a handful of musings...

This has mostly to do with my new-fangled relish for hand creams, and partly also to do with goddamn Dilli ki sardi, but these days I find myself relapsing way too often into my longstanding pondering about hands. The last time I thought about them real hard was on Onam day when I almost lost my right hand index finger by putting it in a live mixie (7 non-stop hours in the kitchen can do that to me; wonder how many Sylvia Plath spent before she put her head in the oven?!). Now I catch myself looking at random people and thinking about their hands.


Some people have hands you couldn't have imagined (since you've seen the rest of them). Big people with baby-sized palms, tomboyish girls with dainty fingers, greek goddess beauties with roguish hands. Pink pea-shaped nails with inverted white half moons near the cuticles. Perfectly ripe Mounts of Venus. Long, sloping fingers, curled gracefully, lying sideways, unconsciously beautiful, on restaurant tables. Hands that move and touch and perform with measured absorbance, like that of a glassful of water, filled to the brim. So much character, in those hands; definitely more than the sum of those ten fingers and two palms.


My maid, she has tiny hands. Like, very very small, pretty much like the rest of her. And she uses them deftly, especially this one kitchen duster-scrubbing thing that is so unbearably time- and space-efficient on her, and so clumsy when I try it. I rub my hands warm and smell apricot oil, as I watch her rinse hers in cold, cold water at the kitchen sink. I catch myself wondering, are her hands always cold? How do they feel when she caresses her daughter's cheeks? Do they still feel calloused, even when they are brimming with love?



I once met an itr wallah, in Purani Dilli. He had a miniscule shop, the kind that seemed like it would end as soon as you enter it. But inside, that small space was dense and deep and maddening, because it was full of itr aromas that were evoking moods and memories and emotions in me that were way, way bigger than that shop in time-space quotient. Maybe it was my semi-hypnotised hallucinatory state, or facial moles really have some scientific connection with attractiveness, but in that moment of conversation, the dirty pajama-kurta clad, shifty-eyed, mustachioed dark man with fez cap I had seen entering the shop with swagger, seemed suddenly, hmm, capable of being charming. He had a cotton wad nestled inside the folds of his right ear. He took it out and showed it to me, telling me that this was his itr-soaked mood-enhancer for the day, and his ear was the best pocket for its safekeeping. We had an oddly choreographed, strangely poetic conversation, like First City interviews can be most of the time, and I left soon after, stepping into a muggy, hot, wipe-skin-off type sweaty July day in crowded crowded Turkman Gate area. But the itr shop's residual itr-moodscape wouldn't leave me; I could smell gulab when I turned here, chameli when I sunk into my car seat, sandal when I climbed the office stairs, hell, even the sesame oil base at random moments, like in the loo. It was as if during those 30 odd minutes, those strong, heavy aromas had permeated the first layer of my skin, and were now playing hide and seek with my nose. I wondered again - that grimy, chauvinist, rogue-ish itrwallah (clearly, as you can see, I was back to my lucidity-about-men mode, now that was out of the black magic zone of the itr shop), he spent days in that shop, for years. If I was smelling like itr after half hour, he must be sweating and shitting itr. He could be smelling as mesmerisingly divine as that itr shop even when he was beating his wife, or telling her she's a whore. His rough, wrinkly muddy brown calloused hands, would always smell like desire of maddening depth. And then I told myself ten times over, how I am a very sick child to imagine these things. But I do hope, like I did that day, that his wife is nose-dead. No one deserves such mindfuck.

There was also this pedicurist I met (err...had contact with? Is a pedicure-interaction called, simply, meeting?) once, (and have blogged about experience in terrible detail here), and he was really a very boring type man, but his massage techniques were maddeningly good. His hands were extremely detailed in touch; he didn't just do a mechanical routine of slap-squeeze-kill, like most pedicurists. If I closed my eyes, it was as if his fingertips were sometimes, mmm, searching, or giving me sweet head-pat equivalents on the foot. Sometimes it was as if he'd found nodal switches for the nav rasas, in my calf. But when I opened my eyes he looked so bored and such a sullen pouty morose creature, I remembered feeling sad for the wife he told me he had. And then, (how horrible, I know), but just as a lot of fiction writers do (I assume), I tried to imagine how he'd make love to her. Would it be automatic for him, those fingertip movements he was doing on my calves, doing them to her? How would she feel, to be touched that way by a husband who was so sullen pouty morose with a pencil moustache in the day, but whose hands moved so gently at night, always smelling like a beautifully groomed woman, even if he'd been groping sour-smelling bus railings on the way back home, and he never washed hands before or after eating? I mean, that aromatherapy cream was deeply, perennially in his pores with everyday overuse, just one step short of reconfiguring his DNA.

It's been in reverse many times. Potters work their hands with soft clay (a mud pack for the hands, everyday!), but they braise their skins spinning that wheel, baking the pots in kilns. Can a hand be both, soft and abrasive? I have met many a sweet carpenter whose hands look like they're clothed in sandpaper, not skin. Can a hand that rough, that scarred, that calloused, that crude, still convey melting tenderness in touch? What kind of touch would that be? I have a friend whose hands are perpetually the texture of half-healed burns, and the touch of that is a strange kind of double-edged touch. I am most aware of its quiet messages, because I can feel its abrasion on the surface of my skin. Sometimes when a perfectly soft, gentle hand does that, the feeling is lost because I take for granted, the difference between the surface and depth of a touch.


How odd. And how exhilarating. And how very unending, this Sherlock Holmesy fascination for faces and voices, in namelessly silent hands.