What the Painting Carried.
The same painting. Two encounters, separated by thirteen years. Can inspiration, given enough distance, take shape from fear itself?
by Mihika Malhotra · 3 min read
When I was eight years old, my biggest enemy was a painting hung in the corridor of my grandparents’ home in Rajasthan, India.
Each summer that I visited my grandparents’ home, I was afraid of the way children are afraid of things they have no language for. It was not a fear you can point and name but one that lives in the body, in the particular dread of the hallway, in the specific silence of a room you have to pass through to get anywhere else. The painting was hung in the midway between the bathroom and my grandparents' room, which in a child’s perception of the house’s geography is the worst possible location for anything frightening. Some nights, I would close my eyes to avoid making eye contact with that ghastly painting.
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