Painted in water
It’s early in the afternoon and the world here is dissolving into simpler dreams. Color seeps into the world like a fugitive, a deliquescent love crimping into itself under the starched sun. Pigments cling like betrayals to clothes that stand briefly forsaken as they dry. Crows fly past obliviously, and the city traffic grows steadily furious. The clotheslines are singing their burden with a touch of celebration. Sometimes, a breeze passes.
Like all weather-beaten things, the weather-beaten Dhobi knows how difficult life can be. Often standing knee-deep in water, unable to feel his own toes, he inflicts his sermons on the clothes with a dignity that makes him unexpectedly sublime. A splash, the violence of cloth on stone and then over again.
The struggle traps his fingers and snares his battered arm as he tries to survive. Survival is the face of the sun, adamant in the noon heat. The urban crowd has dismissed him, but his fatigued veins know their calculations, and he repeats this over and over again. Dirt doesn’t come off easy—from clothes or from the soul
Fabric has feeling and can speak stories. Humble white cloth, unstitched and remembered in the tradition of Indian customs, exalts the smaller pleasures of life. The sight itself is a matter of considering what this piece of cloth will become upon drying. What skins will it graze, what thread will hold it in place?
Even struggle is not arbitrary. The clotheslines know this knowledge. When winds do not affect them with any relief, they stand mutely and watch others like them. This is the labor of love, a strict organization, a delicate web that holds its creators like a watery embrace, in a slippery shrine.
Uniforms, bedhseets, sarees, t-shirts. All the remnants of a past, collected here. Hanging on and hanging tight, to be taken home and folded into different closets, for different purposes, for different days, for different people. And yet, here they are together as a mosaic. Strangely united.
In the massive expanse of clothes, you extricate single instances. It inspires something in you and vanishes before you are sure. Beauty comes into being in commonplace instances. When you step back and open your eyes, you see it all assimilating, compacting, fusing and originating. This world is chaos, but magnificent. And this truth is carried in the weary vein of the Dhobi, the disciplined uniform on a heavy clothesline, a burdened tree full of iron nails and the smile of a photographer with only a camera.
