The shop boy asked me why I don't just print the peacocks
Yesterday I was sitting in the shop of the paper supplier on Station Road, waiting for my order, and the young boy there, maybe nineteen years, was watching me sketch a peacock on the back of a bill. He asked, very innocently, why I do not just make one good design on computer and print many copies. Same time, same money, no strain on the eyes.
I did not get angry. He is a boy, he has only seen printed things. But I sat there and I could not make him understand that the peacock I draw today is not the peacock I drew last Tuesday. My hand was not in the same mood. The line goes thin here, thick there, according to how the brush is feeling that morning. That is the whole thing. That is the only thing.
Then I came home and thought, honestly, is he wrong? Because the cooperative gives me the same rate whether I take two days or six. My son says the buyers in Delhi cannot tell the difference on a phone screen anyway. So some days I also ask myself why I am doing this slowly, and I have no clean answer. I only know that when I copy my own design neatly, twice, I feel like a photocopy machine and I do not want to feel like that.
Thirty eight years of this work and one boy in a paper shop has put the whole question in front of me in two minutes.
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This is the whole thing, isn't it. I set stone and glass for a living, and the same argument comes at me from the other direction: why not print the mosaic design onto a sheet and glue it down, save yourself three weeks on the floor. They're not wrong that the copy is cheaper. They're just not talking about the same object. What you're describing, that the peacock on Tuesday and the peacock on Friday come from two different hands, is exactly it. The variation is the work, not a defect in it. A print is a recording of one good day. What you make is a record of many days, and the small differences between them are the only proof a person was there. Tell the boy to look at two peacocks side by side and find the one where your wrist got tired. That's the one worth money.
The mosaic version of this is worse than the drawing one, I think. A print at least admits it is a copy. Printed stone glued to the floor pretends to be the thing, and in ten years it is lifting at the edges while the real floor has gone quieter and better. What do you set mostly, glass or the stone? The glass cuts light in a way nothing printed can imitate, that part I would defend with my life.
You have said it better than I could, ji. "Pretends to be the thing." That is the whole matter in four words. And your point about ten years, and the real floor going quieter, that is exactly what I tell the boys here: age is not damage. In our painting also, the natural colour darkens with years, the paper gets its own tone, and people who know will say the old piece has come into itself. A print stays exactly the same forever, which sounds like a good thing and is not.
Mostly I paint on paper and on cloth for the wedding and ritual pieces, but when it is on the wall of a house we do the kohbar on mud wall with the fingers, and there the pigment sits in the plaster itself. That is a floor of its own kind, no? It cannot be lifted at the edges because it was never laid on top of anything.
Your glass line about the light, I will remember that. Some things the eye knows even when the mouth cannot explain.
You have said it better than I could, ji. "Pretends to be the thing." That is the whole matter in four words.
And your point about ten years is the one I will be repeating. In our work also it is same. The natural colour, the lamp black, the paste we make ourselves, it changes with the years. It deepens, sometimes it fades, the paper itself breathes. A print will sit there exactly the same for fifty years and never once look older. That is not a small thing.
What you do with stone and glass, three weeks on the floor, that is tapas. There is no shortcut for tapas. The boy in the shop will understand one day, maybe when he is forty and his back is also telling him something.