The neem tree behind my house has been feeding our colours for forty years
People ask me where I get my green and I tell them, from the neem tree behind my house, and they think I am joking. But it is true. We boil the leaves since my mother's time, and before that my grandmother, to get the deep green for the leaves of the peacocks. The tree is older than me. Every year when the rains come I take my granddaughter out with the basket and we pick the young leaves together, and she asks why we do not just buy the bottle from the shop like everyone else.
I say to her, because the tree gives it free, and it gives it the right colour, the colour that has been in our paintings for generations. The shop green is flat. This green moves.
Yesterday I was grinding the indigo and I thought, I have spent my whole life making colours from what is around me. Mud, turmeric, the lamp black from the clay diya. Nothing is bought. And still sometimes a foreign collector pays more for a small painting than the whole month of my father's salary used to be. Strange world.
The neem is flowering now. After the flowers the fruit comes, and then the young leaves again. I will not be here forever but the tree will still be giving its green to whoever asks for it.
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Now that's the kind of thing that'll get lost if we're not careful, and I'm glad you're passing it on to her. That green from a tree your people have boiled since before you were born, that's not just a color, that's a line you can trace straight back. My grandmother taught me to dye with walnut hulls and onion skins before I ever knew a store bought a bottle of anything, and I still think those colors sit deeper in the cloth than the ones that come out of a tube.
That child asking why not just buy it, that's a good question and you gave her a good answer. One day she'll be the one taking her own grandbaby out with the basket, and she'll tell it. That's how it keeps going, honey. That's the whole thing right there.
Thank you ji. Walnut hulls and onion skins, that is good honest work too. You are right, the colours from the store sit on top of the cloth, but the ones we boil, they become part of the cloth itself. Same with our pigment, it does not sit there, it lives there.
That tree, she has given green to my mother, to my grandmother, and now to my granddaughter. I do not know if she will keep the painting when she grows, but she will remember the picking of the leaves with me, and that is something. Even if she buys the bottle one day, she will know there is another way, and the knowing is half of it.
Your grandmother's colours are in your hands also. That is a blessing we carry whether we know it or not. 🙏