Joseph is at the edge of the little bridge across Judge’s Avenue, Kaloor. He walks through a lane, turns right and shows the door with ‘Clint’ written outside of it. He asks us to step on the flowers scattered on the doorstep. They — he and Chinnamma — have been putting it there every day since Clint’s 40th birthday. He was born on a Thiruvonam day and would have turned 41 in May, had he lived. May 19, a day veteran filmmaker Harikumar hopes to bring out a feature film on Clint.
That’s just the newest. There have been so many features, documentaries, books on the little boy who never smiled for the camera, and drew pictures so brilliant as a five and six-year-old that the first time he took part in a competition he didn’t get the first prize, because the judges thought someone else drew it for him. “The junior category could draw on any topic but the seniors were given the topic ‘Ente Veedu’. Clint thought he too had to draw that and sketched a house that’s neither ours, nor the paternal homes he has visited. He also put a white rabbit at the bottom, because while he was drawing, one had touched his legs,” says Chinnamma, like that day had just got over and not three decades ago. Everything she says about her little boy is fresh, and if you didn’t know better, you might go upstairs of their two-floor house, looking for him.
“But he didn’t grow up here. That was in Thevara, office quarters allotted to his dad. The first time I caught him drawing was as a six-month-old with a stone, when he lied on the floor and drew around him, making a perfect circle.” Joseph started bringing home chalks and crayons and papers. He had told the tale many times, how he named the little boy after his favourite cowboy star, Clint Eastwood. At their Kaloor house, there are photos of both. But they couldn’t protect the walls and floors Clint drew on, there were some at the department who were afraid the house would be turned into a museum for the boy who grew famous by the day, and they’d lose a government apartment. So it was painted over and the parents moved away.
“Shivkumar who made the first documentary on Clint — called Clint — had tried to find the drawings beneath the painted walls but couldn’t. He had come back to us for eight years, for we had at first refused to share his pictures. He used 1,500 paintings and drawings,” Joseph adds. There were tens of thousands more—- 30,000 is the rough figure they give. Joseph climbs up the stairs to bring more and more pictures — the elephants he loved to draw and like a natural progression, the Ganapatis, the ‘panchavarna kili’ he drew only from imagination of the stories his mother read to him. There also hangs a photo taken by their neighbour and photographer Christopher of the five-year-old drawing three elephants for his second competition, surrounded by admirers.
“Kaladharan (artist) was the judge for both — that first one when Clint didn’t win, and this. When I went to ask him why Clint didn’t win the first one, he thought I went to beat him up because I used to wrestle those days. Later he told me how the judges thought someone else drew it for Clint. The second time he came and witnessed the creation,” Joseph says. Joseph and Chinnamma do not know how he got it, neither of them drew. Their only rule was never stop a child. “Children are innocent, they wouldn’t go wrong. It’s when the parents say don’t do this and that, they change,” Joseph says. So when Clint asked for Rs 25 one day, Chinnamma gave it without asking why. The next day he brought home a photo of a girl who danced at a school function he was honoured at. “Where would you get a mother like that?” Joseph asks, with love in his words, decades after their arranged marriage. “When she agreed to marry this pint-sized man,” he adds, chuckling.
Chinnamma was mummy and Joseph was Pappu to Clint. “He didn’t care about the prizes. Once after a competition he said let’s go home and then they announced he won the gold medal. He didn’t want to go, he said ‘Pappu go get it’.” Another time, ‘Pappu’ saw Clint draw Ganapati as writing the Mahabharata with eight or nine fingers on one hand. “When I said it looks like a pazhakola (bunch of bananas), he said, it is Mahabharatha, it is big, he needs more than five fingers to finish it fast!” That was Clint. He was a serious little child who wouldn’t explain his drawings, ‘It’s whatever you think it is’ he’d say like a seasoned artist. But Clint never spoke of his illness that killed him a month short of his seventh birthday. He wanted to be pilot of a bomber plane, Chinnamma says. Two hours have passed and they have only just got started. There are smiles on their faces, as we step on the flowers at the door again. “You see how there is a third person here,” Joseph points to invisibility, but you get it.
