Sunday, February 6, 2000		Article

Of faith, sculptures and broken bangles
By Rooma Mehra

SOMETIMES this terrible fear nudges my heart that perhaps I lack ture faith. Why else do I always try so hard? Maybe my prayer lacks the true abandonment of those who are just able to put extra effort on the side and relax in the faith that God will, of course, take over, after "effort" is fully taken care of. It makes me pray extra hard to compensate for that little doubt that is always there... And that extra effort makes my fears, of being a fraud in God’s temple, even more real... It is a vicious circle.

These scary, negative thoughts strike me when at the happy end of almost eight hours of continuous, relentless work under the hot, sultry August sun and the following drizzle, I step back to appraise the finished result in the form of what I had thought was my best sculpture in cement and scrap to date, and stumble, falling right on top of it. The impact of my hands, the cement still fresh on them, on the finished wet cement of the sculpture, is great enough to destroy the sculpture beyond redemption, I feel. So much for my happy illusion that I hardly weighed anything. I weighed enough to kill my own sculpture.

I remember, as a child, when glass bangles were already becoming a rarity, we would go hunting for those bits of colourful glass. Nothing can match the excitement of finding a particularly fascinating bit of bangle. We would sit for hours in front of lit candles, waiting for the tiny, quivering flame to heat the centre enough to bend the bangle-bit enough to be able to string it into a necklace of broken glass bangles.

All the other necklaces, bought from the market, seemed like so much scrap when compared to this childhood dream-necklace. Our magnificent obsession — that never materialised, of course — because nobody ever thought of replacing candles with a better heat-outlet.

As I stare glumly at the bits of colourful glass bangles gleaming teasingly in the sunlight on the broken pieces of wet concrete on my broken sculpture, I find myself wishing that I had not found that long lost boxful of broken glass bangles collected over years of childhood glint, grinning, at me, where my hands dug into the concrete during the fall.

The changed shape outlined in the sunlight suddenly looks quite interesting, even arresting. Infact, it looks almost whole and complete, much like a bird with multi-coloured feathers, poised for flight. Now, if I would add two human hands, almost joined in prayer, emerging from the deep hand-print furrow, it would balance the negative and complete the sculpture... with its wing-hands.

I leave the deep hand-prints-furrow alone and start repairing the cracks.. wondering where I could find two whole glass bangles. No, in fact, one would do fine if I could break it into two exact halves for the base of the two emerging hands.

I take out one glass bangle from my collection of glass bangles and find I am absolutely unable to break a whole bangle — it breaks my heart — and the cement hands are already set so I cannot use two whole bangles now.

As my search for two almost-halved-glass-bangles enters its second week (Try hunting for broken glass bangles in G.K.) I realise it is not prayer but patience that my effforts sometimes fall short of. Maybe I fear that the poised-for-flight bird-sculpture will take flight if I don’t seal the base of the wing-hands to the concrete body with the two halved bangles. I finally cover the sculpture with an opaque black polythene and hide it away in a corner where I cannot see it anymore.

That was sometime ago.

Today, walking through the narrow lanes of Chandni Chowk with my sisters, we spot happily the great number of broken glass bangles strewn on the ground, nostalgically reliving childhood dreams of broken-bangle-necklaces. The conversation moves to the exciting musty smell of old books in the school library and childhood friends and teachers .. till I brake at the sight of a black polythene bag on the ground crying for my attention — and still incomplete sculpture nudges my memory.

I have to walk back almost half-a-kilometer, to find and finally pick up the two bangle-halves in the lane we have left behind, with the realisation that I had finally abandoned hope and regained faith .. spelt in the clutched bangle-halves ..

I return excitedly to my studio to find a blank-patch-in-the-dust where the sculpture had been, and an equally excited servant gleefully narrating the tale of his first "sale" to an eccentric art buyer half-an-hour ago who only wanted that raddi-ka-sculpture .. and he looks concerned that I should be looking weepy instead of happy.

An amused God-picture grins at me as I deposit my two bangle-halves in front of it.