Sudha Padmaja Francis

March 26-April 2

Am I still allowed to doodle?

Jan 16-Jan 23

Our Courtroom

Our Courtroom, 2024

South Africa presents its case against Israel at ICJ 

Source: Live streaming video of SABC News

Jan 2-Jan 9 2024

Underwear Sculptures

When voluminous  women

remove their underwear

It becomes a sculpture;

crumpling many layers of it,

becoming a new sculpture on its own

with the creases, twists and turns

Oh so unique!

Some get irked by this sight

as they make their way to the laundry basket

and then to the washing machine

There are sculptures in my university

all made by men

with significant holes in them

My younger friend there once asked me

us talking about those sculptures

Aren’t there any women sculptors in the country?

Actually very few people inside the house

ever see women’s underwear beyond bedrooms.

Those marvellous sculptures are so private, 

that they could be mistaken for ones private parts

being secretly transported through the house;

they are hidden under clothes 

which are carried through hall ways and dining rooms,

only to make an appearance in the kitchen;

 backyard ropes  delegated for them

await their arrival

on days of washing.

And then, they lie there like a discarded sculpture

beheaded, in the laundry basket or bucket,

waiting to be churned out in the washing machine

and hung up on the ropes with plastic pegs.

The sun touching them,

healing them

preparing them for their next sculpture

to be seen only by a pair of eyes

That thing of beauty

rolling it’s way down my voluminous hips and thighs

arriving at the floor without asking for attention.

Oh so unique!

Or are they?

 Are we living with sight?

Or do we want to look away to save ourselves alone?

Like a discarded sculpture, beheaded.

Red green white black, 2024

October 24 to October 31

Lost and Found and ..

*This essay was written in April 2023*

In Elia Shafak’s  Forty Rules of Love there is a character called Aziz Z Zahara, the Sufi-writer. Ella Rubenstein, the ‘ protagonist’ of the novel , after she begins reading the manuscript of Zahara’s novel ‘Sweet Blasphemy’,  looks him  up for the first time online. She discovers that he is a blogger who puts up photographs of people he meets on his travels and one thing that links them all is that they seem to have lost something.

Just a few days ago I scribbled:

I  had to put my hands,

into so many unknown tree-holes all through 

this journey.

Tree-holes may be filled with a variety of things:

sticky toffee, 

used hair band, 

ants dividing sugar dutifully amongst themselves,

note that never reached its destination,

squirrel hiding from its companion 

to savour the mango on her own,

a single slipper,

a single earring..

Since the last few years, I have been losing ‘single earrings’ of mine. Sometimes, it is when I return home from the railway station in an autorickshaw that I have that feeling. A feeling which tells me something is amiss and then I check and then I feel the shape or form of the earring only in one of my ears; in the other, there is just nothingness.  But curiously for quite some time then, there has been a phantom earring telling me that it is still there.

What happens to these lost earrings of mine on this earth? Will they show up at some beach some day? Like those single slippers we see on the beaches. But those single slippers are not a mystery. Which woman would think about finding her slipper to go home after watching the sea for hours? Or the children who played ecstatically in the sea, what could possibly wait for them beyond the brown sand? Or these could be interchangeable activities for both of them that would keep them by the sea forever? Yes, slippers could be lost in purposeful amnesia for sure. An attempt to forget what is behind the waves, the golden brown sand, feet dug deep into that wet sand.

The sea and the beach held possibilities for me, even as a child. I grew up very close to the sea. Walking to the bridge ( that would later be broken by the 2006 tsunami),  was a treat when there were visitors at home. I felt especially alone, not lonely, when I was on that bridge. I for one immediately thought I was a sailor on a ship as soon as I stood on the bridge. Traversing boundaries of land through water, going away and away. 

Getting lost lured me only in my dreams. I did not have the courage to even be a tad bit rebellious as a child. There was an internal rebellion that did not lay to rest even for a day though.. But I guess my mother saw through it. She must have known that when she passed, it would erupt, from the place in between my breasts, into my mouth and eyes and tips of my fingers. It is often joked that she would cut me into pieces and would have thrown me into the sea if she had seen what I had become 🙂

 Disobedience and the actual crosses one would have to bear as a woman if one got lost dawned on me only much later. There would be people to keep tabs of what she lost and when she was lost, never searching for her, but there was a noticeboard in each bylane that said Lost and Found Women.

Shame is the emotion with which I would describe my 20s. Overpowering, overwhelming shame that I was made to feel/felt for being lost. Lost after I lost my mother, lost after not having discovered myself despite being 20.. 24.. etc. Zadie Smith talks about the shame of not being understood or not being able to make yourself be understood in an interview. There is nothing to describe the shame ‘lost’ women feel better than those words. All the other emotions that seem to be ascribed to them anger, bitterness all are shame rolled out into the mouth but thrown out as something other.

I went to Pondicherry alone, after signing a piece of paper in the court when I was 22. I went and lived alone by the sea for a week. I went until its edge, in the night, knowing too well I would like to get lost only in life then, and not in death.

This sense of loss keeps happening like waves of the sea. There are some days when I wake up that I do not want to wake up and would rather remain in the dream that I was dreaming. More than the dream, I wake up with a Malayalam film song in my head which occupies and populates my inner being for a week; I never want to lose that loop.

In an American series I have been watching for a long time now, in one of the episodes I  recently saw a Lost and Found room in the police precinct central to the series. Some things are like that; you know that they exist but seeing or reading about them suddenly calls forth a surprise or shock regarding their existence that reality cannot conjure up. To think that there must be officers in the police, in the railways, who handled these lost and found objects, with their very own hands. 

All those objects have been lost but not found by the owner yet. Does that then become a ‘found’ object? Those single earrings of mine have to reach my hands for it to have meaning again, for it to be circulated in this world of meaning making.

Like others I have often wondered, where are the birds that die? I don’t see them lying around except for the crows that were hit by electric shock, while sitting unassumingly on electric wires. Like my single earrings, where do these birds go once they die? Even on evenings as I watch the sunlight recede and some birds are flocking together on the horizon to their homes, not lost, in unison, with purpose, I wonder where are they off to with such certainty? 

I read in the paper a couple of days ago that the day before Rahul Gandhi, the Opposition  Leader of India was made to lose his MP status, police officers had visited his residence to enquire about the remarks he made regarding the country and its state. (It has been now restored by the court) 

I curiously remembered the chocolate my father would get us on his way back from the flag hoisting ceremony at his office, when we would be back from school, watching the parade on Republic Day on Doordarshan (state television), or while  sitting with the joy of having a holiday on Independence Day after having savoured the laddoo that was distributed in school.

  It all feels so far away, when I inhabited another planet, not belonging to boxes and forms that could not label ‘hybrid’ children then. Maybe I knew all along; maybe that was why I was a  sailor on that bridge on the sea. 

Feeling dissociated from one’s body is an experience that is often marked by trauma. Most women I know have gone through it. I have lived like that throughout my 20s. Even now. It is just that I know afterwards, maybe after weeks or days, that I cannot feel my body except when my ankle aches or a headache presents itself  in the evening. It is surprising that it is when I have ‘lost’ the metabolism of my 20s that I feel connected to my body the most. My relationship with it is a fraught one, where I have worried and longed for an older body to come back, one where my ankles do not hurt because of the weight gained over the years. 

With so much social media conversation happening around body and fitness, it must feel that it is much easier to embrace one’s body, or to love it being aware of the structural construction of that perfect body, that happens everyday  mediated through images. Images that are schemas of femininity that posits a possession of a good body as a worthy and hard working one. I had to lose myself in the deep end to even start to emerge from the tunnel, out of which my changed body sprouted, to tell myself that it was not a form of punishment bestowed on  me. 

Today, I got a call from the editor of my new documentary, in response to me asking him about progress, that he lost the working file/project of the film, when a friend of his accidentally formatted the hard drive he was working on. I was feeling disappointed. But as I watch the sun recede after a long day at work, I am still trying to think of ways that the film that will emerge bearing a memory of the lost one but will still be new. Lost and found and…

Getting lost for a little while on Instagram while working is when I feel like I have woken up from the afternoon nap that extended for too long. I have a close friend who takes naps like she has programmed it into her genes; 10 minutes, 20 minutes. Her solution to my exhaustion is always a nap. But unfortunately I am incapable of napping like that. 

Even as a  child, when I overslept my afternoon nap after returning from an exam and then woke up after the sun had receded, it would feel like my world had ended. That I do not know who I am, where I am, why I am here, what is this world.. Lost..

Feeling lost is not so clearly etched out on our body’s maps like feeling tired for instance. It is often retrospective, felt over a period of time or maybe even when one wakes up from that afternoon nap. It of course has so many implications for mental health; not everyone is lost uniformly of course. 

Those puzzles we did as children in children’s magazines of helping some lost creature reach the centre of the maze, or out of it. I used to love them. Maybe I imagined life like that in my 20s. Maybe there is some way out of this maze.  Someday I will be out of this maze, out of it, eating carrots like the rabbit who was hungry before she entered the puzzle. Some great exit point or epiphany to cause a little less suffering. But then as I live through it, I know this is all there is to it. No grand arrival. Lost and found and…

It is Easter today. When you do not want to lose someone, you imagine different ways in which that person will come back to your life. They are mostly sad dreams, so far-fetched that you know that it could never be true, but love for the person cannot let you reason.. Like imagining re-awakening from death. I used to dream that my mother was taking the final turn to our house, almost dutifully, for several months after she died. That in fact she had just taken a train, because she loved train journeys, and had not told us that she was going away. I woke up almost convinced that this was true in the months after her death and would go and check from my verandah.  Years have passed and I do not have that dream anymore. That possibility has been erased from my body. But who knows, maybe I will find that dream again..

 Like my single earring in someone’s hands, and that woman’s feet which is refusing to move from the sand for a while longer, maybe we will be lost and found and …

Gift from a dear friend Ammini

My niece Neelanjana and her freshly coloured hair  in June 2023

May 9 to May 16

A Sketchbook without a Purpose- Part 1

I have this sketchbook with me which I keep drawing and painting in. Doodling might be the right word perhaps.

It has no purpose. It does not aspire for an improvement in my art or technique. I have never trained in drawing or painting. I do not aspire for paint to belong to sturdy lines.

It exists as a testament to the lines and colours that took me past some of those hard evenings, as light receded. A lot of times bearing witness to my friends, especially my women friends, and who they are to me. As I talk to them on video calls or lying on the bed, I have drawn them with love and awe. I have sometimes drawn me, my partner, imaginary flowers, flowers from a photo a friend shared, leaves from a place I could just take the time to draw it, and things or figures that  may not warrant an explanation. Some of them were drawn, while I was out in the open, moving in a train or sometimes, just on my work desk, talking or just drawing.

Little by little, page by page, just being me.

February 28 to March 7

For the week in which I was born and in which my mother passed away; a week apart, years apart. 

November 15 to November 22

On some days
I feel I have no inner world inside me,
no roaring sea,
a vast emptiness lies inside
but with textures,
it feels like,
on those days.

One day as we returned in the car,
my father very curiously said to me,
that he saw a small girl at the clothes shop
and she walked in her midi and top,
oblivious to the clothes on the hangers,
and to the stylish mannequins,
as if thinking deeply to herself,
“the way only girls could be ».

I wonder about the universe on some days,
when I rise up from and above my own woes,
like a face buried inside bent knees
looking up to the sea.

I walk in the courtyard in the evening,
as the sun recedes
and my father waters plants,
(mostly planted by my mother
who is not in this universe anymore)

me thinking, jumping from one thought to another,

despite the bluetooth headphones attached to my ears,
and the old music flowing from my father’s phone speakers,

of all the girls and women
who walked amidst mannequins lost in thought
who planted plants, with her astute mind
who watches the roaring sea
who dream of funerals to alleviate pain
who live “the way only girls could be”.

October 25 to November 1st

October 18 to October 25

Yellow

Right now, a yellow has shrouded the courtyard and everything beyond.
I don't know if it's nostalgia, memory or the characteristic of reminiscence; this used to be yellower when i was a child.

I used to go out through the main door, as a little girl and get underneath this shroud in the courtyard. It was my entry into an-other world.

Today I also happened to be wearing a yellow t-shirt. I do not think my mother ever dressed me in this bright-a- plain yellow. I dressed according to her, for her. I lived according to her, for her. Even attrition  that came later was fastidiously designed for her.

My father walks in the yellow courtyard, almost as if he is floating on top of the shroud, with a mobile phone pouring out music. Malayalam film music that is. That one vehicle of expression for the whole range of emotions that exist in the world for him. For me

A friend, who is more of a sister, just sent a voice note to me which said she found the most balance in the world with me. She had thought about it when she witnessed a performance involving a see saw and she told her friend as they returned home, apparently.

As I stood outside on evenings then, entering into the yellow shroud each day, I never dared to imagine company to gaze up at the sky, wondrous and lost all at the same time.

I am grateful, at this very moment.

June 1 to June 7

As a child, I went to places with my family, every vacation, almost always in a train. I remember the sleepless nights on the long train journeys, travelling to Goa, Maharashtra. Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu…

Brown trains became blue trains. The smell inside trains; something which we took home invariably. We wouldn’t know of the smell until we reached home though.

I would be given a lower berth mostly, because it was difficult for me to climb  up onto the upper berth. I would lay awake in the night and look out of the window, trees taking different shapes and forms that fascinated me endlessly. I always saw animals and creatures in my half asleep state. It is telling I do not have a single image of things outside a train window now.

I was fascinated by the red chain one saw in trains to be pulled in case of emergency, as a child. I always used to wonder what would one feel like if someone pulls the chain of the train we are travelling in, unexpectedly. 

I think, this is the year since I was born, the least I have travelled in trains. The last I boarded a train was in March 2020; and then the world was held hostage by a virus. And of course our own thoughts on death and mortality.

“It is so morbid to talk about death”, a person I once knew used to say. I intend to not run away from my mother’s death until I die.

I do not have a sample of my mother’s voice with me. She died before the time of mobile phones. She loved freezing images. We have so many photographs from our childhood but no sounds. My mother loved train journeys too; the time when she wore her churidhar sets, instead of her everyday sarees, to be comfortable. She also loved movie. She was forbidden to go to the cinema hall in her parental home. We went for all the films that released in theatres.

I looked forward to every Sunday only for the film that showed on Doordarshan (national television channel). I did not sleep in the afternoon, while everyone else did, to not miss even a second of what the Sunday 4’o’clock film could offer. My mother made special snacks on Sundays.

I do not believe in afterlife. I desperately tried to but could not, as nothing presented itself to me in this world to suggest so. But it did , in my dreams. I think images like dreams are sort of an afterlife, holding onto memories and things that were never spoken about.

May 25 to June 1

May 18 to May 25

That photo of dried brown leaves
lying still carpeting the ground
next to the well
taken on that evening walk.

Brown, that fascinating brown
as if it came out of a watercolour painting
The symmetry of the shape of motionless leaves
Leaves from the mango tree in the backyard

Rotten mangoes falling down
Small green mangoes that do not have in them
the fate to become ripe
Falling down beyond the frame
that my photo can aspire to capture

But there is a piece of an orange peel lazily discarded

Summer
Lockdown
Rotten mangoes that fall

Shalini the cat was killed
a few weeks ago
in this lockdown
by hungry restless dogs that came hunting one night

There is an apartment building under construction
just behind the wall of the backyard
that now blocked off that evening light

coming from the open sea
enough to set one’s indulgent and not so indulgent melancholy
all through my tumultuous years
not so far behind
that now spoke through sleepless nights
that came out of months of living here in this country
whose heat/hate did not allow mangoes to grow anymore

Kitchen window opens to this backyard
The lockdown reveals people-workers living inside the ‘under construction’ building
The lockdown has locked them
in the building they have built

probably for the first time in history

I walk every evening
with my headphones crossing the backyard

They are walking about the building too
with headphones plugged in
listening to music or loved ones

Sometimes an accidental glance

A mirror appears on the edge of
a soon-to-be window rim

A mirror with a red plastic frame
I have a feeling its redness will remain with me for a long time to come
I cannot see through thick concrete walls
There must be someone beyond the wall
combing his hair, styling his beard

The mirror disappears
I can smell milk boiling

It must be a strange land to him and his friends
The strange old music that blurts out from my father’s phone
when he waters plants
Mangoes falling all over

Will they leave to their homes away from this strange land
to meet their dear ones
once the rotten mangoes stop falling
in our backyard?
Will they take the red mirror with them once the building is built unto its completion?
How will each of us remember this time when mangoes fell like anything years later?

My father and I go to our backyard one morning
to see where Akira the cat
has transferred her kittens to,
following my brother’s instructions
We stood there clueless under the mango tree
when a voice interrupted our stance from behind

“You are looking for the cat? It just went up the tree.”
Two of them stood on the terrace of the building they had built
smiling and calling out to us
We thanked them and left
the backyard.

May 5 to May 12

What I read in the novel came to me suddenly ,when I was waiting at the hospital last week ,with a dear one of mine. It was the second time we went to the hospital this month. The first was in the first week of April; what we thought would be a short visit, to do away with our feeble doubts about a pain that we were almost sure was some gas problem, turned into a week of hospital stay and confirmation of what one did not even dare to imagine.

In Jeet Thayyil’s new novel ‘Low’, the protagonist tries to deal with the loss of his wife, running away from where they lived to another city, with her ashes( after her cremation) in a box. In the novel Dominic Ullis the protagonist who is a writer reflects on how we have to end up consoling others, more than we get consoled ourselves, after the loss of a dead one. It is the same with grave illnesses I feel. 

I read ‘Low’ during this lockdown. I had borrowed it from the Ernakulam public library before the lockdown. The library’s automated system still keeps sending me SMSs on the dues I have to pay during the lockdown. 

*****************

Is it ok to play ludo when  one waits in the hospital? It would have been unthinkable  the first time we went.

***************

Only one person is let in to the hospital, accompanying the patient. ( I still can’t get to use the word ‘patient’ without discomfort). We skip a chair in between as instructed, to maintain social distance. Not everyone has gotten used to it. Some come in with their masks hanging loosely, in some daze, and suddenly remembers seeing everyone else.

********

All the time I have spent in the hospital in this lockdown, I come back home thinking of all the doctors, nurses and other health workers.. especially the nurses. How stressful and tiring their work  is in these times. What is it to go home after all this, to enter a space so different from what it is here? 

The first time we went, all I could see was surfaces everywhere and fearful eyes above the masks. Fearful eyes of having to make that inevitable trip to the hospital, without any other option.  But our habits have changed and are changing. 

***********

As I sat waiting for the tests to be done this time (and thankfully this visit’s reason turned out to be a false alarm), bell hooks came back to me. bell hooks writes in All About Love about something achingly similar. About how as modern societies we don’t allow others to grieve. Or there is no space or place to grieve after one loses a loved one.

I think I understood so many things about myself after I realised that. I was 19 when I had to first face the loss of a dear dear one. I do not think I realised what that death did to me; what it kept doing to me for years to come and how it could even influence the course of my life thereafter. 

Questions left unanswered: everything, from where she got that particular pyjamas which my hostel roommates loved, to my realisation about how hard it must have been to be her or how and what must have hardened her and why she was the way she was: all of it came too late. 

And yes, we as people don’t let others cry their hearts about their loves ones. It is as if it is a bad omen or something that needs to be brushed away soon; it is as if a grieving person’s sadness will bring death close to us and we don’t want that at all.

***********

There is so much talk about death and illness these days, out there in the open, with the pandemic. Not necessarily sensitive talk or empathetic talk. But it is inevitable to talk about it these days.

bell hooks reminds us that when we know death, we should become more mindful and love even more, going even further away from sexism and misogyny. 

The lockdown has got me thinking a lot about love and death and a framed photo on the wall.

April 21 to April 28

Sudha Padmaja Francis is a filmmaker/artist from Kerala, India. She graduated with a Masters in Creative Enterprise(Film) from the University of Reading, UK in September 2017. She is a recipient of the Felix scholarship for 2016-2017.

She completed her first short film in Malayalam titled Eye Test in August 2017, which was her graduation dissertation film at Reading. Eye Test won the National Award for Best Cinematography in 2017, along with other awards, and screened at many international film festivals. Next, she went on to make a 26 minute documentary film, with the help of a PSBT- Doordarshan Fellowship (2018-2019), titled Ormajeevikal ( Memory Beings) based on the sub-altern musical realm in North Kerala. It has screened at various international film festivals and has been shortlisted for the Toto Funds the Arts Award 2020.

Her recent non-fiction film  Walkway, shot on a phone, showed at Oberhausen Film Festival, 2022.