Special Section: Arti Jain

Arti Jain

This photograph is wrongly captioned

It’s her lipstick that piques my interest. A blood red crescent drawn precisely in the middle of her full mouth, like a young Geisha’s, except the pigment doesn’t keep within the confines of her lips but extends down her chin in a sharp line. Is it meant to look like a sickle or a question mark, I wonder and realise, too late, I’ve been staring.

“Take a picture. It’ll last longer.” Her voice cuts through me.

“So sorry. I didn’t mean to. Hi. I’m Mahesh.” I fumble with the leaflet I’m holding and grin sheepishly.  

“What do you make of it?” She points to the photograph I was viewing before my peripheral vision had alerted me to her presence.

We’re at an exhibition of Robert Maddox-Harle’s latest work, in a gallery in Haus Khas. And the photograph is, The Axe Just Fell.

“Fascinating.”

“Don’t you think the caption is misleading? Forcing the eyes to fall on the axe that allegedly just fell?” She jabs her right index finger in the air like a laser pointer.

“I’m not sure I understand.”

Before I can ask her who she is, she turns around and says, “Close your eyes.” She shuts hers and nods to suggest I do the same. “Go on, trust me.”

I take a step back, and clutching the leaflet in my right hand, close my eyes, but not fully. Despite Delhi’s December chill, my ears feel hot.

“Step back in time,” her voice reminds me of rail tracks, just after the train has passed, metallic and warm, familiar and dangerous, “at least a few hundred centuries, out of the obvious. Breathe— inhale, exhale. Now, flutter open your shutters of perception and let the photograph reveal its truth.

After a slow second, I make a show of opening my eyes I had never closed.

“Is it a trick of the light?”

“I don’t mean to be rude. But despite the deluge of photographers these days, no school, no AI tool, shows us how to see. You will have to work just a little harder.”  She smiles and the blood-red sickle on her lips stretches into a scythe.

Her kohl-rimmed eyes, fine lines fanning out at the corners as she adjusts her glasses, are warm and brown. She could be forty or fifty.

“Every thought is recycled. And nothing is ever forgotten.” She breaks into my reverie. “What would you say if I told you I am the woman in the photograph? Notice how your gaze is drawn, nay propelled towards that enigma of an expression—while the rest of her face is obscured?”

What was I supposed to see? Some hidden symbol?

“Doesn’t her expression compel you to think: will she pull the trigger?”

“Perhaps.” I wonder if there is a connection between her lipstick and the woman in the photograph’s half-scowl-half-glare-half-hidden face.

“Why the axe?” She asks.

“Ah!” This I know. “It’s a place-holder, right? Maybe for an idiom… like grinding an axe? Holding a grudge? She looks mad. He better watch out.” I chuckle, relieved to have covered some ground in this collective-viewing-game.

“Typical. Just as lines begin to blur, men hide behind humour, or hubris, even hatred.”

“Not all men.” The words are out before I can stop them.

“What do you make of the opacity of the man’s knee-high socks or the broad stripes of the deck chair he’s sunk into?”

“Visual distractions?” I hazard a guess.

“Exactly.” She lets her gaze rest on me for a slippery second and says, “You’re a quick learner.”

I can feel the heat rising in my cheeks.

“But the opposite of opacity is not clarity.”

Unable to decipher what she’s just said, I continue to look at the photograph, feigning depth of perception.

“Tell me what you see.” She surprises me.

“Any minute now, she’ll pull that trigger.” I blurt out.

“Why are men so eager for action?”

I want to repeat not-all-men but don’t.

“The parasol is what I see.  No better metaphor for brain fog that descends like silent crickets hungry for memories—devouring names, faces, facts. The parasol is neither clear, nor hiding a thing. It even alludes to peace.”

I lean in to peer closely.

“In the moment of this capture, while the woman holds the gun, the man is silent, at peace—the lull before the storm.”

The gallery lights flicker, as if on cue.

“I am all the women. Storms, ancient and new, we have borne— for a long, suffocating time. We were—and still are—silenced as embryos, as teenagers, as adults and now as we come to this final lap, as we mature, ripen into ourselves—past our child-bearing, family rearing periods, as we flow into fields of our choices, voices, sharpen our axes to chop up labels and blitz them into a blurring—for an awakening of us. Don’t get us wrong. We don’t plan to plunder. But prepare a new vision for our fogged-up world.”

Spellbound, I watch as she extends her hand and breaks through the photograph, as gently as a dragonfly landing on a lily pad, barely a ripple, and plucks the parasol out of the man’s clutches.

“Imagine if the man in the photograph stood for all men. His presence visible only through his adornments, his essence squeezed into—socks, parasol, background. A static man. Playing golf. Best kept occupied with sticks and balls. Like we once were. In kitchens and bedrooms, valued only for vaginas and wombs.”

“Not all men.” My voice echoes in the empty gallery.

“The opposite of revolution is repression.” She collapses the parasol and tucks it under her arm.

“This,” she means the parasol, “is a place holder for silence. For far too long, men, women, cultures have used it to unsee the unseeable. It’s time.” She turns to leave but stops mid-stride. “You didn’t ask,” she says, a faint smile softening the question mark on her lips, “but the right caption is, Metaphor of Menopause.”

 

Bio: Arti Jain is a poet, an award-winning spoken word artist and an author. Her work has appeared in many international journal and anthologies, including The Kali Project, Kindle India Magazine, Muse India, Usawa Literary Review, Gulmohur Quarterly, The Hooghly Review, Flash Flood Journal, Porch Lit Magazine, Poems India, Epistemic Literary, BTWN and is forthcoming in The Indian Yearbook of Poetry 2024. She has authored two books. She lives in Doha, Qatar. Website: https://arti-jain.com/ Instagram: @arti.a.jain Twitter: @artijain28  

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Setu, August 2025