Summer is almost over, as are the monsoons. The mangoes are most definitely gone, but here I am, still trying to snag one from the tree in the backyard of my childhood. There is nothing more delicious than a mango in the middle of the blistering heat of an Indian June. If this national fruit of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh can’t bring us together, I don’t know what can. Happy 70th birthday to India.
Left to their own devices everyday would be cake day for these two bandicoots.
Third experiment in watercolors for my husband’s 45th birthday. And, no, her hair didn’t catch fire. Its all the way down to her back now.
“In a very busy town…
On a very busy street…
Was a very busy umbrella store.
At the very back of this umbrella store, lived a little umbrella named Mimi. But, Mimi wasn’t fancy at all… in fact, she was just a plain black umbrella. But Mimi had a secret, which, made her special… very special indeed.
On rainy days, lots of people came into the umbrella store to buy, well …umbrellas! And the shopkeeper would always show them his fanciest umbrellas”….
….”But, the shopkeeper never showed plain little Mimi to anyone… and no one even asked for her.
So, she just lived quietly at the back of the store, waiting for the right person to come along.”….
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Does the right person come along? Does Mimi ever get to leave the store? What made Mimi special? What is her SECRET?
I am not telling till some one publishes this story… till then.. here are some illustrations/sketches of work in progress.
Character sketches –
This is one of the many collaborations my husband and I did in the School of Planning and Architecture in New Delhi, India. I thought of this today – as I have a REALLY ANCIENT printer that can’t scan or print anything larger than A4- so I went old school today, while working on this long panoramic (9″x72″ or longer), scanning smaller components, resizing and compositing them in Adobe Illustrator CS5, then printing out the result in small parts, cutting and pasting them, and redrawing them again. It reminded me of the pre-computer days in college – when used the photocopying machine and glue stick to cutting and paste images in layers and adding hand drawn floor plans and such to create covers and content for magazines.
It was not the best day. She had been stripped of her womanhood. Shrivelled up inside this unfamiliar androgyny, she felt too debased to dare this world of wondrous, demeaning, and fragile promises. Debarred from tasting such tantalizing portents, she fumbled for a pencil, and touched color to paper for the first time in nearly 20 years.
