The humidity is sabotage and my skin is undone. I’ve always had a preference for dryness. While other women fear wrinkles, I never mind the beginnings of a crease. They seem cleaner, those intersecting lines. But then I’ve never been afraid of getting older, of being an abstraction.
When my aesthetician prods at my face, she remarks on the lack of hydration. I suspect she’s an idiot. Everyone knows water wants nothing to do with oil. With a paintbrush she covers my face in a cold, white liquid. I feel a nibbling on the epidermis. Enzymes, she says, like the ones in your stomach.
At lunch my face is a red blot but Baal pretends not to notice. She is wearing python dyed like a mermaid’s tail. I tell her she reminds me of a turquoise mosque I was refused entry to on a holiday in Fes. Smiling, she taps on her menu. She is intransigent about cuticles and the time she eats lunch. Intermittent fasting, she says. The body has a chance to detox every night for eighteen hours. I’m trying to rebuild my microbiome.
She dips the spongy middle of her bread in tapenade and chews for eighteen seconds before swallowing.
When she asks about what I’ve been up to I tell her my dog died last week. Her eyes widen and her lower lip protrudes. The color of her lipstick is the same as the inside of her mouth. I wonder if she has done this on purpose, matched the outside with inside so people will always be thinking of the inside, even when it can’t be seen.
How did he die? She drank too much laundry liquid.
Baal frowns and her forehead becomes a sheet of musical scales. It doesn’t sound possible. Animals are smarter than that.
I have made segments of my fish and don’t feel like eating it anymore. She didn’t see the laundry liquid. It spilled on the ground in a golden puddle, spreading slow like honey.
I want to change the subject. How’s Sheb, I ask, hoping the story will be long.
Baal’s nose is poreless and her eyes are full of certainty. She tells me her husband Sheb bought a new car and that their marriage is over.
This story is from the July - December 2017 edition of TAKE on art.
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This story is from the July - December 2017 edition of TAKE on art.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Sign In
why do artists write on art?
once, there were newspaper reviews. they connected art writing to the artist and to an audience, with immediacy.
Complete Love
It’s 2011, late summer. All over Europe, young people are occupying central public squares to demonstrate for more social justice. In Berlin, their agenda is different. The completists gathered at Alexanderplatz aspire for justice primarily on an intimate level. They believe that only when the redistribution of material wealth includes equal chances of finding sex and love — no matter how elderly, disabled, or ugly you are — communism will become real.
Delicate Animals
The humidity is sabotage and my skin is undone. I’ve always had a preference for dryness. While other women fear wrinkles, I never mind the beginnings of a crease. They seem cleaner, those intersecting lines. But then I’ve never been afraid of getting older, of being an abstraction.
Falling In Love (Again): India's Weaves Story
India’s love affair with handwoven cloth shows no signs of abating. Open any fashion magazine or newspaper and weaves get ample play. Designers up and down the country extol the virtues of weaves, proudly brandishing their innovative work with weavers to contemporise motifs and palettes. This is laudable but hardly surprising.
Technologies Of Elegance
As soon as you enter the exhibition space in Bikaner House, the display ahead sort of takes your breath away. It’s a carefully crafted mise-enscène, filled with dangling screens, suspended sequins, overflowing jewellery boxes, glass displays, and more. And yet, in spite of the exquisite setting, and the props that inhabit it, your focus never wavers from the clothes, which form the essence of the exhibition.
A Writer's Discourse
There are two moments in Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus that I come back to often. The first is an epitaph that Socrates uses to explain bad writing, which he recites (and I will now quote) in full:
The Smuggler: A Mural By Sadequain
The story goes that Sadequain (1930 – 1987), living in Karachi, was exhausted and in poor health. He was offered a stay at a government rest house at Gadani in 1958, so that he could recover. Gadani is located in the province of Balochistan on the Arabian Sea, a few kilometers west of Karachi. It must have felt quite remote from the city back then. The western coastline of Pakistan has long been infamous for underdevelopment and for unregulated trade activities with West Asia.
Ghosts Of Ghan-Town
Landing gracefully on a rock, the camel tucked in its wings And wondered if this was perhaps Miryam Springs? This parched and desolate landscape was not what he hoped to find What of the flourishing settlement he had once left behind?
Kerala Boy
The Kerala boy stands alone, facing the sea or what looks like the sea. Water is never far from his feet. His eyes are dark and his hair is blacker than the best Tellicherry pepper. He is an inch taller than most and a little long in the tooth. He likes the language of protest. He likes the flavour of a season called ‘Left’.
Fictioning The Landscape: Robert Smithson And Ruins In Reverse
That zero panorama seemed to contain ruins in reverse, that is – all the new construction that would eventually be built. This is the opposite of the ‘romantic ruin’ because the buildings don’t fall into ruin after they are built but rather rise into ruin before they are built. –Robert Smithson, “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey”
