This spring, I was lucky enough to attend the opening of Salman Toor’s Wish Maker collection at the Luhring Augustine gallery in Chelsea, New York. 

Salman Toor is my favorite contemporary painter, not that I have many. I was properly introduced to art fairly recently, and I couldn’t cite better reasons for liking his paintings than “I like emerald green” or “I find the clown noses kind of tragically hilarious”. If you’re looking for a deep, poignant analysis of why his work resonated with me – and really, in a way, introduced me to the art world, then this isn’t the article for you. The more I read about Salman Toor before and after Wish Maker though, the more I grew to enjoy his work. In him I could see something that’s harder and harder to find in the age of almost-real-time-introspection: he is precisely of the times, and that is what gives his work a sense of timelessness.

A few years ago, Salman Toor’s Museum Boys was displayed in the same room as paintings by Johannes Vermeer at the Frick. In an interview with The Frick Collection, he says in his posh Lahori accent “they (Vermeer’s paintings) were scenes of domesticity, but they were naughty.” Only he pronounces naughty as nottttty which makes it sound naughtier, somehow. He captures this naughtiness in many of his paintings — often times raw, heartbroken, and conflicted.

I fear we risk transience when we write our increasingly sentimental Instagram captions with the intention — or hope — of making them timeless. Our words — however achingly raw they may feel to us in that moment we carefully choose a Charli XCX song to post on our grid (guilty) – synchronize with the algorithm intensely before being lost forever. 

While walking around the gallery in Chelsea, my friends and I asked each other what our favorite paintings were; I said mine was “Mommy’s Room”. My filmmaker friend’s filmmaker girlfriend asked me why. I loved the directness of her question; her genuine curiosity.

The answer was simple, it reminded me of my mother’s bedroom and her mother’s bedroom. Not her present-day bedroom, but the various rooms in the different apartments we’ve lived in over the years, or the room she’d stay in in during summer trips to Pakistan. My Nani had a bedroom that felt like a separate wing – full of light, wooden furniture, and a steady stream of visitors. I loved playing by her dressing table or singhar mez, a small and inconspicuous table on which she neatly arranged plastic combs and comb-pins and black tubes of frosty pink lipstick.

 The grandeur was – as always – in my head. I may have been a little girl, forever in awe of their beauty, but now I am a grown woman, forever in awe of this singhar mez and my mother and her mother’s ability to show up for themselves even after they spent most of their lives showing up for others. A neatly pinned bun, a wash of pink lipstick, and voila – you’re showing up for the world and showing up for yourself. This timeless, even magical form of self-love, the simple act of painting your lips has been passed from generation to generation of women, never losing its thrill or efficacy. Since then, did I ever encounter a space so small, so electric, so vibrant, yet so wholesome? Is there anything in the world as intimate as sisters and grandmothers and girlfriends lounging on a double bed like queens, a bed that never seemed to run out of space for what felt like a hundred children, a bed that seemed to unfold limitlessly, matching a limitless generosity? It was a space where bearing hearts wasn’t mandated but happened wordlessly, through tears and laughter and tearful laughter. A safe little haven with endless trays of spicy, salty snacks received hush-hush through a door that needed to stay sealed shut to keep the room as air conditioned as possible. Cold glass bottles of jet-black Coca-Cola, so fizzy it burns your throat, the only thing that snapped you out of heat-induced delirium. Children piled up all around the room, under sheets, visible through sheer curtains, headcount positively unfathomable: it was their safe haven, too.

In the years I spent exploring the world and forming ideas about privacy and intimacy, the bedroom became a quiet, sacred space. In forming those views and thinking I was seeing things for what they truly were, I didn’t turn back for a second, not even to consider all that I was losing in exchange for my proud seclusion. While I cannot exactly speak to the experience of the little boy at the dressing table in Salman Toor’s The Women, I can speak to the power of that glorious singhar mez and all that it symbolized: secrets and vanity and diffidence and beauty and compromise. I can speak to it because I saw it firsthand.

I traveled to New York for a mini holiday but I didn’t plan to do much.  I saw the beautiful clouds painted on the ceiling of the New York Public Library, from which I wrote this Editor’s Note. I watched my friend roll a cigarette before a viewing of Hadestown during which I promptly, predictably burst into tears. During the first act, I spilled a hot mocha all over myself, and he offered to clean it with his t-shirt, a small but sweet gesture that I declined but appreciated nonetheless. I watched a lady cross the street with an orange snake around her neck, worn as a necklace.  At the library, I noticed a young man who smiled at me from across the table – I smiled back before burying myself in my notes again because one look is enough. My intimacy cup fills easily but lasts me a while, with moments as thin and diffusible as air. 

I saw other paintings in person, too, including the John Sargent exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I saw Madame X in all her intimidating, sensual glory, beaded straps and jet-black dress stark against a porcelain complexion that would have even the most toxic of desi aunties swooning. I tried for once to trace a painter’s life first through his work and then Wikipedia finally down the sub-reddit rabbit hole – reverse engineering my experience. Only to realize that this wasn’t a reverse at all: this was God’s intended order. God said save the sub-reddit for last – I swear I read that somewhere.

The magazine was born during a rather boring, bleak and distinctly artless year. In a rather remarkable feat of consistency, showing up for ourselves and each other, we are happy to share with you that Issue 4 — Glimmering World — is now live. I am much more excited about the work the team did than my own. I will read Raisa, Molly, Isha, Sophie’s articles with the same pleasure that you will. I am sitting quietly now; but I am both impatient and excited – Half-Light has inadvertently become a comfortable conduit to the unseen; shining a light on doors unopened and unexplored.