Journey-prints are found in feet, did you know?
We’ve
always had them and we have always taken them for granted, even though
we have all heard that line about complaining about the lack of shoes
until one sees someone without feet. Interesting, isn’t it? We talk of
journeys, we talk of footprints, but who ever thinks of or writes about
feet? Until about four years ago I didn’t know there was a word called
pedicure, didn’t know about foot massages or Podiatry.
I find it strange. We all have teeth and we all know about dentists.
We all have eyes and at some time in our lives we check them out. We
never go to a podiatrist, though. What is it with feet? Lesser organs?
Too far away from eyes, ears, tongue and nose to get noticed, unless a
toe is stubbed? Is it because feet are too close to the earth, that they
get dirtied faster?
I was introduced to feet, so to speak, by my friend Kanishka
Gunawardena. This was in the year 1995. Ithaca, New York. He wanted me
to watch Bernardo Bertolucci’s film The Little Buddha with him. He said
he had seen it before with Geoffrey Waiter, a member of his PhD
committee and a professor in the Department of German Studies at Cornell
University. Geoff was a film buff.
He was a great teacher. He could see films frame-by-frame and made a
point to note detail and comment. It was obviously an exercise that
fractured the entertainment; one had to first watch the movie as though
in a theatre, that is, without a remote control and later watch it on
video and try to harvest the richness of detail.
Just as feet leave footprints, so too do journey’s leave their
print on
their feet-companions. Picture by Laksan Maduranga |
That’s another story. My story is about feet. Kaniya (as we called
him) told me how important ‘feet’ were in that movie. There were many
‘feet-moments’ that I would have completely missed had he not pointed
them to me (Geoff had alerter him to them, he said). There were so many
shots that focused on feet that it is possible to read the entire movie
as a narrative of feet or to understand the story through the
conversation of feet.
I have, since then, paid more attention to feet than I have before. I
came to understand that feet are marked by the journey’s they’ve taken,
the paths they’ve walked. I came to understand that just as feet leave
footprints, so too do journey’s leave their print on their
feet-companions. On Saturday, I was to be on a panel at the Galle
Literary Festival. I wasn’t adequately ‘wardrobed’.
The trousers didn’t match the shirt and I had only a pair of rubber
slippers. My sister ironed the shirt and said ‘if you are shaved and
your shirt is clean and ironed, no one notices anything else’. I
remembered something that Voltaire is supposed to have said, ‘Give me
five minutes to talk away my face and I will bed the Queen of England’.
I felt ok after I digested these two statements, and not because I was
interested in bedding anyone.
I thought of what my sister said and the feet-issue came to mind. Why
don’t people care about feet, I wondered, not least of all because I had
heard a ‘feet-story’ that very morning.
That morning I had run into Rohan Edirisinghe, who was a participant
in a session with Gillian Slovo, a South Arica born novelist. He had to
interview her and moderate a discussion. He was focusing on her
biography, ‘Every secret thing: my family, my country’.
I had attended a panel discussion on Friday where Gillian spoke about
writing and until Rohan told me I didn’t know that she was the daughter
of Joe Slovo (leader of the South African Communist Party).
Rohan spoke briefly about the session and mentioned how her mother
Ruth First, as much a political activist as her husband, had been killed
in a parcel bomb blast in Mozambique.
‘She was blown to pieces; the only thing they found of her were her
feet,’’ he said. Maybe I was imagining things or inscribing on his face
something I felt in my heart, but I thought his eyes got a bit red and
teary.
I’ve spent a lot of time since then, thinking of feet. I remembered
that one of the common methods of torture during the terrible days at
the end of the eighties was hanging people by their feet. I had heard
that torturers took special pleasure in hitting the victims’ soles with
an s-lon pipe. I’ve heard that every point in a person’s sole is linked
in someway to some important organ and that this was the ‘logic’ of
foot-massages. I have wondered what organ was got twisted around,
punched, squeezed etc. when pipe met sole.
Since watching The Little Buddha I’ve noticed feel-things. I learn to
read class, work, leisure, pleasure, tenderness and love in a person’s
feet. I learnt that feet are like faces; time carves the signatures of
its passing on both. There are beautiful women wearing beautiful clothes
that we see everywhere we go, but the depth or shallowness of beauty is
easily and quickly ascertained if we spent a few seconds looking at the
person’s feet, I have noticed.
My father, like most fathers, has feet. My father has corns which I
am periodically required to carry out surgery on. It’s a delicate
operation. I have to shave off the dead skin with a blade, clean up the
wound, put some medication and bandage it all up. He has a hereditary
foot disease which has twisted all his toes. It is not easy for him.
Attending to his feet is a thanksgiving as well as worship.
My mother had feet. She never asked for much, for she was a giving
person, but she liked having her feet massaged. We used to do this,
myself, my brother and sister, taking turns as kids and as adults
whenever we were around. Thanksgiving. Worship. I noticed during those
few minutes of hand-foot encounter how much she has walked and worked.
The next day I would quarrel with her, but still I could never forget
her feet.
Here’s the final foot story and I hope it will make you think a
little differently about feet. My mother passed away a few months ago. I
had to attend to the initial rituals pertaining to death such as getting
a death certificate, contacting an undertaker, informing friends and
relatives and making funeral arrangements. One of the ‘musts’ was to get
her body released from the hospital mortuary.
A hospital official took me in, along with two men from the funeral
parlous. She was kept in one of those long drawers. I had to identify
her body and sign papers. As they brought her out, the first thing I
noticed were her feet, her toes tied together with a strip of cloth.
Cold. Dead. Her entire life story was written in those feet and I read
it all in a matter of seconds.
I am thinking of her now. And I am thinking of Ruth First. I am
thinking of feet.
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