The Impressionist (3 page)

Forrester realizes he is in the presence of a spirit. He died in the flood and this is some kind of phenomenon, the sort of thing one tries to conjure up with table rapping and Ouija boards. But she seems real, this goddess. Shaped out of the raw clay by the flood. He wonders if he has created her, sculpted her with his sleepless nights and his meanderings through the desert. Perhaps, he reasons, if you lack something enough you can force it into being.

Then she steps towards him and starts to unbutton his shirt, and as she does so he feels the tug of fingers on button and wet hair against his cheek and smells her clean rich smell of woman and mud and hair oil. His hands brush over her skin and they touch real skin cut and scratched by stones and branches and he knows he has not created her at all. She clears her hair out of her eyes and looks directly at him, and with a start Forrester realizes that it is the other way around. He has not created her. She has created him. He has not, never will have, any other purpose than the one she gives him.

As the fire crackles and dries his skin, she strips him of his clothing, and he does not even wonder that he is in a warm dusty place with brass water pots and a stack of brushwood piled neatly against one wall. Outside the storm is raging and inside the cave her small hands are curling round his penis and tugging him down in a tumble of limbs on to the floor.

The flood comes and the whole world is swept away except Amrita. The water shakes and paws her, unwrapping her from her sari, batting her around like a huge rough dog. Then it sets her down and she slips out of it, shivering at the sear of the wind on her bare skin. Objects stream past her in the dim light, men and beasts and valuables, the things of the defunct world being swept off into oblivion.

That is the old world and she is the mother of the new. She peers into the watery darkness and pulls a pearl-skinned man out of the flood. He is panting like a baby. The raw heavy sound of his breathing excites her.

Amrita drags the pearl man backwards and a roof closes over them. He falls on the floor. She looks around. Everything is there, everything they could need. So the mother of the world squats with flint and tinder and lights a fire and looks at her find. He has no colour at all, face and hair washed clean and pure as milk. He is wearing wet feringhi clothes, which she takes off. He seems very helpless, lifting up his arms to assist her with his shirt, putting a hand on her shoulder as he steps out of his khaki shorts.

Then he is naked, and although he is helpless he is very beautiful. Amrita traces the line of his hip, the arrow of hair leading down from his navel. In small extraordinary stages, his hands start to return her touch, and soon she does something she has only imagined, and pulls him downwards.

Their sex is inexpert and violent, more fight than sex as they roll and claw across the packed earth floor. It happens quickly and then for a long time they lie tangled together and breathing hard. The unprecedented sensations of each other’s bodies make them start again and they do this twice more, roll and claw, then lie exquisitely, drunkenly still. By the last time the fire has guttered, and sweat and dust has turned their skins to an identical red-brown colour. The colour of the earth.

They lie until the fire has died out completely. Then, in an instant, something tiny sparks in Forrester’s brain. This Small thing cascades into something larger and potentially threatening and he takes a shot at giving it a name and fails, though he thinks it may be something to do with duty and India Office ordinances, and this thing which now seems enormous and important and panic-inducing makes him leap to his feet and stagger backwards, turning round to try to confront it or at least have some idea of its shape and meaning. Perhaps it is unnameable, the unnameable thing which strikes a lost man whose sole short purpose has just been achieved, but, whether or not it can be named, it makes Forrester look at the girl wildly and understand nothing about why and where he is, except to know that he has changed everything about his life and cannot see where it will lead.

So Forrester wheels round and steps out of the cave and down to the edge of the water, which has formed itself into a fast-flowing red river. As he rubs his eyes and straightens his back and tries to control his panic, he sees, with a surge of joy, something coming towards him that he knows. A young deodar tree, snapped off at the trunk, is sailing towards him down the flooded gully, its branches quivering like the beginning of speech. The tree seems so freighted with wisdom and routine that it might as well be playing the National Anthem, and Forrester lets out an incoherent cry and hails it like a cab and jumps on and is swept away. The last Amrita sees of him is a mud-streaked torso heading downstream, continuing the journey she interrupted a few hours before.

In 1918 Agra is a city of three hundred thousand people clenched fist-tight round a bend in the River Jamuna. Wide and lazy, the river flows to the south and east where eventually it will join with the Ganges and spill out into the Bay of Bengal. This, one of countless towns fastened to its banks, is an anthill of traders and craftsmen which rose out of obscurity around five hundred years before, when the Mughals, arriving from the north, settled on it as a place to build tombs, paint miniatures and dream up new and bloodier modes of war.

If, like the flying ace Indra Lal Roy, you could break free of gravity and view the world from up above, you would see Agra as a dense, whirling movement of earth, a vortex of mud-bricks and sandstone. To the south this tumble of mazy streets slams into the military grid of the British Cantonment. The Cantonment (gruffly contracted to Cantt. in all official correspondence) is made up of geometric elements like a child’s wooden blocks; rational avenues and parade grounds, barracks for the soldiers who enforce the law of His Britannic Majesty George. To the north this military space has a mirror in the Civil Lines, rows of whitewashed bungalows inhabited by administrators and their wives. The hardness of this second grid has faded and softened with time, past planning wilting gently in the Indian heat.

Agra’s navel is the Fort, a mile-long circuit of brutal red sandstone walls enclosing a confusion of palaces, mosques, water tanks and meeting halls. A railway bridge runs beside it, carrying passengers into the city from every part of India. The bustling crowd at Fort Station never thins, even in the small hours of the morning. The crowd is part of the grand project of the railway, the dream of unification its imperial designers have engineered into reality. The trails of boiler-smoke which rise over heat-hazy fields and converge on the station’s packed platforms are part of a continent-wide piece of theatre. Like the 103 tunnels blasted through the mountains up to Simla, the two-mile span of the Ganges Bridge in Bihar and the 140-foot piles driven into the mud of Surat, the press of people at the station proclaims the power of the British, the technologists who have all India under their control.

For such a lively city, Agra is heavily marked by death. This is largely the fault of the Mughals, who, in contrast to the current mechanically minded set of masters, thought hard about the next life and the things which get lost in the transition from this one. Everywhere they have left cavernous mosques, chilly monuments to absence. Round the curve of the river from the Fort is the Taj Mahal. For all its massive marble beauty, for all the relief its cold floor and dark interior afford on a scorching day, it is a melancholy place, forty million rupees and who knows how many lives’ worth of autocratic mourning. The Emperor Shah Jahan loved Mumtaz-i-Mahal. Now the pain of his loss rises up at the edge of town, clothed in the work of countless hands, surrounded by a formal garden still used as a meeting place by steam-age lovers. Despite all this effort love still refuses to conquer, and the trysting couples have a subdued, pensive look about them.

Now, as it does every so often, death has come to hang over the city. This time the killer is not siege or famine but the influenza epidemic, making its way eastwards across the world from its mystical birth in a pile of dung behind an American army camp. By the time it leaves it will have taken with it a third of Agra’s people: a third of all the shoemakers, potters, silk weavers and metalworkers in the bazaars; a third of the women pounding their washing against flat stones by the river bank; a third of the six hundred hands at John’s ginning mill; a third of the convicts making rugs in the city gaol; a third of all the farmers bringing produce in to market; a third of the porters sleeping on the station platform between shifts; a third of the little boys playing shin-shattering games of cricket, bowling yorkers off the baked mud of their tenement courtyards. Rajputs, Brahmins, Chamars, Jats, Baniyas, Muslims, Catholics, members of the Arya Samaj and communicants of the Church of England will all succumb to the same sequence of fatigue, sweating, fever and darkness.

Across the world, the scale of this killing is even greater than the slaughter that is finally playing itself out in Europe. Here, it hangs like a miasma over the knot of streets near Drummond Road, the quarter of the city called Johri Bazaar where the jewellers have their shops. Now, like the pilot Roy, trailing black smoke over faraway London, plummet down into the middle of all this death, to a large, impressive house cut off from the street noise by high brick walls. Swoop down over the parapet topped with shards of broken glass to a low flat roof, a place where a boy reclines on a charpai, one hand working steadily inside his pyjamas.

Pran Nath Razdan is not thinking about death. Quite the opposite. The bazaars may be empty and the corridors of the Thomason Hospital clogged with corpses, but none of it has anything to do with him. At the age of fifteen, his world is comfortably circumscribed by the walls of his family house. The only son of the distinguished court pleader Pandit Amar Nath Razdan, he is heir to a fortune of many lakhs of rupees and future owner of the roof he lies on, along with all the courtyards and gardens, the cool high-ceilinged rooms, the servants’ quarters and the innovative European-style toilet block. Further afield there are other houses, a brace of villages, a boot-blacking business in Lucknow and a share in a silk-weaving concern. When he glimpses his future, it seems full of promise.

With a sigh, he looks down at the tent in his raw-silk pyjamas. Full of promise. Money is the least of it. Clearly he is loved by everyone. His father will not hear a word spoken against him. The servants smile as they struggle upstairs with his bath water. When his aunties come to visit, they pinch his cheeks and coo like excited doves. Pran Nath, so beautiful! So pale! Such a perfect Kashmiri!

Pran Nath is undeniably good-looking. His hair has a hint of copper to it which catches in the sunlight and reminds people of the hills. His eyes contain just a touch of green. His cheekbones are high and prominent, and across them, like an expensive drumhead, is stretched a covering of skin that is not brown or even wheaten-coloured, but
white.
Pran Nath’s skin is a source of pride to everyone. Its whiteness is not the nasty blue-blotched colour of a fresh-off-the-boat Angrezi or the greyish pallor of a dying person, but a perfect milky hue, like that of the marble the craftsmen chip into ornate screens down by the Tajganj. Kashmiris come from the mountains and are always fair, but Pran Nath’s colour is exceptional. It is proof, cluck the aunties, of the family’s superior blood.

Blood is important. As Kashmiri Pandits, the Razdans belong to one of the highest and most exclusive castes in all Hindustan. Across the land (as any of them will be happy to remind you) the Pandits are known for their intelligence and culture. Princes often call on them to serve as ministers of state, and it is said that a Kashmiri Pandit was the first to write down the Vedas. The Razdan family guru can recite their lineage back hundreds of years, back to the time before the valley was overrun by Muslims, and they had to leave to make a new life on the plains. The blood stiffening the bulge in Pran Nath’s pyjamas is of the highest quality, guaranteed.

Pran Nath is not alone on the roof. The servant girl’s choli has ridden up her back, exposing a swathe of smooth dark flesh and a ridge of spine. She is sweating, this girl, her skin glistening in the sunshine, her broom held loosely in one hand as she sniffs the air, catching the strong smell of raw onions wafting up from the master’s bedchamber. Beneath her many-times-washed cotton sari he can make out the curve of her buttocks, which was the original stimulus for unlacing his pyjamas. Somehow looking is no longer enough. She is not far away. He could grab her, and pull her down on the bolsters. There would be a fuss, of course, but his father could smooth it over. She is only a servant, after all.

Gita the servant girl has no idea of her peril. Her eye has been caught by a monkey, and she is thinking how nice it would be if it spoke. Perhaps the monkey has been sent by her prince to watch over her, and perhaps it will grow to an enormous size and put her on its furry shoulder and carry her off to a palace where there will be a wedding with singers and dancing – or if not a prince then at least the monkey could turn into the pretty boy who cleans for the fat Baniya druggist, or if not a shape-changing monkey then a talking monkey which could tell her fortune, and if not a fortune-telling monkey then one which would do something more to distract her from her aching back than just sitting there, scratching its lurid red bottom and rolling its lips backwards and forwards over its nasty teeth. She straightens up and wipes a hand over her forehead. As usual there is more work to do.