The mechanised being, his gate

M :

Opposite the railway station, an old public threatre, from post independence public architecture, it's simple un fetching solid, useful form, but across its facade, llike a large screen, a mosaic, a mural done in terracotta tile pieces, small squares attracted to one another, a swathe of cloth in circles falling diagonally, held in by a border of tiny terracotta triangles, a large sleeping rectangle above the curve of the nose the curves of the eyes worked in with a scalpel. A queen talks to a parrot on her arm, her other palm at rest, is reduced in size to the tiniest triangle that falls suspended from the outstretched second wrist. large sun a centre of tiny spires in two rows attached to one another, outside of them, terracotta mounds, like the offerings to ganpati, like women's breasts, in rows, small falling borders of flat circles, cascading down corners, held in byp those tiny triangles. No left side the same as the right. Organic forms through geometric shapes. And on the outiside of this radiant centre, sharp long triangles with narrow bases, like rays of the sun you can pluck and eat, narrow ice cream sticks sold cheap down old lanes in the city. Within each triangle, the hand marks again, small marks of the scalpel, dashes, irregular small line hand etched? Two women turn to look at each other in the garden. A man at a till box with a flow of round coins, what else? The circles favorite form, the coins that jingle pockets. Men with triangular daggers, a.man with a crown. Theatre expressed through a large tray of building blocks, the artist with his cutters moulding those shapes just enough to not leave them purely geometric. The freedom to make after the early constraint of only using building blocks I love you

gestures which leap over the body, will not be concealed by stillness, this is their beauty. they are gestures that express sensation, or its distillate, feeling. vulgar- of the people, human, as different from the controlled, made celestial, removed. the human gesture is vulgar, and therefore beautiful. the celestial is bloodless, air. Purvuras realises he loved the air

what does dance do to the human gesture? what is that wonderful mechanisation? [1]

nothing runs away in a gif, explains the young Usha to me. she has mechanized the stories for me into a central gesture. Nal keeps leaving the sleeping Damayanti. Usha keeps flying away from Puruvuras. Shakuntala, fondling the deer in her lap, always looks up late, at Duruvasa.

What are the other stories you want me to work on? she asks.

I think I will move from the world of Amar Chitra Katha towards the Kahtasaritsagar.. those cannot be gifd, I am sure, I tell her.

She grins in a challenge.