In August 2025, I visited an exhibition called ‘Mapping Memories’, organised by Madras Art Weekend and The Hindu, at Lalit Kala Akademi in Chennai. In the beginning, I felt what I often feel at events like this: a profound admiration for the artists but also a deep sense of unbelongingness. I’d traveled in a crowded bus, for more than an hour, and then walked from the bus stop to the Akademi, all in the sizzling heat of Chennai. When I entered, I found my body – still recovering from a congested, chaotic journey – separated from the serenity that emanated from the artworks, and the people in that space.
As I caught my breath, artist Ashwin J Chandran’s ‘Movement of Madras’ caught my attention. Unlike the other works of art, that, perhaps, were “aesthetic” in display, because they were distant – an escape from urban routine – Ashwin’s work was enchanting. It was familiar, and surreal enough to be so intimate, that it was inside me.
It made me rewitness what I’d just seen, on my way to see this. It made me think: about urban moments and mental movements, about the city and the eyes that rebuild it, about reaching the spaces where art is shared and about that art reaching the spaces inside us where revision exists.
Thank you to Ashwin and Aranya for reaching me through the work that they do.
With these poems, I am reaching out, now, to all of you.
Fig. 1. The Middle Lane
“confined in his cell
he thought
what a wonderful thing it is
that a painting has walls”
~ from “pastorale” by srinivas rayaprol
i.
i’m speaking to you, movement.
my heaving, sweaty, lone body
to your tideless blues, prolonged
pink, your yellow hush of form.
my eyes were walls that alighted,
through traffic, by footboard, on bus.
the grid had settled on the map
like the shadow of a cage.
the roundabout of mount road
revealed that tomorrow has been
here. the city is a long habit:
the way the roads curve, the way
the centre leans, the way we move
as if there’s nothing between
our journeys and their finality.
the same blemishes on the moving eye
and the same ways of numbing them.
when i crossed the koovam
i carried with me the umbilical
reek of the cows and the bulldozers
grazing on its burning banks.
i entered the akademi purged
in the drained river that pierces
the bay: a primal refuse
entering an unyielding refuge.
and that is when you spoke to me,
movement.
ii.
i’m speaking to you, you.
as your own exhaustion insists
that you are here, no matter what,
you let your unreadiness become
the beginning of your presence.
as these yellow roses welded
to the streets remind you that
every bending bristle breaks
a lamp, you shed your eyes.
as you tilt into the pipeline
of uncertainty, with the brightness
of an orange swelling through its peels,
the eyes are still full of walls,
but what a wonderful thing that
the walls have their paintings
just as the paintings have their walls.
as these frames threshold
an uncontainment that words are too
needle to know, you see the artist
coming after, sweeping the movements
of what has been left unseen,
and their trails, wet with remembrance,
give you your eyes back.
you’re on the verge of tears.
the traffic outside looks
like a meadow of small flames.
and the wall in the gallery
becomes a window that saves you,
not from the fire, but from being burned.
hold a mirror up to that wall. call it
a canvas. let it know itself as light.
Fig. 2 Paths of Unseen
iii.
i’m speaking to you, eye.
i unlearn the heaving geometry
of waiting when the bus arrives
on the canvas, breaking habit into
indivisible planes.
you can tell the eyes
that have adapted to distance
by the way they refuse to see.
see, it isn’t night yet
but the lights have come loose
like the innards of a fallen star
sizzling in a lost recipe.
see, the signature of presence,
muted by the hours, take root
in the subtraction of the future
from the calculus of tomorrow.
see, there is no fear in their eyes.
see, there is no eyes.
see, there is.
can’t you see the city’s rosary
breaking as you count?
isn’t the city a long habit?
an uneven manner of growing
dignity in the sand?
did you not see? love is just
busdust in your eyes, blown away.
Fig 3. Window Seat
iv.
i’m speaking to you, i.
when the habit plucked out their eyes
the artist saw their spines grow sight
and he knew that words lack the brightness
needed to sing the chords of the enraged
iris, and used, instead, the ingrown
privacy of the hand, catching the spark
of a somewhere, waiting to be thrown
back into its own need, humming the blues
of what isn’t there yet and shuffling to
the pink jazz of what never was, as the shape
breaks into a compass and the compass
aches into yellow unheadable directions.
an altar of sighs invades the space
that you, movement, made around me.
the bus runs over me now.
i fall out the window now.
i am a lightstrip and a pricetag
hanging by the flyover’s dark canvas.
i am a lonely word now
lost in a mela of sights.
i hold a mirror up to the walls of my eyes.
i call it a canvas. i let it know itself as light.
and, in return, it tells me that
the only paradise open to us
is the one that our eyes picket.
