Trust is the Only Currency : Bangalore to Anantapur [Part I]
It all started on another evening, a few weeks earlier. In the hazy South Indian sunset, a few of us decided to go for a concert in Anantapur, at a village our friend had grown from nothing in the dry desert. As always, I was stuck with the middle seat — the leanest and least fragile person in the hired car, which, as usual, didn’t seem to have its suspension intact. Sleepy, the half-light always lingers in this part of the world, as the colors turn warm shades of electric rose, neutral, and finally dark.
When we arrived in Anantapur, the sun had already sunk behind the dry horizon, but the light still shone bright enough to see a man holding up a scroll and singing amidst a crowd. He pointed at different corners of the painting, and I realized he was singing the story depicted there. Fascinated, I drew closer, watching his eyes take in the audience and his hands dance across the painting. His teeth were stained a bright paan-red, and he was wearing a threadbare gamchha faded to the color of a construction worker’s once-neon saree. He had a certain endearing way of pronouncing each “A” as “O,” revealing his Bengali origins.
Once the song was over and the people had dispersed, I asked him in my broken Hindi what the painting was about. “September 11th and capturing Osama bin Laden,” he replied. In that moment, it struck me that this man from a faraway village in Bengal had cared enough about something that had happened in the place I come from to not only imagine it, but to work for weeks composing a song and painting it. Here was a fellow storyteller; and a master of the art — not simply pressing the shutter release of a camera, but observing, thinking, composing a song, adding color to a painting, and slowly unrolling it in an impressive performance.
“Before radio, TV, and mobile phones, we had Pattachitra,” he said. “My name is Prabir, and my family has been creating this art for seven generations.”
In that moment, a familiar curiosity tugged at me. These stories had an insatiable need to be heard the world over.
“Prabir Bhaiya, can I come to your village and make a video about you and your family?” I asked.
“Sure,” he replied. “When will you come?”
It so happened that a friend was getting married in Kolkata the following week, and I had already bought my tickets. I had planned for a day to visit Kolkata and then attend the wedding for a few days, so I had exactly twenty-four hours to spare. But, I would have to fly to Kolkata and almost immediately board a train for his village, which, according to the map, was about a three-hour journey away. My mind raced to solve the challenge of how I’d get there and where I would stay (best not to plan on staying the night in an unknown village in Bengal near the borders of Odisha and Jharkhand with a stranger whose language I cannot speak.) I resolved to make it happen.
“How about Wednesday?” I replied. He seemed fairly surprised, a brief discussion ensued about whether or not he would reach home from Andhra Pradesh by train before my arrival.
We exchanged telephone numbers, and there would be several colorful conversations over the phone during the next few days, as he confirmed again and again that I would indeed be coming, and I struggled to understand his thick Bengali accent through the noisy telephone signal, replying in my approximate Hindi. I had left the questions of how I’d interview his community despite these language barriers, and where I would stay in Kolkata, up to chance. But with one quick post on social media to see if anyone would be available to help, a friend connected me with a girl named Arpita who was ready to host me.
As the days passed, it seemed the journey was approaching me, rather than me heading towards it. I asked around in Bangalore to see if any friends knew someone from Kolkata or Kadaghpur who could come with me. Finally, I settled into the early morning flight, awaiting any response from a last-resort request for someone to accompany me and translate. A friend’s message appeared on the screen of my phone: “My friend says Balichak may be difficult for his contacts to reach. So an exciting adventure ahead for you! Trust is the only currency.”
Trust is the only currency. I was headed to a stranger’s home somewhere on the outskirts of Kolkata to drop off my bags and leave for Balichak. A smile flickered across my face as I dozed off in the airplane, falling asleep even as the sun rose into the skies around me.
[This is the first in a three-part series about my journey to Balichak, Bengal to document the stories of seventh-generation Pattachitra artists.]
