She was in the centre of the hall, next to the old typewriter and postcards she had set up on a pedestal. In the distance she recognises someone she knows enter the hall. Fathima Hakkim then becomes the girl she is, a smile spreading across her face as she runs to hug her friend. Is her shawl alright, her glasses fine, she asks before posing for a photograph. She doesn’t want to look cute, she is very serious, she claims. You look around and you realise she’s right. The paintings she’s hung up on the walls of that hall — gallery D of Durbar Hall, Kochi — say things she’s wanted to say at different points in life. They talk literally too, for Fathima has stuck little poems next to each of them.
Painting
Professionally she is an architect, but she wouldn’t want to work on architecture unless she is allowed to create with her hands, no computers for this young woman. When it is just her and the colours, Fathima becomes a child, an explorer, no rules to limit her in any way. She would spread the canvas on the floor, paint on it, put her hands on them and sometimes walk over them! “I did that painting like that, it is my feet you see,” she points at the biggest painting at the back of the hall. You see more such anomalies. There is a painting with umbrellas falling like rain drops, and they continue falling outside the painting as little paper umbrellas Fathima stuck on the walls. Then came Autumn & the Umbrellas rained is the ditty she’s placed next to the painting.
Painting
“I wrote those after the paintings, most of which I have created in the past one and a half months,” says Fathima. It was a sort of release for her, these paintings. “I made them after I realised I am dyslexic about four-and-a-half months ago. It is my husband Sameer who recognised the symptoms.” It became a huge relief for her, because that would explain the little failures she had as a child. It was not all her fault. She was not stupid or dumb as people called her.
You wouldn’t know the girl you called fat, shared her chocolates, every time. The lady you called ugly is the most beautiful to her children. The woman you called bald suffered from cancer. You wouldn’t know, you just wouldn’t. The message here is simple. People are not what they seem to be. Fathima stuck that poem next to a painting of an oversized woman at the beach. “It is for my mom, to tell her it is ok if she gains a little weight.”
In the middle of the hall is that typewriter we spoke of, next to other nostalgic bits like jeeraka muttai and manjadi kuru, the stuff she wished her childhood was full of, but missed by getting born a little late. This exhibition that she calls Aurora, has been to Kozhikode before, and after Kochi, will go to Bengaluru. The Kochi one ends on October 17.
