Reuse

In the lexicon of Proust and Monet, ombre means "shaded." In the decorative arts vocabulary, it fittingly refers to a historic method of dyeing fabric that renders subtle gradations of color from light to dark. An offshoot of a European weaving process, ombre has adorned pre-Civil War quilts and furniture textiles, Victorian-era ribbons and trims, and even -- in a wilder moment -- 1970s disco wear. In recent years, the technique has taken a sophisticated turn, appearing in all manner of fashion.

- Martha Stewart Living 

http://www.marthastewart.com/article/looking-deeper?rsc=also_try

I've had a set of plain cotton napkins for ever. Must love them dearly, for every time they begin to look a little out of colour, they get a fresh start with over- dyeing.  They have changed colour from white to off white, pale yellow, canary yellow and now- taking a cue from MS Living- a two-toned Yellow and Orange avatar.

Have done it with a variety of other fabrics around the house, table linen, bed sheets, kurtas and Tee's.

Posting the napkin how to:

5

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1

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1,2,3

Posting a few pictures of a quirky little stand I found a few days ago.

A carved handle attached to a tiny wooden rectangular stand, which has a tiny little drawer at the side. It is hard to say how old it is or what purpose it might have served.

For now it is happily lending itself to different uses around the house, mostly ornamental.

To house a single stem here.

towels and little things in the bathroom.

Or simply a tea-light sometimes.....

M's House

Had started a thread  a few months ago, only to leave it in limbo like many other things  that need to be done until something the other day reminded me of M. 

Sweet, young and kind of forever pregnant with a protruding belly bearing twins the first time I met her and very quickly, with  a sickly little girl born premature only to die a few months later.

When I think of M, I remember  curly long hair always worn in a single  oily plat and funny ever changing shadow like marks--near the eyes sometimes or near where her cheeks sunk into deep dimples when she smiled.

 

She lived with the twins and ailing parents in a mud and brick house, right across from the house my family rented for the three summers we spent in her tiny village near Trichy. 

If I stuck my nose far enough between the trellis patterned grille on my window, I could have a good look at her house and the backyard. A simple affair like the others in the village. Squat, rectangular, covered with ramshackle red black tiles.  A porch running its length. A very white house barring a few flashes of green for windows and doors.

I could see a cattle shed at the back with its two pointy horned beasts. Here M  spent most of her day thwacking dirt with a stick broom,  a stone and mud well where her father did his early morning gargles- loud enough to rouse the village and beyond. What I could not see too clearly was a kitchen that the back door led to. A  window less room, made even more glum  with years of soot climbing up the walls and the chimney. 

I have vivid recollections of drinking coffee sweetened with tiny jaggery dumplings in her kitchen. Her mother called it `Kapi', the, sweet dark broth that left brown sand like grit at the bottom of little tumblers.

I had to steal into her house after school to drink the coffee, and that was the best part.

For reasons I only understood partially then, my mother strongly disapproved of us going to M's house. I had a feeling it was because of this funny looking man I saw on the porch one morning a few weeks after we came to stay in the village.

I saw him  sitting on his haunches in a dirty vest and rolled up lungi tied at the waist in a half skirt. Large red eyes looking vacantly at nothing in particular. A dark and brooding guy with curly black  stubble for hair.  His mere presence giving  the house an oppressive air.

I understood why that night when we woke up to loud noises coming from M's house.

Groggy and heavy with sleep , I looked out of the window to see, M's parents hunched over near the door on the porch. Loud screams followed by whimpering noises echoed out of the house for long.  I did not see M the next day. She emerged a day later in her backyard scrubbing the shed as usual.  She had a few new shadows on her face,- angry and purple.

We soon realised it was a frequent event in the life of the household and the village. Occurring every fortnight or so when M's husband Mutthu - the dark guy sitting on the porch -would come visiting from his transport business in Erode.  I heard people murmur, it was because Mutthu was a `drunk' and it was some `business'  between husband and wife.

The only night I saw anybody bother about it was a few weeks later, when my father went up to their porch and asked M's father to stop Mutthu.  The old man just shook his head in quite desperation and murmured something about fate and not having done his bit years ago when the girl was born in the first place.

I remembered M well, but comprehended her story fully only years later as an adult myself.

Transformation

Getting back to blog after a longish break. Plenty has happened.  

Summer has very slowly changed to winter here for one.  These are the sweet days of the year, when it is chilly but not the biting kind of cold, not yet atleast.  The winds roll but not with the intensity of gales. The suns rays warm and benign  slant ever so little but not in an evasive kind of way.

It feels to good to be here like this.  A time for reinventing and reacquainting with life. Time to revisit my much neglected house and blog. Posting before and after pictures of  the living room, as it changes with the season from summer into winter.

Living room in Summer....transformed quiet simply by breaking up the sectional sofa, replacing the rug and shuffling the accessories  and art work around  little.

making the area a little cosier and more intimate for the winter.

This winter I am promising my self to rest and just be.  Turn inwards into meditative silences. Treat myself to more  solitary afternoons spent with books guzzling endless cups of tea.

Celebrate  the colours of the earth and skies, with  winter flowers fruits and berries.

Listen to music on long chilly evenings...... 

To all my blogging buddies out there,  enjoy this time to rest and restore, love and be loved. Do also  visit this  space again and have a wonderful season !

Cat Street

 Uploading a few shots from an aimless tread around Upper Lascar row, or`Cat Street Bazaar' a few days ago.

In the true style of flea markets, although mostly situated astride a single street, this one is dishevelled, aging and full of odd things.

I  start  somewhere at the end of Hollywood road. Walk past old antique shops, cafes, and swanky new service apartments. A little near Man Mo temple, a narrow alley beckons me,  I walk in, contemplating the graffiti on a crumbling plaster wall. Behind a row of glitzy stores and cafes, the alley is cool and deserted. A blast of hot dog smoke blasts from the back of a charred makeshift chimney. The smell lingers only moments before the rancid smoke bearing it raises to the heavens.  At the far end of the street disembodied Buddhas sit chained to rusted iron stands. A plastic sheeted Vishnu waits patiently for a buyer. 

A nose-less ear-less wooden horse,  keeps the Gods quite company beside a reeking yet ever flowing drain.

Endless, unfathomable fascination with graves, foot binding shoes, spittoons and Chairman Mao draws folk down to Cat Street. Queer looking utensils, wine holders and chamber pots sit beside each other with new found dignity on dusty shelves. Their vendor swats mosquitoes with practiced flair, incinerating fidgety creatures with a battery run, racket like contraption.

 An old lady, strings of coral and turquoise in hands haggles with shoppers. 

Cat street is awash with objects, things old and new. Piled in mounds at every corner, pillaged from graves, dead people's homes, garbage dumps, flea markets, and dingy Chinese factories that churn out souvenirs in bulk by the hour.

Even with a surfeit of things around, more arrives here each day. More is created here, in this quite, old span of a few meters, way smaller than its former self, or so I am told.

In red and black

Detail of a Chinese lacquer table 

Of the enduring craft traditions of south East Asia, Lacquer ware is most certainly my favorite. Its production is said to predate written history. In China excavations have unearthed lacquer bowls dating back to the Neolithic period.  In Japan, lacquer coated eating vessels were popular much before the introduction of ceramic tableware. Today, the tradition continues to flourish in idiosyncratic styles and methods throughout Asia. 

The naturally occurring plastic obtained from the lacquer tree (Rhus Vernicifula) native to Central and Southern China was the authentic raw material of choice to coat every day objects with glossy, richly textured and intricately patterned veneer.

Purse and offering holder from Burma

As opposed to Chinese lacquer, its Burmese counterpart is made from the sap of the Melanorrhoea Usitata, a tree native to South East Asia.  It is completely unrelated to the shellac used in India and Europe, which is made from the resinous secretion of the insect Coccus Lacca.

All this is information is of course gleaned from various sites on the internet. Most of what I really know about the craft is thanks to my Nani.

Assorted containers on a lacquer tray from Burma 

Having spent quite a few years in Burma, she has managed to amass an impressive collection of artifacts, lacquer ware being a good part of it.

Her possessions have been a source of endless fascination and conversation on long summer days during our vacations.  My love for objects and how they colour our imaginations and histories entirely grew out of there.  

 Burmese betel nut boxes  

Nani had endless stories about Burmese fascination for Betel. Each house has an assortment of lacquered betel nut boxes - a cylindrical box made of woven bamboo and fitted inside with a pair of shallow trays to hold betel paraphernalia.

Headrest from Burma 

In an embellished account, almost story like, she told us how one of her small bowls was fashioned out of real hair, probably alluding to a peculiarity of Burmese lacquer, a technique whereby objects are made of individual strands of horse hair woven around a frame of very Finley split bamboo.   The object is made sturdy with application of successive layers of lacquer before the final coating of embellishment and pattern can be worked upon.  Tediously made over months, objects thus produced are soft and pliable, unlike the containers made from coiled bamboo or  Jack fruit wood.

 Chinese Lacquer coffee table 

Taking a cue from early memories, I have naturally gravitated towards collecting lacquer from all over. The not too shiny, not to matte finish of Chinese lacquer, makes it suitable for coating furniture. Its incredibly polished appearance and strengthening properties make it an ideal choice for an array of very handsome looking furniture.

Lacquered spoons and platter from Burma and China

Thicker, textured and malleable, Burmese lacquer is great for turning every day objects into pieces of art.  Worth mentioning here are lacquer traditions from Vietnam and Japan.  The former has a history of about two thousand years. Newer than most other traditions, Vietnamese lacquer resins are harvested from the Rhus Succedanea tree and converted into natural lacquer which is then applied to paintings and fine art. Markets of Hanoi and Saigon boast the most colourful and glitzy display of lacquer ware from local artisans. With the addition of other materials like plant material ash, egg shells gold and silver etc, artisans are able to churn out innovative and vibrant lacquer pieces in almost all colours conceivable.

Burmese Lacquer bowls 

Called Urushi, Lacquer has been an integral part of the Japanese lifestyle. It has an impressive 6000 year history in Japan. Used to coat a range of articles including furniture and table ware, Japanese lacquer ware has long obsessed the imaginations of the West. So much so that the various methods developed in Europe beginning in the 17th century were instantly dubbed `Japanning'.

The earliest memory I have of a house, is from years ago. I don't remember where it was, or what it looked like too much. There are hazy shadows where furniture might have been,  a kind of faded light permeated everything around.. probably from a 40 watt bulb. 

Soft brown layers of soot rested  on unevenly plastered walls, washed green, or blue? Soot also clung  tenaciously to webs beyond the reach of a round bristle brush attached to a long bamboo pole. 

Really high ceilings, the house was enormous, its walls soared  endlessly before hitting a dark ceiling.. wooden beams? terracotta tiles, I am not so sure now.

I remember a few smells too, a funny metallic eke of  fried fish creeping in through the windows at lunch time..smoke from a muffled cotton wick exhausted of ghee.. the sea, and above all the smell of fear like that of oily hair and  nycil prickly heat powder mixed with sweat-raw and rancid.

I must have been very small. I do not recollect  the source of the odours or reason for the fear. Two or three at the most. Is that old enough to experience fear? guilt?

  

Wish I knew what led me to this post.

Now that I am here, at the doorstep of this house, at the doorstep of fear, this  monologue has kicked in.  I feel like encouraging it a bit, playing with neglected ghosts and shadows. Who knows what a small fire can grow into.  I can come back with some other house from some other  place, for over the years I have lived in and across from many house- a lot of them I remember well enough to revisit in detail.