INDependent indIA
Artists / Writers:
Mark Francia Jolliffe
Hi, my name is Mark. I have travelled/lived-in India for a total of two years spread over four separate trips over the past 17 years, and I am sure I shall return there again at some point. I am currently living in central Turkey, and writing my first novel (an exploration of, or muse upon psychological abstraction and withdrawal as well as a journey towards renewal) after a life time of scribbling ideas down and playing with words. I hope to become published sometime next year.
A disfigured bajaj
It has been a good day for Indian flies as can also be said for the India files;
In a restaurant on the Parhaganj strip by Old-Delhi rail station I sat eating breakfast and looking out to the street through the holes of a latticed wood partition. The world outside filtered brightly through the leafy curlicues, along with the noise, the heat, and the chaos typical to this busy stretch of Delhi life.
There came by a long procession of porters, large cube packages raised to their heads. Somehow caught in this procession, gliding silently by, a man strung on wires, hooks piercing flesh, suspended in a harp shaped frame. A red cotton cloth wrapped about his head, a red dhoti cloth his loin, and otherwise naked aside from dark beads and ashes pressed to his brow.
Was he a holy man?... Some disfigured Christ?... Some obliquely decontextualised clown?
Bizarre spectre of entertainment or mute and potent symbol of things supernal?... Did he know himself?
The frame, mounted sideways on a chassis with wheels, was pushed along by three attendant men. Moving as they were, somewhere in the latter third of this taskful procession of packages, had the hanging ascetic reduced temporarily by context to an item of merchandise in transit. The effect was such that the men pushing the chassis were merely negotiating some rack of new clothes, or stranger still, that someone somewhere in the world had placed an order for one stretched Christ.
I wanted to follow them, to follow the seam of reflection something more. I drank down my chai and left the restaurant to catch up to them before they trundled a turning out of sight.
We came upon a small market square to which to one side, in some shade a tree, the assistants smoothly parked the mobile.
Once settled, some water passed to his lips, the ascetic started to sing some lilting, pitching sea shanty in an old Hindi tongue. His assistants joined in the refrain with small gavel shaped hand drums which fired rapidly and not in sound unlike several guns.
A small crowd gathered to inspect the hooks, that they really were punctured through flesh. To inspect the chassis, to inspect the frame. To agree upon this, to differ on that. To babble and squawk as though there were no other day, and no other sight for their eyes.
I for my part found a seat close by on some stone steps leading up to a fount. I drew out a notebook and sketched down some thoughts;
Amongst the sheep parts, the chickens, the mangled meat scraps under this sky of India – there is a man stretched on a self-imposed rack, in exile, contorted by the edifice of his will.... mortification of flesh juxtaposed dryly against meat parts aplenty for sale.
A disfigured Christ hung perpetually in sacrifice, a living symbol and sign. A strung strewn placard of improbable form. Offering up a ceaseless incantation.
The reduction of a life to the singularity of a black hole. Instead of trapped light there is a mirror held up. A question in language stretched to a null point as reflection upon the eternal. Death and birth and death and birth and death and birth.
Franz Kafka wrote to us of a fasting artist and his decline. A man who travels with a European circus, and fasts in an animal cage for the duration of a month each time the circus pulls into a new town. The attraction is supposed to draw people back over this duration to witness the man paling thin.
As new and more modern attractions appear with the advent of the use of electricity, fewer and fewer people arrive to peer through the bars, and the ascetic artist becomes forgotten. In the eyes of most of the audience in Europe at this time the practice would not have been related to the sacred.
Is it possible the fasting artist himself could have been unaware of this link? Possible that he would not have heard of asceticism and ascetic practice in the East? What impulse would have led him to pursue such an existence? What experience did he have in the cage? Is it possible that the act was merely a dreamt up novelty, like all the other attractions on display? Did the artist himself create the position by approaching the circus with his art? If this was the case, then what was it that the artist himself wished to distil to his crowd? Was he, like so many ascetics, pitting himself against human excess? Was there a light that he could see?
When looked at more closely, the harp shaped frame revealed itself as having had as it’s origin a grand piano. The words Puna Vista Social Club were stamped against the metal above Christ’s head. Now stringless except for those twines which held a man stretched inside. I suppose allusion could be made yet to some chordal harmony at play. Man stretched in vibration to the music of spheres. Stretched humming in the wind. Or perhaps merely some soft hammered trembling in agony.
The twines terminated at pegs. Tuning pegs. Quite possible to see that the levitated splay of man could be tightened or tuned.
(The poetry of the frame; I want to bring to you the soft penumbra of a musical note, a climbing rose hung in appoggiatura. A suspended moment in decay. A string bowed to vibration, rasped, infused with breath, rich in distortions pollinating the air against blossoms of pure sweet tone.)
The singing and drumming stopped, and when I looked up from my notes, the better part of the crowd had dispersed. I returned the notebook to my bag and strolled back towards them. The attendants were seated under the tree, still holding gavels now silent in hand. I approached the frame, my tortured artist in repose, and to my surprise saw sadness, perhaps tears in his eyes.
I pressed my hand against his impassive face. Yellowed eye whites and faint neon blue calcium rims encircling deep deepest brown. A tear rolled down his cheek and chest and caused one of the beads to lustre bright.
He started to speak...
He told me that the hooks came from Sardinia, the steel twine from Salamancha and that the wheel set had been salvaged from an old bajaj Emperioum, a small luxury car popular at the time of the imperialist British Raj. The piano was stationed in Puna during the second world war. The chief supplies officer to the 9th British Light Laundry Division had had the piano shipped from Italy along with five-hundred boxes of fine cigars and ten dozen strings of dry cured sausages packed tightly under the lid. (Someone had been preparing for a cushy war thought I. A smoke of a fine cigar, a tinkle on the piano, a munch on a sausage from under the lid.)
His father was the officer who put in the request, a man of considerable wealth. He married an Indian woman, a school teacher. Some years later there was a devastating fire at the family home. The small boy survived by climbing inside the piano, lying astretch the strings with the lid closed down above him.
And these things, he said, are all anyone wants to know. Last month we passed through Varanassi to bathe in the sacred Ganga river. Downstream funeral pyres burnt on the air. Quite a crowd had collected on the steps of the ghat. They hustled and jostled to look at the frame and asked all the usual questions; Is that part of a piano? Where did the fish hooks come from? Chassis of an old bajaj Emperioum? The apparatus somehow eclipsing the man strung inside. We have seen enough ascetic agony, what interests us now is the mechanics and how he manages to keep away the flies.
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