A Cup of Home

I spent the last two months of 2019 until January 2020 in Bogota with Anna in the house she grew up in. At that time, I was in the middle of editing “Last Days at Sea”. The edit felt like a never ending mystery, something that I could see in my mind but could not get out in a sequence.

Anna’s family work with clay. Her Aunt and Uncle had a studio next to the home Anna grew up in. And one day, we spent an entire afternoon making a cup. It was the first week of January of the New Year. It was one of the few times that I spent an afternoon away from the desk, not editing. I was stuck in the work in an incredible way, and she coaxed me out of the room. If I could not find answers to work that day, maybe I will find it outside. So we went to the studio. When I arrived in November, I had told Anna that I wanted to explore the studio and everything around. Back then, I wasn’t aware of a stubbornness that I possessed, to stick to something until I am satisfied. And so I had spent almost two months, working, paying very little attention to this new place I had arrived in. Forgetting the fact that I was half way around the world, an almost two day journey away from home. But that day I went outside.

As it happens often, what I thought of as a simple task of making a regular shaped cup, is not easy. Anna said we would make a cup using the “Snake Technique” where we would build everything with clay with our hands by building the shape of a cup using a long winding rolled up strip of clay, winding winding on top of each other similar to how snakes do. The cup I had made grew wider and wider on the sides, until it could not hold up its shape. Refusing to do things all over again, we turned the excesses of cup into folds. What was once supposed to be circular, turned into a flower/ star shaped cup.

It went into the kiln for a day. I had told Anna’s Aunt and Uncle that I had hoped it would have a golden lining, with stars and moons on it. When it came out, it held a golden line along the folds, and the sun and moon on its sides and at the bottom of it.

After I left Bogota, I went back home, and a month later, I moved to Bombay. I carried the cup with me, and I intend to keep it with me when I move next. In the beginning, I had expected a perfect regular tiny cup, but as it often turns out with my life, I got an unexpected one that surprisingly fit me more than what I could image.