Jaya V. Chala, supremely artistic, modest, pleasant, yet shy. I walked into the realm of her rather mind-shaking creativity by chance, while on a business trip to Lucknow. Reaching her house, I found myself totally struck by the amazingly realistic painting of a vivacious tribal woman in profile. But I wasn't struck enough to stay away from the painting and moved closer to scrutinize that lovely face. And was I surprised! It was not a painting at all, but a complex embroidery, and dinaire who could recreate every nuance of a human face from mundane articles like thread, cloth and a sewing machine! that's when I was really struck. To think that a study in thread could even bring out the different hues of the woman's brown skin, specially the hands, with their darkened portions where the fingers were bent. Each detail of her face was clear and she looked as though she would start talking any moment.

I was amazed when Jaya told me that it was all done with a sewing machine. I do know that a minority of people do use the sewing machine for embroidery, but human faces are really something else. Specially those that Jaya Chala creates with in such great detail.

It all started with an innocuous sewing class in Bombay a good three decades ago, said Jaya, born in 1939 and a native of Bangalore. She was a young and artistic person who then did a lot of painting both oils and water colours. She joined a class on embroidery where a lady called Mrs. Karmulkar was teaching basic stitches. Jaya was not very fond of machine embroidery and joined the class for a lark. Once proficient in the basics she did not immediately enter the world of machine embroidery in earnest. It was only when she saw someone working on the machine and embroidering cloth did she decide to go into it in a big way.

As we sat in her living room she showed me some of her works. Looking at a really tremendous piece of a young woman ladling out a meagre amount of rice to her two little children, I was admiring, sad, happy, all at the same time. Jaya explained that she had watched a similar scene during a famine. Little wonder, then, that I felt sad. Admiring and happy because Jaya had managed to capture onto cloth that complex mixture of resignation and resilience on the woman's face.

I wanted to know how she went about it for her art is certainly not the kind that can be done on the spot, so to speak. She has devised an interesting but tedious method which allows her to retain all the reality of her model even in the final portrait - which might emerge only a month later, notwithstanding the four to five hours she puts in every day. Its like this on her travels and walks, she either pencil-sketches a subject or her husband captures it on film for her. Once home, Jaya converts it into a water colour immediately so as to reproduce all the subtle hues as they were in the original setting. Once this is done she recreates the scene onto cloth, which is always `Binny's' casement, because after a lot of experimenting on different fabrics, she feels her results are best on the former. And the threads are always macerized embroidery cotton.

Why always human beings, I wanted to know. Jaya, who has a pleasant demeanour, told me with a smile that it all started with a challenge from her husband. He, who felt that her acid test would be a human face, and not flowers or abstract motifs, brought her a picture of two children. Ever since the completion of that "challenge picture", there has been no looking back. The prime motivation in creating a human subject is the plethora of expressions and feelings that are always mirrored in a human face. From a pensive beauty, to an old woman concentrating on weaving a basket; from the handsome Gujjar to the smiling Tibetan or a young boy whose face mirrors his dreams, the challenge that faces Jaya is of huge dimensions. She feels strongly about people being able to relate to any art form and her contribution to such a symbiosis is to try and capture all these human moods in thread. Interestingly that is what her exhibition at Bangalore in 1983, was called - `Human Moods in Thread'. Jaya's portraits have been exhibited a number of times from 1973 to 1983, mostly in Dehradun. The praise her work has received is unanimous. The sale of her works was something that Jaya did not even want to consider earlier but with the accumulation of her beautiful creations coming in the way of her ability o create afresh, she just had to sell. Jaya candidly explained how people prefer to buy works of art with big names, rather than for genuinely aesthetic reasons. This rang rather true, I thought, knowing the rather characteristic snobbery that is almost synonymous with the art world. Even against these odds, Jaya, has sold some 150 portraits. There are other hurdles, Jaya told me. She often does not find all the shades of thread that she might need, thus having to compromise on the colours of her subject.

Jaya, I discovered, is also quite an avid gardener, cook and seamstress. Her adeptness with tending bonsais was evident from the rather impressive line-up of `little ones' on one side of their small but lush garden. But it is working with threads that is closest to her heart.

What really awed me was her total unpretentiousness. Jaya is perhaps a true artist, who takes her skill very much in her stride and who is always open to criticism and change. She seems to be involved in a constant search for fresh impetus and works very hard at her art. Jaya believes that she would not have reached such heights if it was not for her husband. From actually helping out in terms of taking pictures of desired subjects, providing the necessary intelligent criticism, standing by her side through the travails of a tough art which takes up a lot of time, he is her real strength, says Jaya.

I left the Chala's house feeling quite honoured for having spent so much time with an unassuming person whose artistic skills were to me so powerfully innovative and whose signature was so distinctive that I realised I would not forget Jaya V. Chala for a long time to come.