Pushpa, the flower-seller, was not so keen to have her picture drawn. Draw my flowers instead, she told Ardra who stood there with a sketchbook. Her flowers were laid out on a little stall on a street in Kozhikode. It took some persuasion but Pushpa relented after Ardra showed her sketch book, realising this is what the young woman did often, and beautifully. When she finally saw her portrait, Pushpa was so elated she couldn’t find words, and asked Ardra to come closer to express her joy. She asked for a copy to show her son back home.
Ardra, Pushpa, the portrait and the flowers
The next day, Ardra took her a copy, while her friend Nihal, a vlogger, tagged along to take a video of Pushpa’s reaction. Nihal’s video became a reel on the internet that quickly grabbed views and likes. He made more such videos from Ardra's hometown Kozhikode, one of an elderly man called Koya Hasan running a store in Kuttichira gathering the most views of all — last checked, it was 3,11,000 plus. In the video, Ardra is approaching Koya Hasan, who greets her with a toothless smile and puts a hand on his chin when he sees his face on the sketch book.
"He is well-known in that neighbourhood. His store sells unique items, and has been running for more than 60 years. What I liked so much about the interaction — and this is in the video too — is him offering to buy tea for all of us. It felt so warm," Ardra Anilkumar tells TNM.
She is a postgraduate in social work with a love for water colours, a love that began in childhood. Her mother draws, her grandfather sculpts, and her brother and she were taken to art classes when she was way too young to learn. “I later took part in competitions in school and won prizes, and I still didn't know how to draw portraits,” she says.
But eventually, she began teaching herself. Her first attempt at live-drawing portraits began on a bus trip from Varkala, when she saw a couple's tiff in a seat in front of her. Ardra, on an impulse, drew out her book and sketched the man and woman and took the picture to them. “They took one look at it and immediately melted, apparently forgetting all about their fight. It made me so happy to see them turn so happy,” Ardra says.
The couple's reaction prompted her to do more such portraits, and Ardra always found her subjects on the streets, among ordinary people, like Pushpa the pookkaari (flower-seller) and Koya, the store guy who told many stories. No age was too little or too much for Ardra's subjects. A little girl called Sreekutty was so excited to find her picture painted that she ran to her home some distance away to show it to her mother. Ardra would make sure they all got a copy. But she does not want to make art her profession, she wants to do it without rules, she says. This way, she can witness the joys she spreads, by just stopping by and looking at someone long enough to paint a life.