A few autumn days in Shigar
stepping out of familiarity, the joy of domestic life, and play
On the 27th of October, I got on a plane and met for the first time the girl I would be very closely spending the next 12 days with. She and I had followed each other on Instagram for a few months, but that was all. It was a small leap of faith I suppose, but one that I didn’t have much choice in because I had to take it. I had applied for the residency in May, and it was supposed to happen in June, and then it didn’t, and I (almost) forgot about it, until a message came in September asking of my availability. I’d been dreaming of going back to the mountains in autumn since last July.
The first sign that things would probably be all right (although I didn’t allow myself to make room for much doubt anyway) was that she and I had separately sent a message to a girl we knew of who lived in the place we were going to - Shigar. We had asked her if we could visit her and hang out (she responded and we did hang out). We came from very different backgrounds and different places in the same city, but it slowly became evident that we had very similar sensibilities. It also helped that we were about the same age.
One time she suggested that we buy flour and baking powder and make banana pancakes. She could’ve just said pancakes, but she said banana pancakes which I make all the time. We enjoyed cooking, sometimes for just ourselves at breakfast time, but often for the both of us. We only had breakfast elsewhere once during our time up there, on our last day, really just to fulfill the desire for a morning paratha, which frankly we could also have done without. Mostly though, we enjoyed the simplicity of doing things ourselves, even if it was just multiple packets of instant soup on a very cold evening.
There wasn’t a lot of supervision in terms of what we were creating artistically speaking, which baffled us a little bit. That we could be sent on a funded trip with very little monitoring. But I think being in nature inspires art regardless of what you set out to do.
For instance, I had lugged with me all my oil paints and oils and brushes, which weighed very much, and only used them a grand total of once. In that one time, I was disappointed by the outcome of what I had made, and was also a little stressed by the time constraint. I thought I could go the quick oil paint sketch route, but perhaps I had to switch to a different medium, the medium I’m used to in the outdoors: gouache. No one ever knows what gouache is so I tell them it’s basically poster paint, but that also feels like a juvenile-ization of the medium, and so mostly I tell them it’s like watercolour but opaque.
I did make a few gouache paintings, but I’ll be honest, I felt a familiarity and a sense of ‘I know what to expect’ that didn’t feel exciting to me. I knew I could recreate what I was seeing in front of me in paint, but is that even what I wanted to do?
Every morning once I had settled into the pace of things, I grabbed my yoga mat (so glad I took it with me) and the electric heater and my iPad and went and did a 30-40 minute guided yoga practice by the window overlooking the mountain that caught the first rays of sun. After that I made myself tea or coffee in the all too large steel pot in which surface area dictated the evaporation of half my cup most days. Then I would write in my journal.
One day, I thought of doodling digitally on a photograph of that mountain I used as my drishti every morning. This became more of a meditative and flowing exercise than most of my painting excursions had been. I think this was when I started to reevaluate the difference between what I wanted to make and what I felt I should make, the latter being the one that tends to hold me back from stepping into actual creative play.
Another day, as I waited for the car that was going to come and pick us up to take us to a garden filled with apples, I stepped outside our gate and was about to take a walk when one of the boys playing on the street asked me where I was going. I told him I was going for a walk, but then I realized maybe his question was an invitation, so I asked them what they were doing. He told me they were playing baanta, which is one of those age-old marble games boys play outside. I didn’t know how, so I asked how to play. Two of the boys showed me how to flick my finger on the marble so it goes into the designated hole. I ended up playing a one on one, almost silent game except for a few exclamations of success or failure, with a 5 or 6 year old boy called Sameer. Whether he was or not, he showed great patience with my lack of skill, a little smile on his face, repeating when I needed it a demonstration of how to hit the marble. I didn’t need to say much, and we had fun. Then our car came.
Many things can’t be predicted. I could not have predicted that my roommate and I would grow so close to our downstairs neighbors and their two 1 year old daughters, that one day they would cook in our tiny kitchen because their power was out, that another day I’d make tomato sauce spaghetti in their kitchen, or that two separate families would make it their mission to find me a Shigri husband, naturally one of their own highly eligible boys. I couldn’t have predicted the mountain doodles, or the couple that photographed me painting in a very orange landscape, or the tourists that would enter my camera frame as I filmed myself painting asking me to take their photograph. I am sure that this is what I love most about being in places unfamiliar - the unknown of things, that always exists, that deep presence, that always exists, that somehow I remember most profoundly when I’m thrown out of what I call home, only to find many homes elsewhere.
What a beautiful post, loved it, didn't want it to end 💕