Shoulder Garden

My grandmother took me to a Theyyam in Kannur when I was seven. I had never seen anything like it — a man dressed as a god, his face painted in red and gold, the flame crown so tall it seemed to bend when he moved. I was frightened and then I wasn’t, and I held my grandmother’s hand through both. She had grown up watching Theyyam and for her it was as ordinary as the passionflower on her courtyard wall, as ordinary as the magnolia she tended every morning before the heat came. I didn’t understand then that for her these things were all the same thing — the performer’s face and the plants and the particular way she stood with her hand on my shoulder while I learned to be unafraid. I came to Jess with a photograph my uncle had taken that evening — grainy, slightly blurred, the performer mid-motion in the firelight. And I told her about the courtyard in Thanjavur, the passionflower that grew up the wall, the magnolia in the corner. Jess listened to both and asked where the two things met. I said: in my grandmother’s expression when she watched the performance — the same face she had when she was tending the plants. Concentrated, unseeing, slightly fierce. Jess drew from that. The mask on my shoulder blade is not the performer’s face and not my grandmother’s face but it is the expression they shared, made small enough to carry. The florals grew around it the way they grew in the courtyard — not arranged, just present.

Priya — Chennai, India