I love watching people’s feet. An obsession from childhood when I would stare at my mother’s feet as she washed them after returning home and how she painted her nails red. At railways stations, bus stands and even in zoos, I notice feet.
Like that child that ran down the path at Bhopal zoo with thick many belled-anklets on her little feet and how the zoo awoke with that sound. Or that elderly woman in Secunderabad railway station with feet smeared with turmeric, under a cotton bandini print mustard with maroon border madisar saree and draped with a sliver of a silver anklet. I looked up into her smiling face, her silver hair tied into a small bun, face luminescent with maroon pottu, walking next to a travel-tired train.
Or that railway staff at Hitech station who wore a dull blue saree, unadorned by ornaments or make up. Plain face with unmade hair. And there on her dark dark feet, a thick exquisitely designed ancestral anklet draped. I was so affected by the sight that I made my way to her and knelt down. She became a celebrity for the hour as other staff members came to check what had made a passerby kneel.
My dad’s chocolate brown feet, fresh from socks and still carrying the smell of the shoe. How his veins travelled upto his big toe and how his little toe grasped the other end of the earth. As a child, I would place my feet on his as he walked around the room. When I grew older, I touched his feet during festivals and rose to his moist eyes. When he grew old, I sometimes clipped his toe nails. At those times, I picked up his feet and laid it on my lap as I worked, feeling the veins, holding the toes, knowing the heels. I miss that feet.
Or the unexpected glimpse of a sandal-cream feet, surprisingly unscarred, revealing none of its histories. Toes pressed in the front, as if on the edge of something, heels held gingerly by an unwillingly rubber band of a low arch. I searched for the veins and where it crossed and the trace of sun on the skin – something that would tell where it had been and what it had done. That feet didn’t talk to me. It was busy.
Mine says everything. Of the days as a child when I sat in aramundi and splat the floor with my feet like a thunderclap. Feet flattening out, toes stretched and grasping the earth, heels even and hard from the repeated bruising. They tell tales of careless sandals worn in hot noon days, of the times I stumbled and stubbed, of the places I took them and times I ran. The lady in the parlour is upset. “Take care of your feet” she insists. I say I do, I let them play.