi last year. My spirit was overwhelmed and for the first time, since Souza, did I fully fathom the miracle that Stendhal experienced…

“My head thrown back, I let my gaze dwell on the ceiling. I underwent the profoundest experience of ecstasy I had ever encountered. I had obtained the supreme degree of sensibility where the divine intimations of art merge with the impassioned sensuality of emotion.”