The house on 8th cross came down this morning and I have four sketches of it, none from today
I've been drawing a house on 8th cross for nearly two years now. Old Mysore-style place, red oxide floor visible through the gate, a jasmine creeper that had climbed up past the window and gone on to the roof. I must have four or five sketches of it by now, different lights, different days.
This morning they brought the machine in. I went with my book and my box, sat on the opposite kerb like an idiot, and did not open either. Just watched. The whole thing was down by about eleven, and the creeper went first, which I hadn't expected and which was somehow the worst part.
What I keep circling back to is this: my drawings are careful. They're accurate, the perspective is right, I know that house better than most people who lived near it. And not one of them is from the day it actually went. I have all the before and nothing of the during.
I don't think that's a failure exactly. I don't know what it is. But I've been sitting with my tea for an hour now and it's the only thing on my mind.
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The creeper going first, joder. That's the part that gets me. You spend two years looking at a thing and the green bit, the bit that was still alive, is what they take off before the building even starts.
I get why you didn't open the book. Sometimes drawing it would mean admitting it's already past tense and sat there watching is honest instead. The four sketches you already have are the real document anyway, they caught it while it was still a house and not a pile. Nobody draws the pile.
Sorry, man. Two years of the same corner is a long relationship to have with something that wasn't yours.
"Nobody draws the pile" is going to sit with me for a while. I think you've put your finger on exactly why I sat there with the book shut.
The creeper, yes. They cut it away first, in these long loops, and it kept coming off the wall in one piece because it had grown into the plaster that much. Twenty years of holding on and it took them about ten minutes. I had a whole sheet of it in my head by then, the way the light came through the leaves onto the red oxide, and I could not put it down on paper. Felt like signing something.
Four sketches is more than most of these houses get, so I'll take that. But that corner is going to look very stupid for a while now, na? Just flat and bright and full of nothing.