The light beyond the last curtain

Whether the curtain was meant to hide or reveal is as easy to imagine or understand as the origin of a staircase, whether it was invented to go up or climb down. Its etymological history announces its courtly origin, and that is a surprise. It’s a surprise because one is conditioned to think of it as a prop – a necessary prop – of domestic life. Curtains, while emphasising the boundary between the outside and the inside, protect it from view, from light, reminding us that it’s not just the elements and animals that need to be kept out but the eyes. The curtain, then, establishes the bloodline of the gaze – the determination of the private and public domains, the architectural habit, all of these are predicated on various degrees of visibility.

Opacity and translucence – as I move through a neighbourhood of mixed-income groups, I notice that the curtains move between these two poles. Two sets of curtains in tall glass windows in one, half-drawn, letting in the light, keeping out the gaze, and shutting out everything at night. They declare taste and wealth, almost like an expensive pair of sunglasses – keeping out the sun isn’t enough, one must be seen keeping it out as if it, too, were art. In the same compound, in a corner, is a tiny tin-roofed house – for housekeeping staff, possibly their family. Its curtains are neither bought from a furnishings store nor have they been passed down from the owner of the house. It’s the remainder of a yellowish sari, one end folded and stitched to allow a sturdy string to pass through it. Suddenly turned into a curtain in its new life, it seems to have surprised itself and, by extension, the outsider.

Lower down the lane, a man irons clothes on a mobile four-wheeled cycle van. I do not live here, but I’ve noticed him at different times of the day, whenever I’ve walked through this neighbourhood. Like a tree, he seems to have forsaken movement, the to-and-fro of legs and curtains. Like a tree, he doesn’t seem to need curtains. I’ve seen him asleep on the van, his feet sticking out slightly, as if it were the mobile van’s nose.

That this seemingly innocent accoutrement of domestic life, restricting entry of the outside indoors, should have socio-economic and spiritual registers is one of the surprises of adulthood. Colour, texture, material, design, height, fold – all of these are held up for a whispered judgement about class. During the lockdown, for instance, when our curtains were made visible to the world during online meetings and discussions, I read and heard of assessments and assumptions about ‘class’ and ‘culture’, a tone-deaf display of condescension and critique. They were not perhaps aware, these critics, that their expectation of the ‘beauty’ of curtains owed to its original usage – its courtly life. I think of the dhobi’s cycle van; his court?

There’s also the spiritual awareness of the curtain that might come from a kind of linguistic conditioning in the curtains of theatrical production, the stage. It’s certainly this register that Rabindranath is turning to in this well-circulated poem in Gitanjali that begins: ‘I know that the day will come when/my sight of this earth shall be lost, and/life will take its leave in silence, drawing/the last curtain over my eyes’. Life and death, which one is inside and which outside? ‘My sight of this earth’ implies that the world outside the curtained window must be life. From where is Rabindranath looking out on life, then? If ‘the last curtain over my eyes’ implies an entry into the residency of death, where exactly is the location of this curtain? Are we aware of this curtain, invisible but moving, as we walk through life? The poem ends with ‘Let/me but truly possess the things that I/ever spurned and overlooked’. Is the spurning and overlooking of things and people a consequence of the curtain itself? Bukowski, in his characteristic manner, gives a humorous spin to the idea of the ‘final curtain’, calling it ‘one of the longest running musicals ever’, returning the idiom to the stage, to a life of material and viewer. Both life and death must lie somewhere between Rabindranath’s ‘last curtain’ and Bukowski’s ‘final curtain’?

‘Putting up new curtains,/other windows intrude...’ This is how Ruth Stone begins her poem. I suppose we are always putting up new curtains, a kind of rehearsal for the last one.

The writer is an author and poet. Her books include How I Became a Tree and Provincials.

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.