by Annie Zaidi
He had nodded again, as if to say he had known all along that that was the kind of mood she would want to capture. Emboldened, she had gone on talking. How she was going to paint people of different shapes, different ages. Lots of figures. How it took a lot of time and effort. How her back ached. How she had started from the top, where the ceiling met the walls, so she had to use a high stool, the kind house-painters use. How it was hard to paint with concentration if you were worried about falling off. So far she had only managed one whole person and it had taken three months. How she needed to decide whether she even wanted such a thing in her bedroom – so many life-like human figures; it could be distressing, and what would happen to the art if she ever wanted to sell the house?
Perhaps it was all a doomed venture, a castle in the sand, she had said, but she had anyway begun on the heads of three other women. Their bodies were just black outlines so far.
He had listened and nodded, scarcely looking at her. Suddenly she had begun to feel foolish. He hadn’t asked any questions, but she was seized by a terror that now he would ask if he could come and take a look at what she had painted.
But he didn’t ask that. Instead, he asked, ‘Did you remember to scrape off the whitewash before you started painting on the walls?’
She had pursed her lips, shrugged. She had done a shoddy scraping job herself, but bits of distemper still clung to the surface. She had been in such a hurry to begin work that she had simply painted over it. In any case, it was very likely that the first rains would wash away all her work. During the monsoon, the walls would grow damp and fungus would set in. Months of back-breaking work would be utterly destroyed. In fact, she might never be able to finish it. Each time she finished painting one wall, the monsoon would be back and she would spend the next year trying to clean and restore.
That was alright with her. She wasn’t sure she wanted her work to be seen. Nor did she know what she would do with it once it was finished. It was likely she would never get a whitewash job done in this flat. The workers would come into the house, step into her bedroom, see the nudes, and . . . No, she couldn’t have that happen. If she ever had to get rid of her work, she would scrape it off herself, inch by painful inch. Then she could repaint her walls a pure white again.
She didn’t say it though, not to him. She had only shrugged, as if to say, it doesn’t matter.
‘It is good,’ he had said, and paused. His lips were moving silently as if he was searching for the right words. Finally, he just repeated, ‘Yes. It is good.’
She had asked, ‘What is good? You haven’t seen it.’
‘It is good to do things. On your own. For yourself. That is good.’
Over the next few weeks, she had fallen into a pattern. She stepped out to buy vegetables and paint once in three days. It would be the time when he was sitting outside, on the roundabout. She would stop to say hello. He would say hello, and smile. If she said nothing, he too did not make any further attempt at conversation.
After a few days, she began to linger, exchanging a few sentences – his health, her work, her mother’s health, the weather. When winter came around, more people began to step outdoors. The young mothers with their babies and the old men and women – all of them trooped down to the roundabout after breakfast, hoping to catch some sun.
He still sat there between nine and eleven, legs dangling, arms raised, wrists rotating left to right, up and down. But she found herself avoiding his gaze, scurrying past the dozen people who were also sunning themselves under the black lamp-post. There was no need for secrecy, and yet, she didn’t want to say hello in front of all these people.
Deeper into the winter, she began to go out to the market in the late afternoons. Around five, when it was getting a little chilly – not warm enough for the other old people or babies to be hanging around – she would walk past the roundabout. He would still be sitting there, silent, staring into the far distance. They would fall into talk. She would blabber on about murals and oversized canvases, impressionists, portraiture, landscapes, folk art, miniatures. He didn’t know much about painting, but he listened, asking questions to fill the gaps of his own understanding.
They spoke staccato, like engines in very old cars. She smiled to think of the analogy, but it was true. Her own body was rusty and it wasn’t likely to improve. Except for her short forays to replenish supplies and visits to her mother, she got no sunshine, no exercise, and certainly no grooming. With no sisters-in-law scolding her into a smear of lipstick now and then, she had let her face fall back into its muddy ordinariness.
And him? He was retired and had probably never made any attempt to be anything but ordinary. He never said much about himself. If she stood still, not saying a single word for several minutes, he would take a deep breath and begin to reveal a little of his past. He was an army man, had spent fifteen years in the Northeast. He could deal with silence. He did not smile much at people. It was an old habit. The Northeast had taught him a lot about human society – why people did what they did, talked as they talked, lived as they did, why they lied, why they smiled. He found clarity through the dilution of his human interactions.
One evening, when she stopped at the roundabout, a plump woman in a satin Punjabi suit emerged from the building, huffing and puffing, although she had only just stepped out from the lift. She joined them at the roundabout and he introduced the breathless woman as his wife. A clear-eyed, clear-skinned, fleshy creature of the very Punjabi Jat type.
The wife just stood there, saying nothing, nodding now and then at her husband as if to ask, ‘Why so silent? Go on, talk to her.’
She, who was unmarried and middle-aged, burned. She could read the unspoken words spilling out of the folds of that woman’s fleshy chin, those florid cheeks stretching into a polite smile. She was familiar with this type of wife. Neither content nor discontent, neither enthusiastic nor depressed, neither passionate nor introspective, but always watchful. One of her sisters-in-law was like that.
They were hard to fault, such women. They never complained about how their lives had turned out, never accused you of anything, never let you feel insulted. But they made you fly into unreasonable rages. Her eldest brother had developed an obsession with repairing old radios, just five years into his marriage. Her sister-in-law had never complained about the time wasted, or about the money spent on acquiring old junk. But every few months, her brother would end up smashing one of the radio sets, flinging it across the room with a force that would smash a teakwood table. Oh, she knew this sort of patient wife!
She understood now why this man sat outside his house for nearly four or five hours a day. Just like her brother, flapping his arms inside a cage of respectability, a cage so gooey and rubbery that it wouldn’t break no matter how many radios were smashed.
She stood at the roundabout, trying to find something friendly to say to his satiny wife. She slowly breathed in his mortified rage. She wanted to scream too. To fling some broken-down radio set into a wall, to watch something break down, to confess to her own fragility and misery.
All the time she stood there, he made no attempt to talk to either woman. He stayed perched on the concrete, raising his arms up, stretching and bringing them down to his shoulders, raising, stretching, repeating.
She guessed the roundabout was an escape from his heart’s weariness. He could not bring himself to lapse into a retirement love with his wife. He must have treated his family well. He had probably never beaten his wife, nor drunk too much, nor yelled at the children. Or perhaps he had. Perhaps he had even thought he could love such a wife. But he had failed and even his failure meant nothing. It had meant transfers, three or four children, furniture, a flat. What does a failed love-life mean if there are twenty or twenty-five years of marriage to show for it? What did love mean when there were children and pensions?
She had rushed to the market, bought a week’s supplies and then didn’t emerge from her house for another eight days. On the ninth day, the door
bell rang.
He stood at the door with what looked like a slim book pressed between his large hands. It wasn’t until she smiled that he allowed himself to smile. She did not, however, gesture for him to come in and sit down. She stood at the door, arms at her sides, waiting for him to speak.
‘I brought you a film,’ he said at last.
She extended a hand and he put the DVD on her upturned palm. It was a historical romance, about one of the impressionists. She said thanks. She didn’t step aside, nor invite him in to look at her mural.
He had stood at her door, shifting from foot to foot. He tried to talk about how cold it was, how it might rain, how it would be colder when it rained, how it bothered him especially because he lived on the ground floor and there was no sunshine anyway in this building.
She had nodded, keeping a small polite smile on her face. Then a silence fell between them and he stepped back a little. He said he had seen the film on TV, and liked it so much that he bought the DVD. For her.
‘You might like it too. So I ordered it on the internet,’ he said.
She shrugged her thanks. When he turned to leave, she said quietly, ‘I can’t watch it.’
He stopped and turned. ‘You cannot watch it?’
‘No, I don’t know how to,’ she confessed.
He stared. ‘Do you have a DVD player? Or a computer?’
She shook her head. He shook his head, and sighed.
‘You can come home, of course, and watch it over there. Or if you prefer, I can bring my player and set it up for you. I will teach you how to use the remote. You will learn everything in just a few minutes.’
She stood at the door, head bowed, turning his offer over and over in her head. She saw herself sitting in his house, imagined the décor – glass-fronted wooden almirahs; framed photos, perhaps a medal or two; fancy crockery; geometric patterned upholstery; crochet runners on the table, the sofa, the DVD set. His wife bringing plates of snacks from the kitchen. A curious son, or daughter.
She shook her head then. She would watch it later. She had been thinking of getting a computer anyway, for her own use. She would watch the DVD on that. She would figure it out herself.
‘Can I keep the DVD for a while?’ she had asked.
He had nodded and then he was gone.
That had been the second time, the last time, he rang her doorbell. But she saw him again, of course. About two months later. She had a laptop by then and had been tutored by her brother so that she could watch the film by herself.
She went down to the roundabout with the DVD, intending to return it, to tell him that she had enjoyed the film. She would not have minded keeping the DVD, in fact, if he didn’t mind parting with it.
It was nearly past five. When she reached the roundabout, he was already on his feet, ready to go back home.
She held the DVD out. ‘It is good. Very good. Worthwhile. I can see why you bought it after watching it.’
He took it from her hand, stared into the horizon for a few moments and then he handed it back to her.
‘Keep it.’
‘No, no,’ she had laughed. ‘I didn’t mean it like that.’
‘I mean it,’ he had repeated. ‘Keep it.’
As she was taking the DVD back from him, the young mother’s group descended on the roundabout. They walked around and sat on the other side of the lamp-post, huddled together as if for warmth. Their flanks and shanks pressed one against the other and they giggled. A head turned, one of the youngest women. They were taking in the scene – old man, old woman, standing together with a borrowed DVD for an excuse. Another giggle.
A shudder ran through her frame. Her cheeks flamed. For one awful minute, she battled the urge to walk around and smack their young faces. Then, perversely, she went on talking, a little louder than necessary. She talked about the impressionists’ rejection of society’s rejection of their vision. Of her mural’s progress, of the aches in her body, of the small of her back that was throbbing with a glowing red sunset of pain, of the colour of pain in the flat dry northern plains where there aren’t any rivers nearby and nothing to do except wait for the rain all year long.
Once, she had attempted to mix the shades of her muscular pains on a palette, she told him. Perhaps, if he described his pains to her, she could mix his colours too. She had spoken loudly, defiantly. Let them wonder if she was crazy. These silly young mother geese would have to be born seven times over and marry seven men each in every lifetime before they began to understand what she was talking about. Let them laugh, she thought.
He was staring at her, eyes wide with confusion. He was still listening to her, his head jutting out a bit further out from his neck and shoulders. But when she had finished talking, instead of looking away into the distance like he usually did, he bowed his head. As if he felt defeated. There were a few more giggles from the other side of the roundabout.
She stood beside him for a long moment, penitent. Then she took a deep breath that made him raise his head and look at her. She shrugged, then said something about needing to get home to cook dinner, and getting back to work, and then she left.
For the rest of that month, she did not step out of the house in daylight hours. She didn’t paint much either. Somehow, the figures on her walls had begun to seem pitifully dry, devoid of character or purpose. On one of the figures, she had tried adding a pair of wings, turning it into a wrinkled, benevolent angel instead of a depressed, stooped human. But when she stood back and looked at her handiwork, she felt it was a monster – a duck crossed with a crane with an almost human face.
Nothing she painted came out right in those weeks. Her nudes – women of indeterminate age with funny abdomens and swollen ankles – seemed to rebel against her brush. Their faces were full of malice and judgement, as if they were saying: ‘Leave us alone, bitch! We’re old and ugly but we’re not afraid. You don’t even have the guts to be a whore. You’re ugly too. Why don’t you hide your own face? Plaster it across a wall and then never let a pair of human eyes see it. You think you’ll get younger standing here, making old women give away their secrets? Where will you go when you are done with us? You think you are going to escape somewhere else?’
No, she would mutter. No, not going to escape. She could scarcely bear to sleep surrounded by these hostile, tired creatures. She even tried painting a young face, a teenager with very white teeth and a film-star smile. It came out looking too pink, like a cheaply manufactured plastic doll. She hated it and promptly added twenty years to the face by yellowing the teeth, putting in tobacco stains and a saggy chin.
She was spending many hours at the window now, staring into the grey light of winter and the pale, blue-yellows of the late mornings. She painted the fourth wall a deep blue. It was patchy, slapdash work but as soon as the paint dried, she began to slather another layer atop the streaky mess. Hers was no longer a fight for beauty or order or even an attempt to evoke sentiment. It was simply a protest against the flat, concrete walls she lived within.
Some days, she considered covering the whole house in Prussian blue, even the ceiling – a uniform, perpetual midnight without a single star to wish upon. But she couldn’t quite give up her elderly nudes. Not yet.
All this time, she didn’t step out until after dark. After he had gone back to his flat and the roundabout was occupied by sulky, secretive teenagers. Late one evening, she spotted him. About thirty yards away.
He was outside, near the roundabout, but this time he was with his family. Other families milled about. She remembered that it was the day before Diwali, and the housing society had organized a maha-bhoj. Everyone would be eating together. She had been invited too, and though she had politely handed over the recommended donation of Rs 101, she did not intend to eat here.
She did not even want to hang around or wish anyone a Happy Diwali. But when she spotted him at the maha-bhoj, she paused.
The month must have been hard on him. He was shuffling towards the buffet table and his sat
iny wife was heaping his plate for him. He found a chair to sit on and then he looked up and away, into the distance.
It seemed to her that he was looking at her, trying to focus. And she saw that his face was puffy and he looked bewildered, or lost, or like he was in pain. Age, she reminded herself, is a terrible thing. That’s all there was there to it, age. She hurried towards him.
His chin seemed to have sunk down to his chest. She murmured a soft hello, but he did not seem to have heard. His eyes were fixed on his feet, and his hands shook. She stood beside his chair for a minute, waiting for him to notice her. But he never raised his eyes.
That was two weeks ago. Yesterday, she had noticed a huddle of people, a scattering of marigold outside the building. Still, she had not guessed. She had to hear it from the notice board.
How had he looked? It was too late to see him now. He would have been cremated yesterday. She should have had some warning, she thought. Some instinct should have told her when she walked past a knot of people and those marigold flowers. But nothing happened. She had glanced at the huddle, and noticed that some of the women had hankies pressed to their mouths. All were dressed in shades of white.
She should have walked up to them and asked what the matter was. That would have been her last chance to see him, even though she knew his face would not really be his face. There would be bits of cotton stuffed into his nostrils and ears. There would be his family gathered around him, and their presence would make him look different.
She would not have wept, of course. Nor could she have rushed forward to touch his face, for the first and last time. She would have politely stood at his door, waited for her turn to go into the narrow hallway, looked at his face one last time, perhaps folded her hands in a farewell namaste. That’s all. But even that would have been something. Better than finding out – too late – through the cooperative housing society’s notice board.