This essay was submitted for “The Lure of Beauty” writing seminar, in response to ‘what is beautiful’.
Namaste, and welcome back to discomfort. What a return. This was India, the country considered by travel guides (and my Dalai Lama-loving, sixth-grade social studies teacher), to be the most beautiful on Earth. Yet, my past four visits found those opinions to be subjective. Each of my consecutive arrivals didn’t reinforce the raves, but rather, a culminating disspassion. The incessant noise, the noxious odors, and the overbearing climate…? I had hated them all before. Beauty is relative, they say, and, as far as India was concerned, it bore no relation to me.
But, on this trip, I started out with more optimism: lucky number five. This trip would be the one. I was older and wiser, and had even snuck my aunt’s new camera into my fanny pack without parental approval. I was putting my ass and ego on the line: if my fresh, new perspective didn’t find a shred of beauty, my stolen camera lens would. And so, in my first moments of arrival, there it hung, limply around my neck, ready for action. India, I was risking a lot for you, so olly olly oxen free! (Yeah, I was pretty desperate for that “beautiful,” Indian hallelujah moment.)
But, as it turned out, my camera failed me—because I got lucky.
Now, it wasn’t amidst the squat-and-go toilets, the trash piles, or the silent stalking, rusty-looking men, that beauty hit. Thank god. Nor was it intertwined with love, oceans or flowers.
Rather, it was the beauty of my grandmother.
Incapturable by film, beyond her personality or anything human, it was the beauty of her simply being:
It was about five a.m., the dewy, hazy morning of our immanent arrival. My grandmother had come to receive us. She sat beside me in the cramped and humid cabin of the taxi, her body weary from the journey. She had no makeup, did nothing in particular to impress. She was sweaty; she was wheezing.
In all due respect, she was subpar.
Which is why I doubt the beauty was intentional.
Allow me to clarify, I value and love my grandmother above most in this world. I give respect where it is due. However, I will remove this courtliness to faithfully legitimize her flaws. My grandmother is no Bollywood beauty: her teeth are discolored and misshapen; her hair has been oiled by pureed coconuts, mangled into a permanent braid; her nose is bulbous and irregular; and her wrinkles visibly show her age. Yet, for that moment, in the compounded heat of that car, as she closed her eyes to rest, she appeared pretty damn stunning.
The Indian mountains slid past in the window behind her, bowing in forbearance to that heavy sun, whose early rays graced my grandmother’s stubbled silhouette.
They say the whole is sometimes better than the sum of its parts. This was one of those times.
The culmination of the objects before me hit me. It was more than my grandmother, or the streaky windows, or the foliage. Rather, it was the combination of each subject by itself: it was the momentary purity of the entire scene together that made me go ‘aha!’ The sun spread its light because it had to. The trees were green because they grew untouched. My grandma was genuinely tired. Nothing was trying to be more than what it was, and that was the beauty that stuck. Hallelujah.
I had to make it mine.
But of course, I couldn’t. No deus ex machina here. Like I had said, my camera was obsolete. So much for fifteen megapixels.
So, I tried to memorize every detail: the spews of her hair, the shapes of the mountains, the genus of the trees, the shadows and contours of her face. But to no avail. As we rode, I immediately tried to transcribe the scene to paper, yet I kept coming up short. This was more than an artist’s creative block. Although I had absorbed all the specifics, nothing seemed right. My lines were shapeless, my placing position-less, my shadows lifeless. Sure, I could blame personal talent or the unstable automobile, but I think the imperfection went beyond me and my control. No matter how much I squirted, no mix of colors could mimic the hues of my grandmother’s skin, no pencil was dark enough to intensify the tropics behind her, no medium capable of capturing the lazy heat in the air. And so the drawing was never completed. All I was left with were meaningless etchings and erased potential.
Or was I? Could my version of that guidebook beauty be something more metaphysical? Something Plato or one of those other Greeks were talking about? A beauty of purity, of sincerity. A beauty even a camera or above-amateur-drawing skills couldn’t recapture. Maybe I had found what I had hoped for? Not just beauty, but Beauty! And in India!
And with that we had halted at a local rest stop. I didn’t have much need for relief after my grand discovery, but decided to step out and take in the fresh, new, beautiful Indian air. And step out I did. Right into a maggot-infested heap of litter, dry mud and crusted dung. Welcome back. Hallelujah, indeed.
-Y. Ogale, Jan. 2010
