A Jolly Good Easter Holiday In Paddington’s London [III] Photograph

Utter any sort of grievance and grumble against the speckle size of the images and know that I will personally see to it that you are tied to a goal post facing directly towards the exit doors of a school and whose one million or so children, impatient and hyperactive, are seconds away from being released from the building for the summer holidays and you, yes, you, lie in their path between school and freedom!!! Your fate will be of such grim outcome that industrial steamrollers will think the work they do are on par with your granny’s hair curlers! Oh do stop behaving so ridiculously mousey and click on the image for Pete’s sake! Is it that I am stricken with hallucinatory tendencies or is Madame Nuha an adept queue jumper in my montages for she always seems to occupy the first spot on the canvas! She may have committed the puny offence of crawling through people’s legs to advance in front of the line but no one in their right sense of mind would want to see or do anything to vanquish that ambrosial smile from her innocent face. She wore the pink flower in her hair to make a special impression on me on the first day that I arrived and I, in turn, was quick to admire and take pride in her natural passion for flower folk. I have no daughter of my own but her display of care and thoughtfulness made me feel that she had inherited something from my palette of life and that was all I needed to believe that I had tasted a brief but precious sip of the sweet brew of Motherhood. Ah, before you start pulling the alarm cord and shouting out at the top of your lungs that we housed a band of questionable dwarves during our stay I would like to clarify that the tiny red arm behind Nuha is a scene from a television programme! My goodness, what a delicate constitution you have and alas, no remedy for it! Giggle, giggle! Oh my, a rather delectable congestion of smiley faces swings into sharp position at number two of the montage. Tania, who appears to be hedged between myself and ‘King Tut’ was actually not in the room. We cut out a hole, using a butter knife, in the wall and she stuck her head through from the other side and that is how she managed to have her included in this group shot. Miss Tania can run up a delirious fever of remonstrations if her ways are not met with prompt action so we were left with no choice but to compromise the uniformity of the dining room wall. WHAT? You don’t buy a word of it? Well, you will just have to wait until we meet for real and then I will break the suspense and reveal to you exactly the crafty trick that lies behind the illusion! Ha! The company of our four teenage pirates poised with nail-biting anticipation as they prepare to enter the Aladdin’s cave behind them sent the sweetest tingles into their fingers and toes! So close to the loot of new discoveries, all they could chant at this point was that I was to guide them to the fabled Rosetta Stone. On the night before I told them all there was to know of this singular key that unlocked the hitherto mysterious world of Egyptian hieroglyphics and without which the history we have at our disposal today would never have materialised. About to march into the atmospheric caverns of knowledge that lay beyond the mighty columns of the British Museum, I felt a relief and contentment as scented as the moistness of fertile rains as I observed before me of my cousins, young people of a younger generation, having their attentions diverted away from the uninspiring world of computers and Smarty pants phones. They were setting out to a magical world where their imaginations and inquisitive natures were allowed to stretch out with relief, a chrysalis splits and a wing edges out to greet morning’s face… Budge over Mr Amundsen and Mr Shackleton, both you chaps have some enormously large shoes to fill ahead of you because neither of you were able to cross between the polar caps as fast and as industriously as our Prime Minister of Strawberries, Lady Tania who in this scene shimmies from pole to pole without even a hint of doubt or trepidation in the sway of her actions! On the contrary, she seems to be far more concerned with making it known that her sense of style even in the most treacherous of conditions is never for one moment under threat. Keeping up appearances no matter what the task ahead – how very British of her! In conclusion, I postulate that all who have entertained the idea of death-defying polar explorations for the future should invest in a strawberry red woolly and, to add, experiments are already under way at CERN to determine whether such coloured apparel proffers an advantage in establishing a symbiotic relation between the wearer and the Earth’s magnetic field and therefore help speed up the trek to the polar cap. WHAT? Why are you laughing?! Oh, go and bogwash your head down the toilet! Giggle, giggle! Did you know that the pressure in the core of the earth’s centre is equivalent to 120 elephants sat on your head?! ‘King Tut’ was sat on the sofa minding his own business when a sudden flash of mischief came over me to put the theory to the test! That day I was out of elephants, like you do when you need them the most but, fret not, I am known rather well for my notorious detection for alternative props for use in prank set-ups. Cushions lead such docile lives as like koalas on a tree, these square plumped bits of idle layabouts stick out like a sore thumb on the sofa. They needed to experience what it means to live! So, I crept up close to ‘King Tut’ and using my Jedi Mind tricks instructed him to pile the cushions on his head to see how many he could take on. One, two, three, four and on and on and on he went. I inspected closely whether his face held any resemblance to what one may see on the face of someone bearing 120 elephants on his head. Dear reader, take a look at the photograph and the blasé expression of my cousin and I am certain you will agree that my experimental set-up came no where near to recreating the unimaginable terror and pain of confronting the monstrous pressures at the earth’s core! Bugger boo! The mummy of Cleopatra from Thebes, 2nd Century of the Roman occupation of Egypt, rests serenely with a smile painted across her tightly-wrapped bandages that seems to betray Death itself. She is not the famous Cleopatra popularised in films and books and who was the victim of unrequited love. The mummy encased here is of a 17yr old girl and daughter of an important government official. I stood outside the glass barrier, my eyes gently walking along the shape of her burial shell, sifting through the pictures with caring attention as if she had intended me to read them and I could tell – feel even - that she and I shared the same dreams at the tender age of 17… Revving up the engine and going out at full throttle on a Harley might send waves of peasant heads to stare in your direction in gasping awe, the tank running on conventional fuel and on whatever oxygen that was bound for the lungs of your audience being cheekily diverted to your mechanical tastebuds! I, at this stage, throw down the gauntlet and challenge the bikers out there to take a peek at this and not feel the dread of a party of 120 elephants sat on your head! Nuha settles down on her eco-friendly, boom-boom supersonic speeder, The Red Elephant! Designed by the Japanese, funded by the Welsh and officialised by the matriarchal Asian Aunties Society on Coventry Road, Birmingham, this is a whopper force to be reckoned people! Yeeeehaaaaaaaa!!!! Alas, my shutter speed played up for some weird reason so I was unable to take a shot of Nuha speeding through the park… ahem, ahem…!!! After a day worn to the teeth with explorations of ancient artefacts and quirky shops and teahouses of the capital, we decided to plonk our bottoms in Pizza Hut in Piccadilly Circus for some serious replenishment! There was a wonderful old gentleman who was sat on ‘King Tut’s’ left and in retrospect, I am pitying myself for not asking him for a portrait because I do not think I shall ever be able to forget him. He was sat alone and began to make conversation with us. My cousins were obviously a little timid but I went at him full-blast and in a span of a few minutes we were chatting away as if we had known each other for more years than I can count. He was born in Pakistan but crossed over to India during the partition of 1947 and presently, his residence was in Canada. He echoed the message that I have carried in my heart since I was a little girl – that we should not get too caught up with the borders we see on maps for our hearts were essentially the same. I found a mirror in him that showed my own face and the intricate weavings of the soul to which I was born in. Naturally he asked me if I was married! I replied with a question and a hearty laugh, “Why do you ask?” He told me he had a son. I was flattered but gently broke it to him that I am waiting for someone and if Destiny is anything that it purports to be then my day will come too. He smiled and nodded in agreement. We spent the rest of the evening in Pizza Hut bantering away and the kids joined in too. Outside the sky grew dark blue, the colour of Moroccan mosaics, and the lights of Piccadilly Circus, much brighter now, danced on our white plates like fireflies out of a dream… Our final piece in this montage displays a dry lacquer sculpture of the Buddha originating in Burma and created approximately sometime in the 19th Century. Peacefully sat in the iconic lotus position, his right hand holds a small fruit that legend tells us is vested with unique medicinal properties. No, it is nothing as sickly sweet as mangoes or as sparse as passion fruit. Your heart knows it could only be something so bright red that blood is nourished by its fragrance and whose descendants to this day grow happily in my garden back home… Photography & Words: © Masufa Khatun | Mazzy Khatun Photo Stories | Spring Reunion Series | London | UK 2015

Photography:Color on Other

Original:One-of-a-kind Artwork

Size:39.4 W x 31.5 H x 0.4 D in

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