Michelle Sindha Thomas
Pleasure and Leisure: Nirmala

2025
watercolor painting on paper by Shotwell Paper Mill, handmade from SFMOMA mat board scraps and seaweed washed up from Ocean Beach in San Francisco
12” x 18”
$210

Excerpted from West Coasts: A Story for My Sister by the artist:

Mama had little trouble adjusting from life in Bombay. She knew Kerala from the summers she spent visiting her grandmother and her days unfolded in tropical languor: She and her brother, Vinod, lived on the family estate in their summer home, a white modernist masterpiece with an Olympic swimming pool nestled in the Rubber Board hills. The house was named after her: Nirmala Nikethan. Mama would wake up at sunrise, as she still does, borrow a bicycle from one of the workers, and ride around and around the property line before they left for the shop […] She would go swimming during the Radio Ceylon English music hour, and when the sun went down, she went in and ate dinner with Vinod, started her homework, propped on her elbows in bed, safely under her princess canopy mosquito net. Nani and Grandpop came in and out of town, back and forth from Bombay. Nani would bring huge suitcases of clothes, in styles girls in Kottayam were not yet wearing, might never wear. Only Mama and the Punjabi girl at CMS wore a two-piece salwar kameez set back then. She had a maxi dress with suspenders, smocked dresses with puffed sleeves, custom fitted button downs, an array of trousers. One of the boys taunted, “Hey, you got your grandpa’s pants on?” She retorted, “No, actually they are your grandpa’s,” generations before the golden age of yo’ momma jokes.

Work is available for pickup or shipping after Thomas's solo exhibition, PLENTY, closes in April 2025.

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