Living Without The Glass Tea-Pot

A few weeks ago Mahipal broke my Borosil, glass tea-pot. I was upset, but took out an old stoneware one from the cupboard and have been using that since. I have not had the time to get another glass one, nor really felt like it. I thought what the heck; it’s just a tea-pot, what I relish is the tea and who cares what the tea pot looks like, ha!

 

And that is the mistake I made. It does matter how you see the tea being brewed. Not just because it makes a better cup of tea, but it’s like living without being able to watch yourself, see how your thoughts create life and its circumstances; witnessing your life unfold. When one is busy with the world, it does seem tedious to live this way. Yet, when I am less restless - in that relative quietude, at ease with myself, I tabulate the way my mind works. I watch questions being answered effortlessly through intuitive leaps and have also observed people do things even before I have asked them. It’s fascinating.  In that space, conversations are like someone telling me what I am feeling, even though they are expressing their own - like looking into a thought mirror. 

In some ways, it’s not unlike observing tea brewing in a glass tea-pot where leaves create patterns and the colour of the tray cloth also becomes part of the design. The way you look determines what you see.  Some of the photographs that I have taken hardly look like tea leaves at all. This may have something to do with the fact that in trying to get really close up with my ‘point and shoot’ Olympus camera, the image is blurred. Out of focus or not, they work well for me because it is not really watching tea brew that enchants – but looking at the scene, as if watching the inner landscape unfold. And in these photos, with the turquoise blue or pink ribbed handloom tray-cloth as a backdrop, the images seem almost ethereal.

 

 

 In the ceramic pot everything is eclipsed from the eye.  If I get absorbed in something else, the tea becomes too dark and bitter.  But when I can see through clear glass I enjoy watching the leaves swirling as they open up in the heated water, gradually infusing it with their hue and flavour, waiting till it’s just right before I take a sip. Sit back, my head leaning against the wall or chair, relishing the warm liquid coursing through me; cup nestled cosily between my palms as I savour the flavour of the moment. How often has life been this good, when you can sit back and reflect upon things achieved effortlessly, when everything happened exactly as you had imagined it, or better? 

 

I cannot see clearly enough inside the stoneware pot because its colour is similar to that of lightly brewed Darjeeling tea and can be deceptive. So I pour out a bit, take a sip and this has to be done at least two or three times before I am satisfied. It’s a plodding affair: remove the tea-cosy, open the lid and look inside. Does it look okay? Prod it a bit, stir it with the spoon; is it done yet? And I often equate this process with arguments or long dialogues we have with each other to ascertain what the other is thinking and where we stand in respect of them. And especially so, when you cannot get your point across, time is short and work needs to get done. But when one has the luxury of clarity: living with awareness and ease, watching thoughts unfold, heeding our own feelings, this dialogue is superfluous. Opportunities present themselves almost as if unbidden, yet are exactly what I needed and everyone seems to understand precisely what I want without elaborate discussions. Its bliss; an ideal state, but alas, nothing is permanent, is it?

When I embarked on this project on tea, observing the marks left behind in the tea cup I found them evocative of those feelings and thoughts that linger in embarrassment, guilt and pain. At that point, I would not have been able to acknowledge that I had been careless in my approach to life. But, as the creative process unfolded, a lot of things became clearer because it provided an objective perspective.

In the beginning, I took a lot of photos as I made my pot of tea each day and some were printed digitally onto fabric. For a couple of years this was how I contemplated the stains, until one day I decide to create actual tea stains onto fabric. And it was in the process of watching how I created the stains that I started making a correlation with being careless with my life - of doing things, that were punishing just because I wanted to achieve those ‘marks’ as it were.

In order to stain the fabric, I made tea and drank it. The used leaves or tea bags were then placed ad hoc on some muslin fabric. Hot water was poured over them and then left for as long as I felt like it.  This fabric and tea leaves were later placed in a baking tray, inside a hot oven. Sometimes I would forget about it altogether until I could smell the fabric burning. I found the dark burn marks most interesting and further ‘cooked’ this fabric with a fresh bunch of used tea leaves in the microwave oven. I punished the fabric as much as I dared. I loved the marks that emerged. I felt a certain empathy with them. They were evocative of what I had endured through life, what I felt like: burned, torn, stained and so fragile that some of the time all I seemed capable of was trying to make sense of what my life was and why it had turned out this way.

 I created these stains through sheer, utter carelessness. I didn't care what happened to the fabric. And in many ways I have realized that I didn’t really care what happened to me through life. I thought I did, but as life unfolded and I grappled with the pain of my carelessness, I realized just how uncaring I had been in terms of trying to understand myself. For some reason I had not thought much of what I wanted to be or do and why, but had been driven by the spoken or unspoken dictate of what was expected of me. This was not necessarily family pressure alone, but social constraints and expectations that brought into play cultural and gender conditioning and more besides. I am not alone in this; many of us are driven by these pressures until we begin to understand that it does not have to be this way. Being yourself, being different among your peers is a challenge that we are not necessarily geared to take on, which makes it harder to be what you are. 

When we accept that something we are embarking upon is challenging we prepare for it. Recently, I read an article on aerialist Nick Wallenda's plan to walk across the Grand Canyon in Colorado, USA, on a 2 inch wire, 1500 feet above ground, across a 1400 feet gorge, without a harness. He narrated the elaborate preparations he and his team had made for this event and I thought to myself: what if one approached living with the same attitude? We prepare for exams and job interviews and things one may do in the public domain because we know we are being watched, but when it comes to the personal sphere, these challenges – of relationships, parenthood and those of daily living, are left to pure chance - much like the stains I created on the fabric.

For the last 20 years, I have spent a lot of time watching myself think and focusing upon my feelings. It felt odd at first and I would often think that I was being self-indulgent, wondering how I would achieve all that I wanted to in the span of one life, if I spent so much time this way. However, when I try and push the pace, I succumb to the stress of doing rather than being and it feels like brewing tea inside the dense stoneware pot. I have to keep looking, mostly looking back on the day, analyzing things and arriving at all manner of insecure conclusions. Drinking this bitter tea only adds to the stress.

Mahipal breaking the old one has been fortuitous in reminding me of the tedium of life, when one doesn’t allow enough time to be effortlessly tuned into oneself. Despite know this, I do sometimes get caught up in the whirlwind of living. This also has its place in life but, I really must get myself another glass-tea-pot and start looking again. It is not nearly as much fun living without it.

 

 

 

 
for more about the stains: http://gopikanathstitchjournal.blogspot.com
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And Looking, I Found Myself Change

It all started when I bought a new phone in March 2009. It had a user friendly 3.2 mega-pixel camera that wasn’t half bad. The images I took were not terribly good but I was inspired to click anything and everything that caught my attention. In doing this, I started focussing on little things in my everyday life from left over food in the dishes to dregs of coffee or tea in a cup. Although I must have photographed everything from cut flowers to shadow lines and more, it was the dregs in the tea cup that fascinated me.

I enjoy my cup of tea and have a cupboard full of various teas from Jasmine to Darjeeling, Nilgiri, Assam, Herbal teas, Japanese Sencha and Genmaicha and I also enjoy a cup of good old desi masala chai. All of them have a different texture or leaf. The jasmine leaves uncurl their sly tendrils under the influence of hot water, looking suspiciously serpent like. Remnants of various condiments of a rich masala chai, stain the cup with lines so evocative that I have spent the better part of two years, recording them. Photographing marks left in the cup, half drunk or emptied of all the liquid content. In the process I have also studied dimensions of the cups and mugs that I have drunk from.

I pondered on these images for a long time, wondering how to translate them into something I could share and decided to have them digitally printed onto fabric. I then worked with layered images, using the ‘stains’ to reflect a state of mind. These marks became evocative of guilt, shame and blame, the kind of thoughts we carry around us that come up under self-reflection or introspection; of thoughts mulling over a cup of tea. 

There have been many instances in my life, where I think of what it would have been like had I done things differently. What would life have been like, for instance, if I had not returned to India, from London in the nineteen-eighties? Or if I had started out as an artist rather than pursuing a career in design to evolve as an artist, or if I had not entered into various relationships? The list was endless and the marks in the tea-cups thereon, allowed me to go back in memory, delve deep into my psyche revealing familial histories and national influences; making me realise I could not have done any different. Life played herself out such that this is what it was meant to be. I have never really accepted the concept of destiny but started realizing that the only choice one ever has is the attitude with which we accept what occurs in life.

This exploration was not necessarily comforting and dealing with various feelings and thoughts, I would tear the fabric, pull it into different directions, distorting the weave, creating bunches and bulges which the Kantha or running stitch that I have chosen to work with, often exaggerated or quelled, depending upon the mood I wanted to portray. I discovered the Kantha through an article I read three decades ago, on the Sujni’s of Bihar, where women would use old worn-out sarees, stitching them together to make quilts. I liked the idea of taking the old and making something useful from what has been, fashioning it into something new. It allowed me the grace to pick up old memories, wounds and issues, deal with them through the process of tearing, layering and stitching to lend another perspective to things, renewing the spirit, taking control of the past towards deeper realizations which empowered through the process of looking. These meditations on tea, tea leaves, tea cups and the process of drinking became a fascination; you could even call it a kind of obsession for despite taking at least a thousand photographs I keep clicking the ubiquitous tea cup. I just cannot resist. Each day there seems to be yet another nuance that I absolutely must have in my collection.

I have since acquired a more respectable camera which prompted me to go farther a field and look at how people around me engage with drinking tea. I didn’t want to make this into an elaborate project extraneous to my life and surroundings so I just stopped at various points on my route from Gurgaon to Delhi and looked at things around me more keenly. A lot of what I did record is what we know well and stopping, observing and recording these images, opened up a whole new dimension that I would otherwise miss as I blinked in the car or walked past, too preoccupied to notice.

I found that these photographs, which later also included my friends and business meetings or tea at social outings as well as the truckers at the Hindustan petroleum depot in Bijwasan, the chai wala outside my building complex and the servants in my home, started creating a social panorama of sorts where the common denominator was how we made and drank tea: its cups or lack of them, its vessels and utensils and the spaces we made or drank tea in, that started defining the larger cultural and economic environment which I existed in. The contrast between chintz curtains and silver ware at the British High commissioner’s residence and the widow who sat on a ram shackled cart serving tea in plastic bags to labour working on construction sites in Palam Vihar, was telling. A story was emerging with evident socio-economic disparities, the implications of which I could not ignore. 

I did engage with everyone that I photographed. Some were shy, some got angry, some did not even notice. So pressed were they in catering to their custom they couldn’t care who came and did what, as long as they sold their tea. I became engrossed in the people and now notice them even as I sit in the car unable to ignore them like before. I began noticing little things: the way they sat, the way they dressed, the way they treated me, talked to me. How they opened up, so giving under a friendly gaze. Some were curious and also amused at my interest. For the most part they all wanted to tell their stories, where they came from, where they were taking the tea and more. Gradually, I became less and less inhibited in talking to them and a dialogue ensued that compelled me explore the national psyche which I believe mirrors my own.  I went back to Partition for it is an important turning point in making us the way we are today, in many unspoken ways. Needless to say, history is deeper than that, but somehow the events around Partition; its many unuttered stories and memories have created an internal neglect which many of us, if not all, have inherited. This to my mind has tremendous bearing on the external neglect that I was seeing and have recorded around me, in my daily excursions and rituals of living. And thus looking, I found myself change.