Art Kid

The story

Look longer. Every object was made by someone, for a reason.

You went to Kumartuli in September, before anyone else was paying attention.

The lanes were narrow and damp and full of half-made goddesses: straw bodies on bamboo frames, clay drying in the sun, a woman smoothing a cheek with her thumb. Nobody noticed you, which is how you like it. You took forty photographs of hands.

Most people see a pandal. You see a proposal. Someone decided that this year the city would walk through a room made of ten thousand clay cups, or jute woven like a textile, or a wall that breathes with light. Someone argued for it in a committee meeting in March. Someone welded it. An artist like Bhabatosh Sutar spent months turning a story into a building, and the Chandannagar light artists wired a sky onto it. You read the placard every time. You usually knew already.

Kolkata's open secret is that for a few days every year it becomes perhaps the largest public art exhibition anywhere: made by thousands of hands, free, and gone in a week. UNESCO noticed. The British Council counted what it was worth. You just go and look, properly, for longer than anyone around you.

Your friends have learnt to leave you at the good ones and collect you forty minutes later. You're usually still in the same spot, watching the light on one corner at four in the afternoon. That's your hour: the sun is low enough to come in through the side of the pandal and turn everything gold.

You have opinions about the lighting design. You share them. You carry a camera that shoots film, and you use it on the dhaaki's hands and never on yourself.

And every Dashami, when the protima goes into the river, you feel what artists feel: that the point of a masterpiece might be letting it go.