by Preethi Nair
My mother wailed even louder, the wedding sari ripped to shreds in her mind.
‘Don’t worry, it’s finished, and anyway, if it wasn’t why would I be seeing Raj?’
As they took a moment to think about this the doorbell went.
My dad answered it.
‘Hello Mr Savani.’
‘Oh Bhagavan, what more today? My daughter told you I have paid all my tax bills.’
Oh God, Jean, I thought.
‘Nina,’ Jean said seeing me by the door. ‘Who was that man who dropped you off?’
Dad looked confused as my world caved in around me.
‘Nina, I love you,’ Jean shouted.
My dad looked over at my mum who had gathered herself together. ‘Kavitha, the taxman is saying he is in love with Nina.’
‘He’s not the taxman, Dad, he’s Jean, “the Jeannie”.’ I turned to Jean. ‘What will it take for you to leave me alone, Jean?’
‘I won’t, not until you tell me that –’
‘I’m marrying someone else,’ I blurted.
My mother looked at me, wiping her tears with the end of her sari.
‘His name is Raj and he’s an accountant,’ I continued.
Jean looked at me, incredulous. ‘The man in the car?’
I nodded. And then he walked away. And soon after I’d said it, I wanted to shout out, ‘Don’t go, Jean, it’s not true.’ But my mother had somehow managed to wrap herself around me and was weeping with delight.
Dad thankfully thought that Jean had fallen in love with me the day he had met me at the door. It was understandable, he said, as I got my looks from his side of the family. Mum said that we’d have to keep it all quiet so as not to disrupt the wedding plans. But then she would say that as she kept a lot of things quiet. And me, I called up Raj later that evening to ask him if he felt he might be lucky the third time around.
My dad was right: in life you can’t have everything you want – it was better to make it as pain-free as possible.
The next morning I woke up feeling very dazed, and for one moment I breathed a sigh of relief thinking that agreeing to marry an accountant and being an unemployed owner of a studio had been a nightmare. The moment I realised it was true, I wanted to smother myself with the pillow.
‘What a bloody mess, Ki, suppose you’re unable to help me out here?’
She would be laughing at the mess, telling me to get out of it and give Jean another chance, but it was too late – wedding plans were already being put into action.
My mum was like a contestant on The Price is Right who had just found out that her name had been called and was running down the steps in a state of delirious excitement. ‘Get up, beta, and go to work and then you can come home early,’ she said bouncing into my room. ‘We have so many plans to discuss, so many things to do. Come on, beta, we’ve done it, we’ve done it.’
She pulled back the duvet and I dragged myself into the shower. Part of my job was getting artists out of contracts that appeared watertight, but this was something else: verbal agreements in the semi were binding.
I got changed into my suit, pulled out my sports bag and packed a change of clothes, a few jumpers, a dirty pair of trainers, towels and an old bed-sheet. Should I be caught I was prepared with the answer of the forthcoming charity jumble sale that the firm were holding.
‘So you’ll try to come home early? We have the engagement party to think about.’
‘I don’t know, I might go to the gym after work,’ I replied as she was eyeing my sports bag.
‘But the party …?’
‘You just decide, Ma, call whoever you want. I’m running late.’
‘Thank you, beta, thank you. You have made me the happiest woman on this earth and you know –’
I left before she could finish.
It was freezing cold but it wasn’t raining. All the units adjacent to the studio were closed. Just outside the studio door was a grubby pair of boots. I put them to one side, unlocked the padlock and went in. The studio looked bare with no Sydney Harbours looking down over it and the emptiness heightened the absurdity of what I was planning to do. Blank canvases were stacked against the wall and one hung on the easel with a note. ‘Good luck with the birds – play the tape if you get stuck.’
I stood in the centre of the room looking up at the skylight. ‘You crazy, crazy woman, Nina, what have you gone and done? What are you thinking of?’ I said to myself. I changed out of my suit and into my jeans and jumper, tied my hair back and put the suit on the suit hanger. The heater was already turned on full blast. What was I supposed to paint?
Tubes of paint had been laid on the table in an orderly fashion. It wasn’t my natural inclination to be orderly but I had to be that way at the firm. I had to be a lot of things at the firm. I stared at the blank canvas for what seemed like hours, thinking about my family, Jean Michel, about Ki and the deep insecurities the Guru had touched. It was as if I were looking at myself in the mirror and seeing all the parts that hurt. I picked up the paintbrush with my right hand. I wasn’t even really right-handed but from being a child my dad had insisted on me using it, as in our culture it was considered bad manners to do anything with the left hand.
‘Chi, Chi, Chi, dirty girl. Not with that hand, Nina, what will the peoples say if they see you?’
But now I rolled up my sleeve and put the paintbrush in my left hand. All down my left arm was scarring, blotchy skin that revealed my deepest inadequacies. I could have had the prettiest face in the world but it wouldn’t have mattered; inside I felt ugly and worthless; inside was a gaping hole that had been left by the people I had loved the most. The Guru had found his way into that place and confirmed what I already believed. I heard his words again: ‘You’re cursed.’
This was the arm that I hid from everyone, that I tended not to look at. This was the arm I covered, pretending that everything was fine, but here in the confines of this space there was no deceiving myself – this was the arm I wanted to paint with. Nobody here was telling me what to do or how to do it; I could reveal everything about myself and nobody would judge me. I stared some more at the canvas and started to see black. The optical illusion of colour was like the optical illusion of life: stare at something hard enough and eventually you see what you want to see.
Blacks, that’s all I saw: black hole, black deceit, burning black, black at the funeral, empty black nights waiting for my sister to tuck me into bed, the Guru’s black teeth, his dirty black fingernails. Thick ivory black squirted from the tube directly onto the canvas. But there wasn’t a hint of ivory in this black, not one shade of another colour, and with the thickest, hairiest brush I frantically covered the entire canvas with this black.
I swept my hand across the meticulously placed paints and went to get the pair of grubby boots that I had seen outside. They looked so miserable – maybe they belonged to a tramp who had rejected them. They had no laces just holes as if they had been deeply wounded. I hurled them onto the table and watched them land defeated. One fell on its sole, the other on its side.
While the paint was still wet I took another black and smeared the paint on with my fingers. I could not stop. Molten anger bubbled to the surface as I pounded the canvas with my hand and fingers, smearing black onto black, trying to find the shape of the boots on the canvas. My hand and my arm ached but I kept on pounding frantically, finding the ugly creases and the lacklustre holes where laces didn’t even want to go through, until eventually I had to stop and sit on the floor.
When Ki left she took a huge part of myself with her, the part that made me believe I could be anyone or do anything, Jean Michel took away a bit more and what was on the canvas was the part that had stayed with me.
As I hoisted myself up to go and knock the boots off the table, a shaft of light reflected back from them, wanting to tell me something else.
I stared at the boots in this light. They had walked for miles and miles and had been bought at a time when people saved up
to buy things for special occasions. Maybe a man had saved up for weeks to buy them for his wedding and had proudly walked down the aisle. He’d also kicked a football in them with his son. When they had been chucked out years later, he searched all over the house and every subsequent pair he bought was in a vain attempt to replicate those cherished boots.
Perhaps a woman in a charity shop had picked them out just before they were put on display for the customers. She felt that they would fit her husband and had bought new laces that matched. Polishing and wrapping them up in newspaper, she had handed the boots to her husband, swearing it was a stroke of luck that she had found them as it wasn’t her turn to empty the bags that day. Shortly after that he was promoted. He would have wanted to be buried in his boots when he died but his son hadn’t known that and they were discarded along with the rest of his belongings.
Finally, a tramp had come across the boots quite recently after rummaging through some bin liners. He had also come across a decent suit. In a drunken state, he had taken them off and forgotten where they were. It became his mission to find them and every day he would search a different street.
Putting the canvas I had been working on to the side, along with the dirty black brush, I cleaned my hands, took a new brush and another canvas. Without mixing the colours I thinned paint with water and washed the canvas in a sea of cerulean blue. While I waited for the paint to dry, I put on the tape Gina had left me. It was Puccini’s Madame Butterfly. Opera wasn’t really my thing but I listened to it anyway. Carried away by the waves of emotion, I sat staring at the blue and then I suddenly saw something.
Dampening a rag with water, I looked at the spot two-thirds of the way down and wiped the space. I picked up an ochre yellow from the floor and oozed a buttery mass onto the empty space. The bristles on the paintbrush swirled the pigment into two rotund shapes that resembled the shape of the boots. I didn’t feel as if I were the one who was painting as the strokes were rhythmic and disconnected me from all my thoughts.
Pockets of green came through where the blue paint hadn’t come off, and these were effortlessly worked into the painting. Confident red-iron laces were added and where the yellow met the red a hopeful orange shone, the same orange as the soles; the same orange as the sky I had envisaged while sitting at my office window.
The bright colours made the painting look vibrant and full of life. For the first time in a very long time, it made me feel optimistic. Is this what Matisse meant by seeing flowers when there were clearly none? If painting could create an illusion, if it could make you feel things or see things that weren’t there, then this was what I wanted. At that moment I was certain of only one thing; that this was what I wanted to do with my paintings. I wanted to see magic and paint it even if it couldn’t tangibly be seen. I wanted to put bold colours together, see colours that hadn’t been painted and bring inanimate objects back to life.
I took white paint, squirted some onto the palette, thinned it with water and in the left-hand corner I painted the words ‘For Ki’. Looking at the space in between the words and sensing that there was a great distance between them, a distance that shouldn’t have been there, I inserted the letter ‘u’ so it read, ‘Foruki’.
I cleaned the boots with a damp rag so that most of the grime disappeared. There was string in the cupboard along with brown paper, both of which I placed on the table. I cut two long pieces of string and put each of the strings through the lace holes, and when I had finished I packed them both in brown paper.
I washed my hands with soap and water but couldn’t get my nails clean and kept scrubbing my fingers until they felt raw. After my brushes were cleaned and the paints neatly organised on the table again, I got changed into my suit, sprayed myself with perfume, glanced at the canvas one last time and smiled. I picked up the boots, switched off the lights and locked up the studio.
The boots were left where I had found them and then I switched my phone back on. There were two messages from my mum and one from Raj asking how I was and to give him a call back whenever I could.
On the journey back home I prepared to condense my world back into Croydon, to squeeze it back into the semi. No sooner had I walked through the door than my mum cornered me.
I panicked, thinking that she could smell the paint or would spot the state of my fingernails, and so I tried to get away from her.
‘Where have you been, beta, you’re very late? Have lots of things to tell you,’ she beamed.
‘Let me have a shower first, Ma, I’ve had a really busy day,’ I said quickly.
She followed me upstairs and talked nonstop through the bathroom door but I didn’t want to hear a word of it.
‘So it’s OK, then? Two weeks’ time, so December twenty-sixth and second of April?’ she asked, shouting through the door.
‘What’s OK?’
‘The engagement and the wedding.’
I opened the bathroom door in disbelief. The second of April was less than four months away – what was she thinking. I hardly knew this man. ‘What?’
‘I spoke to the priest today and he said that was a good date and then I called up Raj’s mother and she too agreed. We’re all so happy.’
‘It’s too soon,’ I shouted.
‘Soon, soon,’ I heard my dad shout from downstairs. ‘We have waited twenty-seven years.’
‘But I’ve phoned people and made arrangements now, beta.’
‘Unmake them.’
She took out her sari-end from her midriff and before she even began sobbing, I left her there.
How could she just do that? Engagement, priest, wedding, all within four months.
There was nobody I could talk to about it except Raj so I returned his call.
‘Am I glad you called, Nina. I’ve just heard about the engagement and the wedding date, and I didn’t want you to think that it was me pushing you. Far from it, we don’t even really know each other.’
‘That’s exactly what I was thinking.’ This man was growing on me more and more.
‘Anyway, when you get to find out some of my really bad habits you might want to delay it indefinitely.’
‘And they are?’
‘Well you’ll just have to find out, won’t you?’ he flirted.
I giggled pathetically. This was what happened when you spent hours in a room full of paint and had no one to converse with.
We talked about his day at work, his colleagues, his friends, he asked me lots of questions but I diverted the conversation so we spoke mainly about him. I didn’t want to lie so I tried to find a way of broaching the painting-by-day subject.
‘Do you believe in magic?’
‘Black magic?’ he replied.
‘No, things like coincidences. Coincidences, and also when you take a leap of faith that other things happen almost as if you have no control over them, as if someone is helping out.’ I was thinking about my transition into the art world but he took it to mean us.
‘I never thought about it but I suppose in a way I do. I took a leap of faith with you and it feels right and it’s all moving along almost like we have no control over it.’
Did I feel that way about him? Well, no. But there had been a sign.
‘What about signs?’ I asked.
‘What do you mean?’
‘A sign is an indication that you are doing the right thing.’
He didn’t say anything.
‘The sign between us,’ I continued, ‘was that for days, even before I met you, I was thinking about the Matisse quote – you know, the one about creativity – and then you said it to me. Out of all the things you could have said, you gave me that quote.’
‘I can see how that could be a sign,’ he answered diplomatically. ‘It’s nice to think about things that way but I work on gut feeling, Nina, and I know I’m sure about you.’
Yes, that’s what I liked about him. His certainty and practicality: there was no spontaneous, impetuous behaviour, no way on earth that I would ever find him wi
th a red-headed woman.
‘So what do you think?’ he asked.
‘About what?’
‘About getting engaged in two weeks?’
Carried along by his sense of certainty and convincing myself that all the doubts I had were not about Raj but about the superficiality of the list system, I said yes.
My mother couldn’t stop kissing my forehead when I told her I’d agreed to the dates, and my dad hugged me. It was getting to the stage where I could use both my hands to count the number of times he had done that. But I knew I had made them proud; the kind of proud that studying law couldn’t even come close to, and before I knew it they were on the phone, calling all their friends and relatives telling them that their daughter was getting married.
‘See,’ my mother said to my father after she had made the last call. ‘Cleaning the house of old televisions has brought Nina a husband.’
And although he didn’t want to, he begrudgingly conceded that the ‘Chinaman Fongi’ might well be on to something.
Early next morning, I was woken by the sound of my mum singing her heart out with prayers. Singing, though, is probably not the right word, more of a howling noise. My dad began protesting but she sang like nobody could stop her.
The journey into the studio that morning took less than an hour and somewhere during that time the sun had risen. By the time I got there it was eight o’clock. The musty smell of paint lingered in the air from the day before. After getting changed I sat in front of the easel looking at the painting of the boots. I took it down and leaned it against the table leg and put a new canvas on the easel. I sat staring at the blank canvas for hours before looking again at the black, ugly canvas from the day before. It wasn’t black I saw now but grey; grey like sad skies that have the promise of another colour above them; grey like the two stone-carved elephants we had in our sitting room, brought back from Uganda. They had changed hands from the craftsman who sat on the beach making them for tourists to my tight-fisted uncle who had resold them to my father. These carved elephants were what he asked relatives to bring back every time someone returned, and despite the fact that he could now afford to go there himself, he never did.