5 paise

I 'saw' the cover of this book in my mind's eye as I was walking up on the flat roof of our house one evening: 5-paise coins in a harlequin pattern. My late, thrifty mother-in-law left a bag of coins behind. The smallest denominations have all been demonetised now, as inflation has taken their value away. But I like their varied shapes.

Making a little book like this -- 4.5" x 6.5" -- doesn't take much time, but I like to think lazily about how it should be, and how to go about it; to anticipate.

I cut the covers from an old book, and folded the pages. I used various inkjet papers in white and neutral colours. There are six sections/signatures. I painted, collaged and numbered the first page of each one. The third signature has an Urdu number 3, just to give the person turning the pages a little surprise, and a photograph I took of Badshahi masjid in Lahore. The Urdu text is a recipe for egg-and-tomato pulau, because I didn't want to tear a page out of a book of poetry.

I measured and punched holes, put eyelets in the covers, washed the coins and glued them on. Then I kept everything ready in a small basket -- covers, paper, curved needle, waxed linen thread.

Sewing the book took about 15 minutes. And now... what? It waits.

A Watercolour Book

Someone gave me a pretty wedding invitation; the paisley motif on the front inspired me to make a little watercolour book:

Coptic binding, with eyelets

The inner cover paper was cut from wrapping paper

The paper is Fabriano Artistico 140 lb. watercolour paper. The book is 6 1/2" x 9"

January Sketches

I've been filling up my new sketchbook (see the post below this). The papers are of different sizes and varieties, which is more interesting than my usual one-size-fits-all books. I didn't bind in any watercolour paper; but that means that I'm using different media from those which I'm most comfortable with. Which is good.

The first page is small; I did a simple collage, for a title page. You can see two more pages behind it.

Left: two clay birds which live on a table in the drawing room. Right: I saw the Hindi film Dabangg (and liked it. Great music!).

Left: A friend brought a bunch of rajnigandha (tuberoses). Right: Sheru, a beautiful dog who died; and a Puppy brand matchbox.

Left: Collage over a scribbled sketch of mine, which was already on the page when I bound it into the book. Right: a teak root sculpture.

Left: I bound a small book wih pockets for receipts. Photographs of the book with notes. Right: a small page with a stencilled flower. Some text to come later.

Left: the other side of the stencilled flower. Right: a shower faucet that suddenly gleamed at me, all lights and darks, and complicated shapes, positive and negative.

Special Double Extra Thick

I felt the urge to bind a book. I wanted it to be fun, and to allow mistakes. I collected an assortment of papers, in different sizes and shapes. Some of them had my sketches on them, some were printed; most are blank.

I took covers from two old books and cut them to size. I usually cover them with paper or cloth, but this time I left them as they were.

The elephant came from the cover of a bedraggled file folder.

I bound it with Coptic binding, and used eyelets for the first time. As a bonus, the back cover came with a cobra.

It felt like a good thing to do, at the beginning of the year.

Excavations

I was roaming around the house aimlessly, wondering what I should be doing, and suddenly I saw it as if I were a visitor. When you pass through the same rooms everyday, their contents are hardly visible, a white-noise hum. The indistinct background of a dream. Turn on a light switch, and things pop into view. That (object)! How long has it been lying there?

My paper stash! I must throw it all away. Seize the moment! I reach to clear the shelf, and almost before I know what my hands are doing, I am folding papers into signatures, punching holes, hunting for the waxed linen thread. I sew graph paper, wrapping paper, opened-out envelopes together, and make a book.



R's photographs are lying all over the house. Boxes of enlargements, envelopes of negatives. In a plastic shopping bag I find faded 2x3" prints, outtakes. Their blandness is mysterious: I feel obliged to look long enough to find meaning in them. I glue a few into my book.



I can’t sleep. At 3:00 a.m. I come downstairs to get some writing paper. As I pass through the atrium I hear a splash. In the fish pond, concentric rings of water are lit by the moon. A dull brown fish has made itself known. Usually they are silent, gliding along their underwater paths. They eat puffed rice and mosquito larvae, and survive. I feel a pain in my chest, as though they were very dear to me.



I draw Julius Caesar, his stone face split down the middle as if struck by lightning, and then other statues. Repetition is order is harmony. Their blank gaze is soothing: they are not interested in my nooks and crannies.



Should these water buffalo vertebrae, which I picked up off the ground from some land we had once, still be on that table, fifteen years after I casually dropped them there?

On the way to the car, bones:
White shards half-buried. Old news,
not enough to make a whole of anything.

And those chairs in the hallway! Only crazy people would not have discarded them long ago – their foam collapsed, home to generations of lizards, whose miniature broken ping pong ball eggs we sweep up from time to time. Can I point my finger and dissolve them into atoms?



The big copper water vessel, those pinecones from the hills. That brass thing from Thailand that someone gave me, I never even liked it much, but here it is. Too many books! Too many dishes! I'm sinking, I'm about to disappear.



The utility room! so full of old newspapers, bottles. I must call the scrap man with his cycle-cart. But first I pull out some torn paper, and glue it in.



Okay, I'm feeling calmer now. I’m listening to a cheerful Hindi song, with a chorus which means approximately, "You bastard, you're finished! You've had it!" It's so incongruous with the bouncy music that it makes me smile. I'm drawing and singing along under my breath -- 'tu saala kaam se gaya!' The house is still a mess. Never mind.