A 65 cm by 95 cm unfinished canvas awaits me on the easel in a quite corner of my studio, sunning in the warm wintry afternoon. I trudge towards it - the chain between my manacled ankles clink. I try to grab my favourite brush, it teeters at the edge of my studio stool, and tumbles to the polished parquet, rolling away with a dull drumming sound. I pick it up, dip it in black and splash it on the white patch in the upper left corner of the canvas. The tang of tear hurts my eyes.
Didn't I do this the day MH370 failed to find its way home, didn't I strike the upper right corner with the darkest grey when the Twin Towers crumbled to dust, didn't the lower left patch depict the billowing poison of Hiroshima, Nagasaki?
I sit, my face between steepled palms as I bleed in desperation. I let out a roar of cry, fret and fumble, frisk and fossick through my belongings to check for a chink in my armour; I must break free of my fetters. A loud cry of frustration is muffled by the grubby gag in my mouth.
Why can't I stop the silent nemesis, surreptitiously snowballing to engulf the humankind with death, desolation, and destitution? People will call it COVID, I see black blotches on my canvas. I weep at my helplessness, but I move on.
I am old. I am unstoppable. I am inexorable.
Undaunted by what may come, I proceed. No power can stop my long and short arms from going round and round relentlessly pointing to those same same numbers from one to twelve - same numbers spelling a different year, decade, century, era, eon! Indefatigable - am I not, I fear, for who could endure this mundane work for billions of years?
Is my canvas bereft of warm colours? Does it only mark the heinous Holocaust, horrific Black Plague, gory wars and battles, despicable genocide and pogroms, iniquitous slavery, corrupt politics, disqueting shooting at schools, deplorable acts inflicting unspeakable wounds to women? Does it only tell the brutal tales behind the building of imperial pyramids to capricious mood of nature annulling megafauna? Is it all about depression? I hallucinate.
I try hard to fix my groggy gaze to the centre of the canvas. The peripheral excrescence blurs. A warm glow emerges like the light at the end of a tunnel shaping a chiachiaroscuro of moments - laughter beside haunting yells, warmth of love beside visceral hatred, fidelity beside debauchery. The fire in me shatters my shackles. Heaviness if my thoughts lighten like cumulonimbus giving way to cotton clouds fraying from the mass and scudding across the azure to new horizons.
I believe, only I can heal.
I smile and dip my brush in white and yellow to paint little hawthorns of hope, in turquoise to paint swells of recuperation, in red to paint poinsettia of pure spirit quelling impeity and temerity, in chartreuse and Shamrock greens to paint epicormic buds of thriving emerging lives. Slowly, yet steadfastly, I keep filling my canvas with luscious warm strokes - I have to, I have to, until the tapestry looks balanced, until my canvas brings justice to all, until my canvas tells "a new dawn awaits you".
I am Time!
Dona Mallik, September 2024
Prompted by an unfortunate and deadly demise of a doctor that disgorged tales of dissolution, and threat culture in a renowned hospital of my home-city!
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