The Impressionist (9 page)

Feeling as if he is moving through syrup, Pran examines the window and finds that, though it is unlocked, it opens three storeys above the street and there are no obvious handholds to use if he climbs out. Even if there were, the way his watery body feels, he doubts he would be able to cling on. He considers crying for help but the noise of the bazaar blankets everything. No one will hear. Over to the door. Locked and sturdy. He looks around for useful items. Weapons? No. Ropes? No. Perhaps he could tear up a sheet and use that. A sheet. Good idea. Very good.

Pran pulls the cover off the bed and prepares to tear it into strips. It is a worn and greasy square of cloth, with a batik design on it, barely perceptible in the dim light. What is that pattern? Pran turns it over in his hands, feeling the material. It has an extraordinary texture and somehow he is experiencing it so much more clearly than he remembers ever having experienced a piece of material before. Its
materialness,
its
materiality
leaps into his fingers with such sharpness that it takes his breath away. As if, within this small thing, this insignificant bit of cloth, there could be worlds, whole universes of significance. And what is that pattern? The pattern. It is like a forest. Or a troupe of dancing girls. Or parrots. Yes, it is like a whole flock of parrots, red and green parrots, each one trained to speak in a different way. No, not in a different way. In a sense all the parrots talk the same. Although differently. How exactly do the parrots talk? Have that, and you have everything. The meaning of the pattern. All of it present in that one factor. The speech of the parrots. The answer is simple! The key lies in knowing how the parrots talk.

Pran realizes he has come up with something important, but for the moment he has no idea what it means. Everything seems to have changed. The world is suddenly hectic. It is a lot to take in at once. He was not feeling like this a few minutes ago. He was more sleepy. That is it, he felt sleepy even when they were dressing him up. Now why did they do that? There is a question. They must have had a reason.

Then Pran has a moment which contains an answer and in that answer lies an idea and concealed in that idea is the thought that perhaps the second special lassi has something to do with it. And just as he understands that the second special lassi is special in an extreme and very eccentric way, there is the sound of the door-handle turning and a figure steps into the room. After that he is not sure about anything.

In the days that follow, the special lassi plays a continuing role in Pran’s life. He is forced to drink it at least three times a day, with the result that he can never work out which of the things that happen to him are real and which are hallucinations. Most are so unpleasant that he does not care one way or the other.

When he first wakes, bleak and sore, from a night of confusion, he finds he has been moved to a small dirty room which contains only a charpai and an enamelled chamber pot. The floor is dusty, and the tiny window shows a view of a section of cracked wall, perhaps fifteen feet away. In the absence of anything else, the square of wall and the diagonal crack which spiders its way from top right to bottom left of it become his sole interest. Hours of lassi-fuelled staring see it grow into a river bed, a honeycomb, a pit out of which crawl tiny skeletons, an interlocking web of cricket pads and bats, a spinning portrait of the King-Emperor with pale blue face and saffron hair, an ants’ nest, a market, and the backdrop to innumerable epic dramas of love, loss, civil war and conquest.

Occasionally his dreaming is interrupted by a visitor. Most of the time it is Balraj. His routine is always the same. Jangling his keys the wrestler will unlock the door, lumber in, look at Pran sourly with his doleful red-rimmed eyes, then turn and lock the door carefully behind him. Sometimes he comes with food or another beaker of lassi. At other times he comes to tie Pran to the bedstead and beat him. He does this with a leather strap, coughing and wheezing as he works. It seems to be both duty and pleasure, and he performs it with the methodical, unhurried air of a rich man demolishing a plate of tasty food. Pran will shout and scream and Balraj will ignore him, hitting hard and rhythmically until his laboured breathing becomes a low gurgling moan, whereupon he will stop, hawk on to the floor and leave.

Other people come, with varying degrees of reality. The beggar drags himself in to laugh. Pandit Razdan visits to shake his head and admonish him for his dirty ways and the low company he is keeping. His mother comes too, the end of her sari pulled over her face, her heavy silver jewellery tinkling musically as she moves. She never speaks, just stands there fading in and out like a candle flame while Pran asks her angry questions. Other figures come, their reeking mouths gaping, curved knives in their hands. They bend down and start to flay him, first scoring lines under his arms, round his wrists and ankles, then tugging the skin off his back like a tight kurta. As he screams in agony, they hold it up to the light, which glimmers through it in an indeterminate bloody glow. Sometimes they arrive with his parents, or are dressed in their clothes, burly men trussed into gold-bordered wedding saris or buttoned up in neat achkans, their pink faces like soft fruit sprouting out of high tailored collars. The girls from the courtyard come in threes and fours to hover above his bed and ask him to play. These are the only visits he enjoys, though they always end in disappointment, the girls fading to nothing as soon as they promise to open the door and let him out.

Sometimes he scratches at the wall with a nail, taking off flakes of plaster with its tip, making tiny drawings of the scenes he sees through the window. The chipped wall fuels new pictures and adventures, and these make the rhythm of daylight and darkness, heat and cold, cycle more quickly. When he is not picking at the wall or talking to his visitors he lies and stares into space, taking sips from the bottle of water that Balraj places on the sill once a day. The bottle is small, and, though Pran is careful to make it last, by evening it is always empty. Night-time means a parched throat and a stricken feeling as the last lassi wears off.

Soon the world outside fades, so that the street noise which filters up to Pran’s sweltering box-room seems to come from another country.

One day Balraj does not come. In his place is Ma-ji, accompanied by a thin, nervous-looking man who stands barring the door, his fists clenched as if Pran is about to rush at him. Pran lies curled on the bed with his knees pulled up to his chin. He looks at these new visitors with some curiosity. He has not seen Ma-ji since she dressed him for his first night. She looks like a dead person, a bundle of sticks. As she comes into the room, she presses a scented handkerchief to her nose and screws up her face. Pran supposes the smell must be bad. His chamber pot has not been emptied for some time.

Ma-ji hands Pran a beaker of lassi.

‘Drink.’

Pran is obedient. The familiar salty-sour flavour of the drink hits his throat.

‘Balraj is dead,’ Ma-ji says bluntly. ‘The sickness took him.’

For the first time, for the only time he can remember, perhaps for the first time ever in his life, Pran smiles. As they tighten, the muscles in his face feel new and unfamiliar. Ma-ji lifts her hand as if to slap him, and then lowers it again. In a jerky, darting movement she turns and leaves.

After she has gone, Pran takes his English father’s picture from its hiding place in his bedding and looks at it, letting the lines of the face, the shape of the eyes and mouth sink in. He mentally places it against a thousand memories of his other father – he can not avoid calling Amar Nath ‘father’: father looking at his nails, doing puja at the temple, washing his armpits, calling a servant to pick something up. The little square of stiff paper amounts to nothing next to this weight of memory. And yet it toppled it in a single afternoon. Pran handles the photograph as if it were a magical item, as if its power is in some way inherent in its substance, chemicals and paper laced with an energy of good and evil. He turns it over and over, examining every aspect, fascinated by a rip on one corner, by the way that at a particular angle the silvering catches the light and turns the image from a brown and yellow face to a featureless dazzle. An excess of light, a god, impossible to look on directly. For that one moment the silver is whiteness, all the blinding alien whiteness that this new father has poured into his once-comfortable life. He spends hours tilting the little picture to catch the light, repeating it again again again, feeling each time the thrill, the awe of the transformation achieved by a tiny movement of his hands.

Pran moving outwards from the centre, gathering momentum. Whoever might be in charge, it is certainly not him. ‘Him’, in fact, is fast becoming an issue. How long has he been in the room? Long enough for things to unravel. Long enough for that important faculty to atrophy (call it the pearl faculty, the faculty which secretes selfhood around some initial grain), leaving its residue dispersed in a sea of sensation, just a spark, an impulse waiting to be reassembled from a primal soup of emotions and memories. Nothing so coherent as a personality. Some kind of Being still happening in there, but nothing you could take hold of.

You could think of it in cyclical terms. The endlessly repeated day of Brahman – before any act of creation the old world must be destroyed. Pran is now in pieces. A pile of Pran-rubble, ready for the next chance event to put it back together in a new order.

Here comes the sound of the bolt being drawn, familiar as the call of the muezzin from the nearby mosque, familiar as the crack or the chamber pot or the column of ants which for so very long now have been using the left-hand wall as a thoroughfare between one ant metropolis and the next. He does not look up.

Two tall women look at Pran from the doorway. Ma-ji hovers behind them, wringing her hands, fingers turning through fingers like wriggling maggots. The women take in the scene. Then, not flinching from the awful smell or knife-thick atmosphere of despair that fugs up the tiny room, they lift Pran upright and half walk, half carry him down the stairs.

Candle-flame visitors? Apsaras? How many times has Pran dreamt this? Yet their smell of rosewater, their grunts of effort, their tight fingergrip on his upper arms, all seem real.

The rustle of silk. Ma-ji like a caged mongoose, screeching about money. One of the women turns to her and says scornfully, ‘You have been paid very handsomely.’

And that is that. Splash of water. Rustle of silk. Pran’s quivery limbs are rubbed down. His quivery senses are assailed by the sheer variety, the sheer novelty of another room, a new place. He is dressed in clean clothes, given something substantial to eat, spoken to like a human being. It’s all over now. Things will be better.

One small snag.

The clothes. A rustle of silk. A heavy veil hung over his face. The world seen, new and extraordinary, through a cotton grille sewn into the veil. These are purdah clothes. Women’s clothes.

‘Come on, my darling,’ says one of his new owners. ‘We’re going on a journey.’

Rukhsana

The crowd on the platform at Fort Station throbs like a single body. Dirty-collared clerks, hawkers of tea and sweets, beggars, newspaper-sellers, pickpockets, raucous British Tommies all prickly heat and dirty songs, neatly dressed babus, clipped subalterns soon to be kicking the babus out of their reserved seats, displeased memsahibs leading lines of porters with trunks balanced on their rag-padded heads, peasant families sleeping three generations in a row using baggage for pillows, pompous blackie-white guards striding through to check a manifest or assign a compartment, all the denizens of the various waiting and dining rooms – first second third and purdah, veg. and non-veg., Hindu Muslim and English, all spin together, as, motionless at the centre, snug in his office, the grand master of this invisible college, his lofty eminence the Station Master, moustachioed, dripping gravitas, checks the time of an Up mail or a Down express and intones that sacred information to underlings who take it down in triplicate, quadruplicate or dizzying higher order multiples more grand than beings of lower rank can really comprehend. And all this only a list of people.
The animals –
pariah dogs trotting between legs, terrified songbirds stacked to be cage-carried in third class, a single regal garbage-chewing cow;
the smells –
of food fried in ghee, of coal smoke, sweat, axle-grease and urine;
the noises –
hawkers’ cries, shouting, the calling-out of names and the scream of steam-whistles cutting through this enormous brawl of close-packed humanity. A noise so loud that at times you pray for this excess of life to let up, to open a space and make way for you in the world’s crush, just a little space, just enough so you can breathe and think.

In the midst of it all, shuffling through the crowd like a trio of voids, come Pran and his new owners. Swathed in floor-length black burkas, they view the world through tightly woven cotton grilles and, tit for tat, absent themselves from the general gaze. Unused to walking, Pran stumbles, feet refusing to follow orders. They hold him up, gripping him tightly by the elbows.