No travel itineraries necessary

The grounds of the Museum Voorlinden at Wassenaar in the South Holland province of the Netherlands. Pic/Rosalyn D’Mello

On Wednesday evening, I returned from a five-day trip to the Netherlands, my first time in that part of the world. I was awestruck by the views as our flight began its descent and hovered around the coastline. Everywhere was sunlight glinting upon liquid surfaces. It was spectacular, to say the least. I was travelling alone with our child. I began to refer to this trip as a work-cation. I was visiting my artist friend Bhasha Chakrabarti who was invited to participate in a residency in Wassenaar, an affluent town extremely close to The Hague. She was collaborating with a musician from Sri Lanka, Hania Luthufi, who is currently in Europe, studying improvisation in Hamburg. They had been sharing the residency space since April and were working towards a publication and felt I could be the right person to address the tenor of their collaborative energy. I couldn't disagree with their intuition. Female friendship is my forte, in many ways. I understand its mysteries and I can sense its aura from miles away.

Since the brief was to pick up on these notes through the act of living and inhabiting space with Bhasha and Hania, I thought it might be fruitful to take our child along. I was drawn to the idea of him being exposed to artists and of initiating him to the multifaceted nature of the work I do. I told him I had to go on a ‘study trip' but that this time, he could come with me, as against previous occasions when I left him in the care of his father and grandparents. He's at an age where he has a passionate love for vehicles and the idea of getting on multiple trains, buses and planes excites him. I took time off from my more regular freelance work so I could be more attentive and focussed and could distribute my time between our child and Bhasha and Hania, who were also colossally busy tying together so many loose ends. They had just finished with a Mehfil they had organised to showcase their artistic affinities and were preparing for the Open Studio which was scheduled for the day after I arrived.

The bulk of our conversations happened in the kitchen, and I felt rather blessed to be in such a desi space where there was always leftover rice and dal in the fridge, alongside samosas, chutneys and raitas. Mario, a fabulous curator from Goa, happened to be there too. He cooked a prawn curry-rice dish one afternoon that gave me the home feels. It occurred to me that for the first time since I had moved to Europe I was in a space that felt totally brown and desi. Hania even has the same skin tone as me and I spent so much time marvelling at how gorgeous she is and I wondered, occasionally, if that is how I might appear too! She is taller than I am and a lot slimmer too, but the most mesmerising aspect of her appearance is her skin tone. There were many days when both Bhasha and Hania did their daily work in saris, floating in and out of the house like fairies, appearing luminous and fastidious. I drank in all of that energy as I wandered around the lawns watching over our child who was at work with a large tractor and wagon that he had been offered as a plaything. I was amazed at how much work these two artists had managed to do since their arrival in the space, much of which assumed the form of music boxes made out of thrifted furniture pieces. They had been exploring Ragamala miniature paintings, pictorial representations of ragas. Bhasha had been thinking about the Dutch sky and its light and had been excerpting the skies from the reference paintings and reproducing them on a larger scale with oil paints, her preferred medium. She had simultaneously been painting dying tulips in vases, a set of works I loved because of how she seems to animate their lifelessness, how much aura she tucks into their gestures of wilting and flailing, and how she revitalises the still life medium, scratching out portions of their constituting organs to punctuate their figurative contours.

In between, I spent time alone with my toddler. I followed my partner's advice and skipped Amsterdam entirely. I visited The Hague, Voorlinden - which has this pastoral landscape and a museum where one can simply go and visit Yayoi Kusama's Infinity Mirror Room without much fuss - and Delft, a gorgeous city not far from The Hague that is punctuated by water canals and typically Dutch architecture. It was my first time travelling to places unknown to me with our toddler, and they became for me exercises in giving up control or any sense of predetermination. If he wanted to take a tram, we took a tram. I decided not to make itineraries but to allow our bodies to charter our path. The day before yesterday, I returned home feeling uniquely nourished. However, my desire to explore The Netherlands is far from quelled. There is no doubt I will find a way to return.

Deliberating on the life and times of every woman, Rosalyn D'Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx
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