Written piece
Badoma's Kantha
MUNMUN MITTRA
India
About this piece
The story is about the sublimation of pain for a woman who was forced to live a colourless life. She proves that the human spirit is anyway unshakeable and symbolically, she rummages through her past and unwanted discards from others to sew dreams for herself and the world.
My Badoma would sit rolled up like an old cat. Her eyes squinted through the thick glasses. A tin box of treasure would be there by her side at this time of the day. The sun would be up and the light would be bright. Her half blind eyes could churn up the patterns inside her head and her bent fingers would trace the stories on the cloth. She would hum and grunt gently as her knotty hands would roll and unroll the strands of thread in the box. Each thread in the sewing box had a piece of cardboard for itself. They were all of different shapes and sizes, like a child’s favourite box of coloured pebbles. The colours and the shades seemed strangely familiar to me. I knew much later. Or had I already known?
She sang gently, the hymns and ballads of Lord Krishna and his divine consort and I would hum along sometimes, barely audible, lest I disturb her focus. Her songs would be like the woollens she kept in her metal trunks, rolled up in naphthalene balls, familiar, soft, soothing to the ear. She smelt of camphor and holy basil after her bath and puja and her clothes carried the fragrance for a good part of the day. Her white saree was something we often clung on to. We wiped our hands in it. We hid our heads inside it. We wrapped ourselves inside the loose part of it during the winters when we huddled inside the kitchen, near the warm earthen stove. During the late afternoons, she would faintly smell of fish and panch phoron, a five spice mix and mustard oil. She cooked everything but she ate just a few vegetables and some rice on a plate made of white stone. She was a devout hindu widow, trained and brainwashed since long by the people around her. She couldn't wait to take another bath and change into her clean white cotton saree after touching and cooking all the fish and meat.
My parents often left me to stay with her during the holidays and I found the magic box rather intriguing. She later told me that they were threads from her old sarees, when she wasn't a widow. She had worn all the colours in the rainbow when she was a young bride. She lost her husband when she was about thirty five and lost all the hues from her attire. With time, she lost most of her teeth and then her eyesight, gradually. She could still pinch out long strands of the coloured threads from the borders of her earlier sarees. She lovingly rolled them up on pieces of newspaper and cardboard cut and folded like makeshift spools and there was a pile of those to paint her chosen canvas. She wove them into stories in running stitches. Cats and mice and flowers and leaves. There were owls and crows and poems for children and rivers in blue. There were patterns in circles and stars and dreamlike stories from an untrapped mind. The threads let her speak and sing and be. I too smuggled in old cotton ‘paads’ or borders from aunts and cousins and even neighbours for her to scavenge and get new shades of colour for her palette.
A pile of kantha from her, soft and gentle, wove the story of her forbearance and calm. The storms in her heart turned into paintings in thread.
And one day, her stories carried her away to another land. The animals were all let loose and the wind went wild. The sun shone brighter and the moon waxed and waned like it had lost track of time. The poems flew out and the rivers poured out. The kantha looked white, like she had been, since she had been a widow.