Image courtesy: Sanjay Patel
It’s a bit of a fairy tale.
The lonely boy who grew up in a motel finds out he’s actually a Maharaja.
Well, it’s not exactly that dramatic. But Sanjay Patel did grow up in one of the “Patel motels” that dot the United States. His parents still live there. His father worked at a gas station to help pay the mortgage. Patel couldn’t play sports because he had to help run the motel after school. He says it wasn’t the kind of place you invite your friends over. “Most of the business we would get were very marginal characters. A lot of prostitutes and drug dealers,” remembers Patel.
So he had to invent his friends. He found them in comic books. GI Joe comics. X-men. He wanted to be a Ninja. Then the boy who wanted to be a Ninja went to art school and joined Pixar and helped animate blue monsters and rats who dreamed of becoming chefs. Now the Pixar artist has found his Indian avatar.
His show Deities, Demons, and Dudes with ‘Staches opens at the San Francisco Asian Art Museum this Friday. And his work is splashed, bigger than life-size, on the external walls of the museum itself. It’s part of their much-touted Maharaja: Splendor of India show. Or in museum-speak, he’s “activating the exterior of the building based on this exhibition.” The museum, which came close to bankruptcy, is hoping Patel’s effervescent eye-popping art will breathe new life into museum stodginess.
Sanjay Patel has come a long way from the motel desk on Route 66. He’s drawn the little book of Hindu deities which made our gods Hello Kitty cute. He’s brought out the big poster book of Hindu deities. He’s done his version of an illustrated Ramayana. He’s writing a children’s book about how Ganesha breaks his tusk. But like many Indian-American kids, he didn’t really think too much about his own culture while growing up.
Image courtesy: Sanjay Patel
He was surrounded by it. His father put flowers before his gods and did puja every day. Their walls had images of gods. “I’d sneeze and my parents would say Sita Ram. And I thought that’s their version of gesundheit,” he says. Hanuman was a picture of a monkey. And Rama was a blue god. He was also even more cut off from the Indian community because his mother had been diagnosed with schizophrenia. In an immigrant community where mothers are often the community glue, Patel was an outsider. His mother couldn’t drive him to the temple or the weddings like other Indian mothers did.
“She is in a world that is an absolute mystery to me. I wish I could be with her in that space even for a day,” he says. He remembers she would sometimes just destroy the things he would make. He keeps having the same conversation with her over the years: what’s your name, where are you living, what have you eaten, where are the children. He has none.
He dedicated his book Ramayana: The Divine Loophole to her. It reads, “the mystery of your mind led me to my art and to my own inner world.” It’s not a dedication she can understand. “I do wish my mother was healthy. There are a lot of things I am proud of that I want to share with my mother. Physically she is there. But mentally she has no faculty to share the thing I have created,” he says. But then he adds, “perhaps because she was not able to nurture me the way a healthy mother could, it forced me to take care of myself and become more introspective and much more artistic.”
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