Reloaded: Husain paints classics again

Cherries plumper than Billy Bunter languish in a crystal bowl in suite 301 of a New Delhi hotel. Slabs of almond chocolates too lie ignored. The suite’s occupant has been painting, fast and furious. In just a week, he has completed 15 canvases that decode his own classics spanning nearly seven decades.

Stepping back to admire his work, MF Husain tosses a handloom scarf round his neck, singing Yeh dosti hum nahi todenge from Sholay. Even as he turns 90 on September 17, Husain will be ready with a new series of paintings that reinterpret his early canvases, like Between the Spider and the Lamp, from today’s perspective.

Unpredictably, Husain swings, Gene Kelly-style, around the suite stacked with man-sized canvases of the remixed Sunhera Sansar focusing on an idyllic rural family; the famous hectoring banana seller; a little Husain with his grandpa; and other well-known characters from his vast oeuvre, which, he points out, tongue firmly in cheek, is still not in the league of Picasso’s thousands.

The shampoo-maned Horses, the miraculous Mother Teresa, and you can bet your boots, the sensuously hippy Madhuri Dixit, will return to the Husain reloaded canvases. MF is thrilled to be on a mission of self-rediscovery. And while that may seem like a lot of work for a normal mortal, it isn’t for MacBull, as he sometimes signs himself.

Husain had plans of celebrating his ninetieth birthday in Chennai, with a multimedia art show dedicated to the late Carnatic signer MS Subbalakshmi. But that will not happen as “the event may become too big to handle. I’ll pay my tribute in a more quietway.”

On his birthday, he hopes to go underground like last year, when he had switched off his mobile.

“What’s so great about birthdays, anyway?” he mutters, into a cotton-candy white beard. “I must keep working and prove myself every day. I can’t sit back and watch the sunset.”

So, among his several obsessions is an incalculably long mural on the history of Indian cinema that he is painting for Yash Chopra’s new film studio at Oshiwara. Husain sees this enterprise as his fan letter to the movie greats, ranging from KL Saigal, Ashok Kumar, and Dilip Kumar to Devika Rani, Sulochana ‘Ruby Myers’, Madhubala, Meena Kumari, and the ‘ever-tehzaabi’ La Dixit.

Towards the end of the year, Husain will also celebrate the completion of a decade after his first feature film, Gaja Gamini. He has designed 100 silver and gold coins which he will distribute to “whoever I think deserves them”.

Husain has lots more on his plate. He is also busy drafting the script for his next film (“an operatic comedy”), and publishing a book of his still photographs on Chennai’s street culture.

“And then, I intend to do a series of paintings based on famous literary characters,” the artist declares. All this, and yet more, is a single life’s work.