Painting in Fire and Water
They conspire so that someone, on the shores, awaits the vendor of flowers. And the other side of earth awaits Kashmir’s sun, its message that water and fire are at peace.
∼ Agha Shahid Ali
We’ve all set a timeline for our lives. Graduate at 18, a College degree at 23 and whatever you’ve decided to pursue after. Some people have a plan with check boxes and clear-cut goals, some people have messy rooms and chaotic schedules and some have sleepless nights trying to still figure things out. Knowingly or in some cases unknowingly people decide what they want to do and who they want to become one day.
There are millions who’re bothered by the same questions on timelines as I am tonight typing this out. Questions about why we allow our lives to measured in numbers and months, questions about if these timelines turn out as pretty as they do on Instagram feeds and questions of what will happen if one day the timeline swerves around and ceases to exist. Masood Hussain’s story happened to answer these better than anyone else’s.
Masood Hussain, an artist from Kashmir describes in various interviews about two instances that changed his life. The first time when years of his work was destroyed in a fire and the second time when the Jhelum floods submerged his city and he was left with nothing except for seven paintings that he’d managed to place in the attic before escaping from the almost submerged house. He describes his life as always being a struggle. No careful planning and detailed analysis of the future could have prepared him for these. He didn’t know what was to come after these either. He simply picked up his paint brushes once again. After the fires. After the floods too.
Masood Hussain did look forward to a different kind of future when he thought of a September afternoon in 2014. Not a monsoon that’d drown his work. But if he did have a timeline and written down goals for 2014, they didn’t matter to him because he knew that only time will tell what can happen hereafter. To him, his art showed the way in a time of uncertainty.
We must acknowledge that these unbelievable time stamps sometimes do help us stay grounded. They make a lot of decisions easier and choices simpler. But even these circumstances are driven by many actions not in our control. Some of them are great and give us the assurance that we’re on the right path and some of them put us off guard. 15 years ago, Aga Shahid Ali, a renowned poet revisited his hometown and gave Masood a few of his couplets requesting him to paint them. They were about Kashmir’s seasons and one of these specifically about the elements of fire and water conspiring together. The seven paintings that survived the floods were the paintings of the couplets of Aga Shahid Ali. The elements worked their own ways and they went on to define Masood’s life. It was a beautiful co-incidence that he’d saved a work of art that was about the same elements that almost destroyed it.
These stories are testaments that as long as we strive to believe and love what we do, no timeline can perfect what the future hold for us. If our plans do swerve and end one day, we’ll realize that it wasn’t for us to have decided.
By Anjali Bodempudi
Anjali Bodempudi is a media and communications student. She hopes to combine her interest in the fields of media and humanities one day.
