The Stash In Amma's Drawer

The drawer was usually locked.

 

The key tucked away between the neatly folded clothes. The rare fancy occasions when she had to wear the gold bracelets, she’d open the drawer to retrieve the jewelry she had once received as her dowry.

 

But gold was the least important item there.

 

It is strange how vividly I remember the contents of those files. Pictures from her university, mushairay, excerpts from speeches, poems and lectures she’d delivered once. She kept them all, methodically packed and folded, ribboned with the utmost care. Her cherished possessions. I don’t think she had any plans for her writings. Though, rarely she would take them and recite them to us with such childlike eagerness -the ardency of an artist.

 

She knew the importance of having the right audience.

“Koi daad tou do aik ghantay se ghazal sunarhi hun!”

 

I let out a giant guffaw. I was young, unable to grasp how people wish to be appreciated for what they are, what they’ve created, how people want to be cherished for their art. And how perhaps they want to be cherished as Art.

 

Once the audience was right the words would blossom out of her mouth with the desire to please. Her face would florence with the innate satisfaction of creating the effect she had intended for.

Once the audience was right the words would blossom out of her mouth with the desire to please. Her face would florence with the innate satisfaction of creating the effect she had intended for.

 

Why then was the stash so rarely revisited?

 

Perhaps because the audience was so rarely the right one. Her artistic thirst was capitulated under the multitude facades of personality, meticulously manufactured to make do in her ordinary life.

 

Vulnerability is often stashed up like that and the key to it- safely tucked away somewhere. Such a shame that art has to be hidden this way. But somehow, she had managed to preserve her Soul.

 

I let out a giant guffaw. I was young, unable to grasp how people wish to be appreciated for what they are, what they’ve created, how people want to be cherished for their art. And how perhaps they want to be cherished as Art.

Once the audience was right the words would blossom out of her mouth with the desire to please. Her face would florence with the innate satisfaction of creating the effect she had intended for.

 

Why then was the stash so rarely revisited?

 

Perhaps because the audience was so rarely the right one. Her artistic thirst was capitulated under the multitude facades of personality, meticulously manufactured to make do in her ordinary life.

 

Vulnerability is often stashed up like that and the key to it- safely tucked away somewhere. Such a shame that art has to be hidden this way. But somehow, she had managed to preserve her Soul.