Adding a dash of her special creativity to personal celebrations and cultural events, Benaifer Khushroo Mehta has been sprinkling vivid hues in patterns of her chalk art for more than three decades now. Rangoli being the taste of the season with an array of festivities coming up, Asrashaheen.in takes a dekko at Benaifer’s heart-warming chalk splendour.
After the dampening spells of monsoon, colours in nature have started popping up, bright and refreshed. Along with the pleasant weather, sunnier days and hovering dragonflies, the month of October is here to recharge your mood with an array of festivities. This is also the time when Rangoli is the taste of the season. The colours in nature become a divine inspiration and what emerges is a melange of hues in a plethora of patterns. Creating designs on ground/floor using rice powder, limestone powder, flowers or coloured sand is rooted in many of the celebrations of India and the Subcontinent. Considered to bring good omen, the art form is practised on various events, including religious, personal and cultural fests.
Benaifer Khushroo Mehta is someone who has spent more than three decades of her life, sprinkling vivid hues with her chalk art (the Parsi term for Rangoli). She has been adding a dash of her special creativity to personal events and cultural celebrations at prestigious hotels in Mumbai. For Benaifer, colours give flight to her artistic ideas and she takes up each occasion as a challenge. Being a Parsi, chalk design has been quintessential to her everyday life just the way it is for many others in the community. (Chalk is a fine limestone powder used with prefabricated stencils to decorate at the main door entrance and inside the house at all door entrances. The chalk powder is put inside this metallic box and stamped onto the damp floor, creating artistic patterns. The designs are more intricate and elaborate on auspicious days such as weddings and Navjote.) A look at her chalk designs will certainly bring to your mind the intricacy of a very different art form ie embroidery, which is surprisingly yet another skill she practises with equal expertise. A school teacher by profession, she has also been customizing exquisite towels for her discerning clientele with a distinct touch of her attractive embroidery.
Well, the festivities this year are more about brightening up the look and feel of your home sweet home. Need some inspiration? Asrashaheen.in takes a dekko at Benaifer’s heart-warming chalk splendour.
From Personal Events to Fests at Prestigious Hotels
Benaifer has been painstakingly adorning the threshold of homes and other venues for various personal events including engagement ceremonies, weddings, Navjote (Initiation into Zoroastrianism), birthday parties, anniversaries, school functions, and also for birthdays of Agiaries & Atashbehrams, which she does free of charges. “This is my humble way of thanking Ahuramazda for the beautiful life and the talent he has blessed me with,” says Benaifer. She has also done rangolis at some well-known hotels in Mumbai such as The Taj Mahal Hotel (Colaba), ITC Grand Maratha (Parel), and for Ganesh Chathurti at the Gallops Restaurant (Mahalaxmi). The popularity of her chalk art has been spreading by the word of mouth far and beyond the Maximum city. Her clientale also includes NRIs and expats visiting their families in India.
“As a little girl, I used to watch my mom doing colourful chalk designs outside our house every day. This cultivated my interest in playing with colours. I started taking small professional orders from within my colony. And now it has been more than three decades since I am into this profession. While my family and friends have all inspired me, most importantly, my husband, Khushroo, has always motivated me to try out something new. He is my biggest critic and support system,” recollects Benaifer.
Catering to Changing Trends
About 20 years ago, when the trend in rangoli was in for a change from the regular floral patterns to themed ones, a friend of hers asked Benaifer if she could replicate the design of invitation card for a Navjote ceremony. “When I saw the invite, I was shocked. The invite had a complete courtroom of King Jamshed, with approximately seven characters. It also had many other details, and I had less than two weeks to prepare the stencils. Each character had approximately three to four pieces to be put up as one. However, I accepted the challenge and was able to create the whole thing together. That design was approximately 8 x 4 feet in size. Luckily, the end result was simply beautiful. This work gave me a lot of confidence to take up more challenging patterns and since then, I have made a lot of variations of that design,” she remembers.
“The changing trends in the patterns and the challenge to adapt to those changes keep me motivated. People don’t prefer too many colours these days and like to have only two or three colours in their rangoli. Incorporating invitation card designs is also trending in,” she adds.
Chalk Art has Come a Long Way
“Blessed with the art of drawing, I have been able to create a lot of stencils on my own. But back then, when there were no computers, it used to take me a lot of time to make each stencil. Today, with the help of technology, various apps and internet, things have become quite easy for the younger generation,” she observes.
Her design size ranges from as small as 1½ square feet to almost 5 – 6 feet circular patterns. In fact, her biggest design so far was a 6 x 4 feet rectangular pattern. On average, it takes her about 1 – 1½ hours to complete each piece.
On busy days, Benaifer starts her first rangoli at 5:00 and then goes to work and resumes her afternoon session by 2:30. On school holidays, she has done as many as 12 rangolis in one day! Isn’t that unbelievable!
“Here I would like to mention the names of people, Tara & Vidya, without whose help, I would not have been able to achieve so much success in chalk art. Tara is my house caretaker for the last 34 years and has been with me in every piece of rangoli that I have done. She is more like a family member now. She is the one who actually gets the colours from the market and does all the mixing. On the other hand, Vidya, her niece, who is more like a daughter to me, manages everything right from setting up my rangoli bag to sorting and arranging my stencils.
Quintessence of Parsi Households
“The custom of putting chalk on the floor of the entrance and thresholds is considered auspicious amongst the Parsis even today. Apart from the fact that it adds beauty to one’s home, there’s a lot more to this tradition. Parsis have their typical specialized metal chalk boxes, stenciled in dotted patterns, well preserved for generations. Traditional designs such as ses, fish, horseshoe, flowers, coconuts, swastika are distinct to Parsi culture.
Be it at your doorstep or the entrance of your function venue, it’s not the size or the amount of colours that matter, but simply the joy and the festive feel that these Rangoli designs bring with them,” sums up Benaifer.
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