Firoz must paint. It's impulse he has had since childhood. A calling. “When it happens, I can't eat, I can't sleep, for days, on end, not until I get it all out.” That's why despite having won the admiration of such an outspoken believer in the power of the human potential as A.P.J. Kalam, a village boy who rose to become India's preeminent nuclear scientist and then the country's President; despite the autographed endorsement of his talent by Sachin Tendulkar, Shane Warne, Mathew Hayden, Alan McGrath, Inzamam-ul-Haq and several other cricket icons who have given pause to marvel at the hundreds of his oil paintings displayed at J.K. Museum in Chennai, the Cricketer's Inn and Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bangalore and the Rajiv Gandhi International Staium in Uppal, Hyderabad; despite the awards, countless press articles and TV interviews - “one even by a British Channel, which was arranged by Andrew Flintoff” - Firoz thinks nothing of his brush with destiny here in Jeddah for 2,000 riyals a month painting textbook illustrations on the walls of Saudi primary schools. It's because Poovathankandi Feroz, 29, from a hut near a railroad track in Badagara, a sleepy fishing settlement in north Kerala, remains very much a village boy. The only son of a laborer, raised on hunger and the virtues of hard work from when he was a 6-year-old made to walk as much as 12 km a day after school with a stack of lungis and T-shirts on his head, which father and son would try to sell, Feroz is certainly no quitter. Nor is he one to be distracted from work by the promise of fame. “After I went on stage for the first time in my life – my knees were wobbly and I was trembling when I faced President Kalam with my oil painting of him – this was in 2003 during a D.Litt. awards function in Calicut University – I fled through backstage door for the worksite, climbed up a pole and stayed there all night painting a hoarding.” “In the morning, when the news appeared in all the papers, I was still up there on the pole and knew about it only from the shouts of the people passing by down below on their way to work or school, congratulating me.' “I felt on top of the world and knew then that I'd never let my father down. I cried.” Firoz is a natural, with no formal training in art. He remembers vividly – and with fascination as if it was only yesterday – watching his father sketching occasionally under the lamplight after a hard day's work. “I was five or six and possessed by his pencil sketches taking shape. I couldn't stop myself after that. In class I'd be pulled up and punished a lot for not paying attention and drawing instead. After school, whatever little time I had, I'd paint, just paint.” His first painting made it to the local teashop in Badagara, after his father took it there to show the villagers what the son of a wretched laborer could be. “He was proud of my painting but he'd also explode and tear them up to shreds when I lagged behind in class.” But word spread from the hanging on the wall of the teashop and before long the commercial work started, taking Firoz away from the classroom to painting advertising hoardings and politicians' faces on roadside walls during election time. Firoz had no other choice. “I had three unmarried sisters then. Two got married later and my father is now deep in debt because of it.” Driven to painting anything for a living, Firoz would be overburdened, but he would always find time for his pet peeve: Realist portrait painting. He would tear out any picture that struck him from newspaper or magazine and reproduce it in oil to almost photo perfection, working out the difficult skin tones under different light conditions, all by himself. That was how his latest collection, oil paintings of King Abdullah, Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, was inspired. Firoz came across a pamphlet containing photos of King Abdullah in his youth The printed photos were mostly black and white, and not very clear, small, 10x12 cm at best. But they were enough to get Firoz going. He enlarged them in his mind, colored them and transferred them to oil on canvas, producing a set of nine grand portraits of the King, each 1x1.9-meter big. Then he did a collage of the King's photos on a 2.5m x1.4-meter canvas. There are at least 20 other portraits of the reigning stars of international cricket, and some abstracts and landscapes, cluttering the run down, two-room, lime-and-concrete shelter in a poor quarter on the eastern fringe of Jeddah, which Firoz shares with six other Keralite men who are too engrossed in their everyday problems to bother about their meager living space being sacrificed for art's sake. The art in the dingy place clearly belongs to a gallery, like the hundreds of Firoz's paintings on public display in India. They are treasures waiting to be discovered. Firoz the village boy who has come so far by refusing to fall for the ganja- and booze-induced escapism of youth going to waste in his neighborhood back home, believes his patience will inevitably pay. “My time will come,” he says. “Until then, I'll keep doing the classroom work and all that for my sponsor.” “It's still painting after all.”
