Tattoo diary: Queens, New York

Tattoos on a desi artist in Queen's New York.

And, what can a tattoo mean for a desi in New York City?

I am interested in the story behind the tattoo.

It is not the tattoo, the beauty or the magnitude of it, as in: it is a really long dragon's tail! Or, you have it going where?

It’s the why. Why have you tattooed "KALI" on the inside of your forearm?

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The tattoo parlors on West 3rd in the Village did not appeal. Their goth images on display did not speak to me.

Or, could have spoken for me.

The woman who has tattooed Kali on her arm is Jaishri Abichandani, 32, a photographer born in Bombay, who grew up in Queens, New York. She is Sindhi, her parents left Karachi at Partition.

She talks about her tattoo, her life and her art.

She lives in a building in which her parents, her sister also live and all have their own apartments.

The first thing I notice as I enter her home is a tarazoo in the corner with dollars on a plate balancing a black baby. Its an image that occurs in her artwork. Looking at it that first time it took a moment before I recognized the dollars as fake and the baby a doll.

She plays a Kishore song I have never heard and says she played this music this afternoon and thought she needed to invite someone who can understand the language.

Aankhon aankhon mein

hum tum

hogayee deewanay

The spring breeze blowing over the traffic of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway blows into this other world of her apartment.

She tells me that her mother told her, when she saw Jaishri's tattoos, that Hindu women were tattooed in Sind because of the fear of their abduction by Muslim men.

It did not make sense what she said. What were the motives behind that tattooing? The women were tattooed so that they could be identified when later recovered or so that their tattoo could forever transgress any notion of conversion?

Which one was the reason? In the arms of the future Muslim relationship she may say la illaha illalla once twice everyday on the hour but she will forever bear that tattoo.

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Jaishri's early photographs, from about ten years ago, are of South Asians in Queens, N.Y. In her photography she strives for a familial association with types of desis. Boys as younger brothers, young mothers as married cousins, girls as younger sisters, young families with babies, older families, a Muslim aunt and uncle (the man with the skull cap, the woman with a dupatta, both wearing winter coats).

Its as if she were creating images for a family album. Except that the people were not looking back into the camera as her kin. They were gazing as strangers, though their desiness seemed familiar.

The photographs are an obvious search for the identifiably desi image and association. But for the young brown boys, wearing their Nike sports wear, the shoes, the baggy basketball shorts, looking hip, looking black, their only desi visual marker is their brown skin. So too the images of the young women who are wearing club wear and on their way to Manhattan.

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Some of her photographs, besides recalling a type of desi-- mother, brother et al -- and the marker of brown skin, also recall a place. Coney Island strongly recalls Chowpatty.

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Her current photographs are of herself. Herself as a dulhan, wearing leather, wearing a tattoo. Images of her as madonna, as virgin, as whore. These images she has inscribed in the iconography of mandalas.

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I think Jaishri has inscribed stories of herself because she wants to tell a public story. She is a desi artist who feels that her images need a medium, as public as radio, MTV or film.

For her mandalas are the only iconography available to her. Mandalas give her her public medium. Her body and the mandala create an iconography for her. But her body--her brown skin-- and her resort to a mandala iconography convey a frustration to me.

In Jaishree turning towards the mandala icon to tell her stories is the frustration that her stories are not American as Madonna's Catholicism in her songs, Spike Lee's Brooklyn,Woody Allens Coney Island, and now the Upper West Side, and the bronze Bronx of Jennifer Lopez.

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I was sitting among a group of people-- Shaista, Anand, Gowri and John (a curator, an anthropologist, a visual artist, and a lawyer)-- 40 and under, all of South Asian origin, living in either Toronto or New York, lamenting that there is nothing in the media that reflects them. Where is the South Asian image in film and television?

They all had tattoos and I began to develop a phantasmagoria that they wanted stories to tell but had for their only medium their brown skin.

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Shaista has on her the zodiac sign of Cancer, the crab that she says scuttles away and hides its resentments in dark places.

The conversation turns to the two masalas of ten years ago.

Srinivas Krishna a Toronto filmmaker who made Masala, a feature film about the coming of age story of a Canadian desi male. The film came out as long as ten years ago. And the other movie from as long ago, about a girl coming to her womanhood, is Mira Nair's Mississippi Masala.

Patches of conversation:

Sarita Chaudhry star of Mississippi Masala and Kama Sutra lamented in a recent interview on Zee News that she would give her left arm for the role of Manisha Koirala in Dil Se.

Now that’s a lament that speaks volumes.

What we have is Ravi Kapoor an actor from England who has made it to a sitcom, on one of the major networks, called Gideon's Crossing. His character is not developing. They don’t know how to show him in any relationship. With lover, mother, father, sister brother, with history, with psychology. He doesn’t even have his accent, they have obviously asked him to curb his English accent, and he speaks the language with a vague, desi accent. He is also kept in the dark a lot, literally. I think his character was intended to be as major as any at the beginning of the sitcom. Before the writers knew their imaginations would draw a blank.

The last comment of the evening was somebody saying they felt as small as Naseeruddin Shah’s role in Peter Brook’s Hamlet. She had recently seen it performed in Brooklyn.