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It’s a fact of life that over time we get inured to the beauty of things we see around us. The gasp of delight elicited by the first look at Marine Drive fades away over time.

We start to see it as part of the commute, instead of the place of beauty that we saw it as initially. It is the fate of the known and the familiar, the easily accessible to be taken for granted.And so we plan our European holidays, and ooh and aah over Peruvian handicrafts, and exclaim over the Native American’s jewellery, forgetting that there is so much of all that and more in our very own country that encompasses so many different landscapes and people and their arts.

I’ve always been one of those people who’re not too keen about travelling abroad. When there’s so much to see in India that I haven’t yet seen and that’s more easily available, why travel abroad, is my argument. Yet, it took the visit from Kate, a UK based freelancer who’s written often for our travel section, to remind me of just how much I overlook.

She told me the story of a woman she met in Kutch and showed me a picture. The woman was old, her skin wrinkly from her time in the sun, her clothes brightly coloured, and her ears laden with silver earrings, number upon number of them. On her legs and hands and even her neck and face she had numerous tattoos of a distinctive green-black colour.

I know the tattoos Kate was describing; I’ve seen them too. Not on the same woman but on others like her in Gujarat and Rajasthan. But for some reason I always assumed that the tattoos were ink. Kate didn’t assume, she asked. Through her translator. And learned that the ink of the tattoos is actually created by mixing the juice from a particular trees bark into sour milk and letting the mixture ferment for over a month. The two bits of metal are embedded in a piece of wood, and with this the pattern is etched out in the skin and then filled in with the black mixture. Hence the distinctive colour that is actually so different from the colour of ink.

The thing I took for granted turned out to have a very interesting story behind it.

And I never even thought to ask.

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Posted by Neha Dara on Saturday, November 28, 2009 at 9:29 pm 
Filed under Travel · Tagged accesible, European holidays, familiar, Kutch, Marine Drive, Peruvian handicrafts, tattoos

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