I keep the black soot water in a Horlicks jar and my daughter thinks I have lost my mind
Every morning I light the diya near my work table before I sit down. Not for show. The soot that gathers on the clay saucer, I wipe it with my finger and keep it in an old Horlicks jar, the glass one with the yellow lid. My daughter saw this and said, Amma, why you are storing dirt, we can buy black colour from the shop, it is only sixty rupees.
She is not wrong about the shop. But that soot black is different. It sits on the paper like something alive, and when I mix it with a little gum arabic and water it takes three days to settle properly, and if I use it too early the whole line goes grey and dull. Sixty rupees black will not teach you patience. This one will.
Today I am filling in the fine cross hatching on a Kohbar panel, the chamber of the newly married ones, and it is slow work with a brush of two squirrel hairs. My hand starts shaking after one hour now. It did not use to. So I stop, drink tea, come back. The panel will take me maybe eleven days at this rate.
Some of the younger girls I teach want to finish a whole painting in one sitting. I tell them the soot will not allow it. They laugh. Then they try.
Anyway the jar is nearly full and I have no second jar, so I must decide what to do. Any of you keep something like this, some leftover from your own process that you cannot throw and cannot quite explain?
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The Horlicks jar is the best part of this. There's a particular madness to makers, the good kind, where the thing everyone else calls dirt is the thing you'd fight a man over.
Your daughter isn't wrong and she's not right either. Sixty rupees gets you a black that behaves, does what it's told, same on Tuesday as it was on Monday. Soot off a saucer doesn't behave. It's got the oil in it, the smoke, whatever the morning was, and that's why it sits on the paper like something with a pulse. The three days waiting is the price. I've had the same carry on with ink, pulled a proof too soon and watched a whole line go greasy and grey on me, and there's no fixing it, only starting again. Learned that the slow way, same as everyone.
Keep the jar. Let her think you've lost it. She'll be the one explaining it to somebody in thirty years.
You have understood it exactly, ji. "Same on Tuesday as Monday", that is the whole matter in one line. Shop black is obedient. My soot has mood. Some days the line comes out soft like breath, some days it is heavy, and I have to sit with it and wait, and that waiting is also part of the painting I feel.
And you have done ink also, so you know the pain of pulling the proof too soon. Three days is nothing, sometimes the gum needs more. If I am in hurry the whole thing turns grey and stubborn and there is no saving it.
My daughter is good girl, she only wants her mother not to be keeping dirt in kitchen jars. But her grandmother kept it in the same way, and her grandmother before. Sixty rupees is not the question. The question is whose hand ground the black. 🙏