Scratches on tiles
Writing
Sanjana Vinod
Hi, hello there, I’m so glad you’re here; come sit next to me. There’s a story I want to tell you, but I’m unsure where exactly to start. How do I start? From where do I introduce you to it?
How about this–let me play you a video clip.
Aman, grey of hair and wearing a faded polo shirt, walks around in circles in the living room, his arms knotted behind him and his eyes fixated onto the marble floors. A cricket match runs on the TV, and he vaguely registers the commentary being spoken. He’s counting the scratches, little scars splitting the surface of the tiles. It records the clumsiness of his grandchildren, the instances when they rode their bikes indoors despite his warnings not to, and when he’d have to dab dettol onto the wounds they received when they inevitably fell. He used to buy dettol every few months back then, but his current bottle was bought years ago, and it still hasn’t been used. His grandchildren rarely spend time in the living room, and he only sees them during dinner, when they are occupied using their phones.
The man spends most of his hours walking like this, just in case any guests arrive, just in case any grandchild comes downstairs to watch the match with him. It’s his sixth time re-starting his counting of the scratches that day. He can’t seem to pay attention. He keeps missing some of them, or he forgets his place in the count, or he double-counts. This sixth attempt is the highest he’s gotten–he’s been careful to pace his steps slowly, to scan the scratches carefully, to repeat the numbers in his head so he doesn’t forget. He’s nearly completed his circle, an oroborous joined, when his feet catch onto themselves.
This next scene happens in a few seconds, but to you, it feels like slow motion. The man trips on air, and his feet tangle together. His eyes do not widen, do not express surprise, but rather close in resignation. He falls headfirst. His glasses shatter, marking new scratches onto the tiles, and his head lands onto the ground like the beat of a drum. He labours to open his eyes, vision bleary as he focuses on those scratches, attempting to tally it and add it to his previous count, but it’s too late: he can’t recall the number he stopped at. He closes his eyes, defeated. And then, there’s silence. We wait, and wait, and wait.
The man blinks, drowsily, and then brings his palms to face the tiles. He pushes himself up, and his face gets only a feet above the tiles before it crashes again. His second try doesn’t lift his face off the tiles. His body laxes. He lays there. He can’t remember what he was doing before he fell. He can’t recognise where he fell.
He hears a gasp, and then a scream. He cannot turn. He feels arms grabbing him, nails gripping his shirt, but then he’s released, and he’s limp on the floor again. He hears the stomping of footsteps on stairs, the yelling of a name. He hears more shuffling of footsteps, feels more arms grasping his, and hoisting him up. He’s being dragged, and then plopped onto a sofa. There’s a cricket match being played on the television, but it’s too far away from him to decipher which teams are playing. A young girl shoves her face in front of the man, and she looks frantic, holding his shoulders. A boy’s face is pushed into view too, and his hands reach towards the man’s forehead. The man winces, pulling his head back, and it’s only then he understands that there’s a bump forming on his forehead. It doesn’t hurt unless it’s touched, so the man shrugs it off and twists his neck sideways to look at the match, focusing on it. As though underwater, he hears distortion of sounds–of sobs, of ringtones, of more sobs.
A Man in the Room, Arpita Singh, 1987, Watercolour on paper, Image: H. 41 cm, W. 28.5 cm; Mount: H. 59.5 cm, W. 44.6 cm; Frame: H. 61.5 cm, W. 46.7 cm, MAC.02936.
The match slips into an ad-break, where a ginger-haired man stands below a spotlight in an amphitheatre, asking the audience, “Do you have a moment now?” The people in the ad soon start drinking coffee, and the grey-haired man’s stomach tightens, longing for one too. Everything around him drowns into static–the crashing sound of a phone dropped, the cursing of another picking it up while shouting out directions, and the blaring sirens piercing through the neighbourhood, announcing the ambulance before you see it speed into view through the windows behind the television. The match resumes once more.—
Along with the video, I have three postcards to share with you. I dug them up from the corners of mymemory, where they’d been buried under guilt.
Here is the first:
Aman, grey of hair, attempting to walk in a circle around the living room. A physiotherapist walks beside him, catching him everytime he trips and holding him upright. Each stumble evokes a flinch from another man, black of hair, who is sitting on the sofa. On this second man’s lap is a laptop, the screen opened to a half-drafted mail requesting unpaid leave for an indefinite period from his job. Next to this man is a medical file, containing a scan of the grey-haired man’s brain, and various bills–from the hospital, from specialists, from physiotherapists, from caretaker agencies.
Concept Note
A few years before I started college, my grandfather was diagnosed with Parkinsons. This diagnosis altered the structure of my family.
Our dynamics changed, as we were suddenly aware of the time we had left with him and of the fragility of his memory, and each moment with my grandfather became more precious than ever.
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Families–whether they are related through blood or through a love deeper than friendship–form a community around us that is so important.
I relied on this community to help me through my grief, later on when he died, but to also cope with his diagnosis when he was still alive, which I have described in my work.
Artist Bio
Sanjana Vinod is a writer, a reader, and most recently, a crochet-er from Bangalore. She has two siblings, who complain that she plays K-pop too loud, and parents who get concerned when she uses the skull emoji in their group chat too often.
She has been forever enthralled by ethnography, folklore and storytelling, credited to the long bed-time stories her grandparents and parents would spin. She sees family as a knitted scarf, one that has been threaded together with love and labor, which warms and comforts you in the cold.
In the future, she'd like to adopt a cat named Taco. In the present, she aspires to study psychology, and hopefully contribute to the research done on memory-related conditions such as Parkinson's disease.