What We Carried Back

Sailen Routray

Market in Djerba in the early 1900s (Wikimedia Commons)

What you’ll see when you step into this space, is what we have carried back, from a few villages in Ganjam. 

And, pray, what is it that have we carried back?

That is a complicated question to answer; but let us at least attempt.

We have carried objects: we have carried pots that carry the ākāsa and the māti of the villages; chairs that sit egos; mirrors that shatter reflections; ornaments that knot desires; seeds that create hungers; sarees that drape our paintings; and slippers that stamp our imagination;

We have carried images: of the goddess that suddenly possessed a friend; of bamboo partitions that draped modesty; of day-long fertility rituals that promised doubt; of tigers that danced; and of girls who could not go to school and still smiled;

We have carried memories: of generous gifts of onions and brinjals; of rangolis in the off-white colour of rice garlanding our dreams; of fecund fields of blood-red tomatoes with no one to harvest them; of unknown brands of cosmetics that promised us narratives of transformation;

We have carried insights:  about a beast called bikasa; about why it might be better to let the fruit of ones labour rot in the fields than hold it in the cramped belly of the home; of the meanings of the conversations when one can barely make out the other’s face in the twinkling darkness;

We have carried objects that have birthed images, images that have congealed into memories; memories that have frames insights, and insights that have germinated again into objects.

We have carried all this;

we left bits of ourselves behind;

was it a fair exchange?

Find out.

Note: Here on this blog I envisage this piece as a prose poem. It is an 'Invitation Note' that I originally wrote for a collaborative public art show titled 'What We Carried Back' by Nilansubala Sasamal and Veejayant Dash. This show was inaugurated on 27th of March, 2015 and stayed open till the 31st of the same month at Lalit Kala Akademi, Kharavela Nagar, Bhubaneswar. The text presented here is an unedited version of this note.