This is a special collaboration between an artist, a filmmaker and a photographer. For this set, I invited my friend,
@rintuthomas (Director-Producer/
@blackticketfilms ), to take my photo and discuss what consent means to her. The lens is not just mine. The stories are not just ours. It's time we took responsibility for creating safe spaces, not as individuals, but as a collective.
. . .
Touch is memory. Some touches are like poetry, light and deliberate, knowing where to land. My mother’s palm against my fevered forehead, its comfort anchoring me to the world. The slight, absentminded weight of a friend’s knee against mine as we sit deep in conversation. Dida’s shurshuri curling over my skin, dissolving wakefulness into the hush of her hands. These are the touches that settle lightly, asking for nothing and leaving no debt behind.
But some touches stay too long. They sink into the skin, like the oily residue of a careless handprint on a wall that was once clean. Like the faint, stubborn stains of colour left behind after Holi. Days later, they emerge—pink ghosts on forearms, yellow traces on collarbones—quiet proof of something that should have vanished, but didn’t.
I often try to trace the moment I became awakened to the ways in which others’ eyes touch my skin and being. Holi reminds me of this. It is the only other time I let myself be drenched in the open, apart from the rain. But the rain is different, it belongs to no one. Even in a crowd, it is mine. I step into it when I choose. It does not watch me as it falls.
Holi is different. The water is also different. Fabric that once obeyed now clings, outlining things I did not offer.
Life has been a slow lesson in the language of boundaries. I've learnt the difference between an embrace and an enclosure, between being adorned and being claimed. And yet, I refuse to fold myself small just to be safe. I will not retreat to dry corners while colour explodes outside me, will not let the joy of open sky and running water be taken from me. I will let the colour find me, the water touch me—but only when I decide. Only when it is welcome. Only when it belongs to me.
. . .
#naqab #benaqab #consent #holi
