Today I painted over a photograph of us.
Before I started, I texted my husband half a world away.
“I’m thinking of painting over this unless you object :)”
He said, “I don’t.”
The photo was taken in 2010 at a friend’s engagement party in Canada. He was wearing traditional Indian clothes — only the second time in his life. That alone made it feel like something to keep.
But the image always sat strangely with me.
Everything about that evening had felt ornate, choreographed, heavy with expectation. So much gold, fabric, ritual, performance. We stood inside it, smiling for the camera, participating in something we both quietly resisted.
For years the canvas remained exactly as it was.
A record of compliance, hiding in the secret closet under our staircase.
This morning, I didn’t plan anything.
I just reached for what was around me. A neighbor’s son’s monster truck. Bubble wrap. A rolling pin. A scrap of lace.
Nothing precious or symbolic. Just ordinary objects within reach.
As I pressed and dragged paint across the surface, the old image disappeared quickly. At some point the flowers began to appear. Not painted in. Not carefully designed. They simply surfaced as the layers built.
Mira watched for a while and said, “It feels like the flowers are emerging.”
That’s exactly what it felt like. They were neither erasing, nor covering.
Emerging.
There is something so right about the way everyday objects softened something that once felt so performative. The smallness of them. The ordinariness. The lack of ceremony.
Years of feeling condensed into 47 seconds of motion in the hyperlapse video. A posed moment replaced by something muted but alive.
I don’t think of it as painting over a memory. It feels more like letting something else finally come forward.
માનસી
