It has been an eventful few days. Most of this week I spent in Betawar in the village.
On Friday I had a small exhibit and we tried to start the Artists' Network. About 25 people came, and admired my pictures. Artist friends Rogesh, Vallery, and the museum curator, Navel Krishna came and also a BHU prof of painting came who was very interested. He liked my paintings quite a lot. Some community people came as well. So I should call it a success.
Yesterday I went to the village Dalit Freedom School near Allahabad. I had invited Nita's daughter Nandini to come since she was doing a project on Dalits. We had an enjoyable ride there. We were met by someone in the village on a motor bike who drove us to the school with two more scooters following in the cavalcade. When we alighted from the car, the children were dressed very nicely in their school uniforms and standing in lines on either side of the side walk. As we walked down the sidewalk to the school they tossed flower petals in our path!!!!
Everyone should have flower petals strewn in their paths once in their lives. I wondered if they had mixed me up with the queen, but I didn't see her around anywhere. Then we toured the school. The children were not having regular classes that day so they were at their desks mostly pretending to study. Only two classes were actually trying to teach the children. One room had no teacher with them at all. Two babies were in classrooms. The buildings were new, clean and spacious with beautiful fields all around. The principal said that they were waiting for new books, but I didn't understand why they weren't using the books that they had already and pass them on to the younger children. Then we had snacks. Then four girls did a dance performance for me with the teachers arranged around. The second dance had two girls. After that we were finally able to do the workshop. First we talked about how art affects us and what art is and why we do art. Then we did the color wheel and after that we painted portraits. While painting the portraits the principal kept saying it was snack time again. So we had to finish up the portraits in a hurried manner. We cleaned up, everyone got gulab jamons (a delicious ball of yellow milk something soaked in sugar water) and another treat that would have done me in if I had eaten it. Then the principal was very unhappy because I couldn't stay for lunch and do another class. But the paints were all cleaned up and I didn't want to start all over and Nandini had a meeting she wanted to attend and we still had a 2 1/2 hour drive home.
So all of the teachers and students were again arranged in the classroom and they stood up and said what they loved about the workshop. It was really heartfelt. They really liked learning about the magic of the color wheel and how you can add two colors and get a third. They said that they now had new ideas about what art was. Another talked about how he couldn't figure out why he should come to a workshop on drawing before he came but now he saw the value and had the opportunity to draw with color and he really liked it. I was then given a wrapped gift that later I found out it was a Madubani painting of peacocks, which is a traditional Indian style with outlines and filled in color on brown paper with vegetable colors.
After we got back, in the evening, Nita invited me to a Mundan ceremony which is when a three year old gets their first head shaving. So I got dressed up again and we went. It was a very elaborate affair with a catered meal with wait staff in uniforms and tables arranged with buffet all around the perimeter of the courtyard. The garden was decorated with little lights everywhere and women were dressed in their best saris with gold borders and studded with mirrors, rhinestones and sequins in a huge array of beautiful colors. The little boy with his newly shaved head was dressed in beige and maroon fancy Indian clothes with lovely matching little Indian slippers with turned up toes and maroon tassels on the tips. His suit was beige with gold and he had a maroon scarf with gold. He looked like a mini maharajah. Being touched and hugged by a hundred cheery men and women was not to his liking however and he clung to his mommy and daddy who were also color coordinated with him. His mother had a lovely chiffon beige sari with silver sequins cascading all over it and his father had a maroon shirt.
This morning Nita, Nandini, and I went to the house of one of my new friends, Vallery and her mother. The house was large and new, with stone floors inlaid with other stones. There was air conditioning with fans. Four inlaid wooden doors with glass windows went from the living room to the next room. The servant brought more food than I could eat, but I did my best. There were idlies (sort of round rice cakes), samber (spicy sauce for the idlies), coconut chutney for the idlies, toast, Boston beans for on top of the toast, mango milk shakes, jellabies (similar to the fried rosettes one used to get in New Orleans). My stomach is still full. We looked at Vallery's paintings and chit chatted along in Hindi and English. Vallery had a new fish bowl with two goldfish. Her mother claimed to speak limited English but I never had trouble understanding her. She had the most beautiful light blue sari with gold border. I hope I didn't look like I was slobbering over it.
Tonight we are going to a concert that Vallery's mother invited us to.
Tuesday I took the express train to Delhi from Varanasi. It took 17 hours plus the extra four hours that it was late. I arrived in Delhi and eventually found the driver that I had hired for the day. I say eventually since it was not so easy as it should have been. We were to meet at the ATM machine, but the train station has a front and back side which are not close together. I wanted to go to the main or front side. I hired a coolie to carry my two suitcases on his head and we left the platform went up the long stairs over the platform across many train tracks and down the long steps. However, we were then on the wrong side. I paid off my coolie who disappeared in a twinkle, before I realized my mistake. Eventually, I called him on the phone and he showed up.
After cleaning up and some breakfast I went to visit two galleries that I was hoping would sell my paintings. It turns out that neither one was actually a gallery. However, the first place I stopped off at was the house of a man who collected Indian antiquities and dealt in those. My heart sank thinking he wouldn't be interested in my more modern work. We had a strong connection with Mussoorie India which is his beloved hometown and I had just finished a number of paintings there. He and his wife invited me for lunch and we chatted on for quite a while about Mussoorie, friends in common, the economic plight of America and politics, and places to travel to. In the end he proposed helping me set up an exhibit in Delhi in February and I was very excited about the whole proposition. He would get the sponsors, line up the gallery and I would come and paint scenes of Delhi to sell. He even knew of a free place for artists to stay and paint near Delhi. We will start work on this right away. The other contact I met with was a very good and delightful cushion salesman. Instead of selling my paintings to him, he convinced me to buy $200 worth of his scarves and cushion covers, and beaded bags to sell to my friends in America. So money went out instead of flowing in. It was really a delightful afternoon. I bought a quick dinner and caught my plane home in the evening.
What a joy it is to sleep in my own bed again.
