Every Door, A Tender Veil: A photo-essay by Poornima Laxmeshwar
Photo: Poornima Laxmeshwar
‘Closed doors mean abandonment… only houses where no one resides must be locked. Doors are like hearts... They must let the sunshine and the storm enter, because life is such.’
Back in the Dharwad home—in our joint family of thirty-odd heads—shutting the door was an act of rebellion. No matter how much rage took over or lust burst in our nerves, we could never close the door and be left alone.
Privacy is the privilege of the elites; in my middle-classness, I see doors as obsolete.
Ajji taught us early that how someone shuts the door reflects what they feel for us. If the act is done gently, it shows respect or affection; and if it ends with a thud, it shows how unwanted our presence is.
In our household, however, we rarely ever had the opportunity of practicing this art. The doors were always kept open. Lakshmi—the goddess of wealth—was welcome without interruption. As were the mosquitoes. Even the newlyweds shared the sleeping space in the kitchen to accommodate the expanding family. It took the groom some courage to sleep in the room with his wife, and tepidly close the door to find some temporary privacy.
Closed doors mean abandonment, said Ajji, and only houses where no one resides must be locked. Doors are like hearts, she added. They must let the sunshine and the storm enter, because life is such.
Photo: Poornima Laxmeshwar
Maybe Ajji philosophized everything she ever saw. I am not sure anymore, as her memories have faded to moonlight. But what I am sure of is that this obsession with breathing freshness and feeling light is hereditary. As soon as Appa returned from work, the first thing he would do—even before he freshened-up—was open the windows, and doors, coil the curtains, and stuff them in grills. He never liked anything filtered.
Every year on Nagpanchami, Amma drew two snakes on the door. She smeared Kumkum-haldi to leave them in multi-colored hues. She would then stick cotton garlands and worship them with jaggery water, milk, popcorn, jasmine, and whatnot. The drawings stayed on the door, changing shapes until the following year. Every morning she would wash the door’s threshold and rangoli it with effortless patterns that her hands didn’t need a thinking pause. She had picked two small, heavy stones to keep it at the edges, so that the doors would still fail to close when the strong winds of an angry season forced them shut. It was as though any seal would be like a nail in the coffin.
When Amma was stuck with us during the pandemic, she loathed the passing moments in our tight-lid apartments. She could never understand that a door was now a mark of safety. She was amused when a cousin picked the 50k heavily carved teak wood for the entrance door. Amma argued the door itself would be an invitation. My cousin told her that another metal door would be installed to prevent that, and Amma only laughed out loud.
I believe that the door is a trap. It makes the entrance exciting, and it is its only purpose. Who invests a thought for doors in the backyard anyway? Exits are, therefore, brutal. Amma says I must drop my melancholic lens to reapproach my perception.
Wait, doors of perception? I do not like the fact that a building without doors is a room to a room to a room to a room.
Photo: Poornima Laxmeshwar
If I must put it poetically…
A door is a word of caution. Listen to it. You will know what graves and grooms inside the discolored walls.
A door is then an ear: noising out the secrets, holding on to the hushes until the wounds pus and ooze out the unbearable.
A door is then an eye: shutting close to the truth, staring blankly at the streets winter after winter but always clogged in rain.
A door is then a lip: longing to let be, sealed in a sacred scare of purity that is told to be too right.
A door is then a face: holding the façade on the palm, breathing in slow terror of the moving cloud.
What you know is what is told to you; what you think is marked unnecessary.
Every city is tough skin, every door a tender veil.
Photo: Poornima Laxmeshwar
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Poornima Laxmeshwar resides in Bangalore, India. Her books of poetry include Anything but Poetry (Writers Workshop), Thirteen - a chapbook, (Yavanika Press) and Strings Attached, (Red River). You can find her on Twitter: @poornimasl and Instagram: @poornimalaxmeshwar.
