Broken bits of wisdom
Rooma Mehra

I SHARE, undoubtedly, with a lot of other people, a special attachment to things that are fragile.. small mementos sometimes preserved lovingly for years. An attachment that threatens to become more and more obsessive, as their sentimental value multiplies.

Hence, I react with an involuntary start and a thumping of the heart every time I hear a "thud" or a "crash". The strides that take me to the broken object are shaky, lest I should see the first ever gift from my best childhood friend, or, God forbid, my father’s cherished big clock (in sheer glass with its gold-plated hands permanently frozen at 3:52) in smithereens.

When the agonising suspense is over and I have seen with my own eyes that it is indeed one of the old favourites that took a knock and lies beyond repair, I am yet to learn to react with a resigned shrug of the shoulders instead of impotent rage.

I was spared the torture of the suspense on the night of the earthquake that caused such devastation in Uttarkashi and shook us Delhiites out of our sleep, because the incident was too mammoth for me to relate it to my small, cherished possessions. I learnt my lesson when I returned to my studio the day after.

When I had my studio built, I had the labourers build four special inlaid receptacles in the wall. One contained one of my oldest and most loved creations in clay that came closest to being my first "sculpture".

I had painted the little doll-like girl with the hat and glued it to the cement, securing it in the receptacle for frozen permanence. The other one contained a virtual hoard of childhood memories.... bits of broken glass from broken mementos that I had first painted and then set in cement in a relief form.

For quite a while I sat brooding over the damage, unable to figure out who had managed to dislodge the doll and fling it on the floor where it lay in fragments, and how the cement relief had flown out of its secure sanctuary and landed on two of my paintings, breaking the glass on both. It was only by evening that I could connect the damage to the earthquake the night before.

The lesson that I refused to accept was staring me right in the face. I could blame nobody. God had tried to reason with me. I was being told very firmly that one must look forward in life and if one tended to get attached to fragile, beautiful objects, one must know that they would one day come asunder, the same way that human beings do.

I managed to join the broken pieces of the relief and keep the relief, with its cracks visible, at eyelevel to remind me of the lesson. I sat in front of it in contemplative silence when the first ceramic Ganesha I had purchased broke, and when a beautiful china-figurine presented to me by a perfect stranger — a gypsy girl I met in Austria — for "good luck" crashed to the ground. The lesson somehow never really registered.

My cherished possessions now include the cracked and painted form of a broken first sculpture, a ceramic Ganesha — artistically modified — and a dozen other such items! Who knows, I rationalise, maybe the lesson was not such a harsh one because the repaired objects look lovelier, if different, from the originals.

A little sadder but stronger.

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