Memories captured in the shapes of a portrairt

The woman on the canvas is my mother. The painting was painted around 1970, when Mom was eighteen and had just become my father's girlfriend. The painter was her godmother, an exceptional woman named Nasreem Aslam, whose house we used to visit every other Sunday, every six months.

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What I remember is that lady's hoarse voice, a deep, smoker's voice, and her smile always clinging to her lips and pupils. It was a warm house and full of beautiful memories. Nasreem lived with her husband, Arshad, near a small plaza that was two blocks from our house. They never had children, but that was replaced by art, because she had dedicated herself to painting with great passion. She even had her own small studio, in a room that in my memory is dim, large, with a strong smell of oil paint.

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This portrait was a constant vision in my childhood. One of those fragments that are often taken for granted because they are always there. We moved several times, but the painting stayed at my grandmother's house, in the room that had been Mom's. After my grandmother's death, the house entered into a legal dispute that has just ended. It was a long and painful process and, after several years, we were finally able to enter again the house where I was born and grew up until my adolescence. The chipped walls, the damp marks, the absence of furniture. I wandered around the house at will, until I found my mother's portrait, inside a closet, facing the wall. I was afraid it was damaged or broken, but I smiled and almost cried at the same time when I saw that it is almost perfect, as if it had been painted a few days ago. I hugged him very tightly, afraid of breaking him.

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I hung it in my room, which used to be Mom's, in the apartment. I watch it when I wake up and sit up in bed, and each time I repeat the same phrase with a faint smile: “Good morning, Má”. It is not about clinging to an inanimate object, because my mother does not live on that canvas; but it seems to me that it is a beautiful reminder of her, of the woman who was hers, of the time we shared together and of a faded and faded time in my memory; because each time the past seems further and further away, because neither my grandmother nor my godmother is here anymore; but, through an old oil portrait, I can contemplate and be grateful for what we were able to live and do, every morning and every night, always with a simple “Hello, Má”. And that helps me keep going, despite the disaster of the present.