Seahorse Read online

  The people he painted, he took their soul.

  There’s a sketch Lenny sent me before he died that looks as though it could have been drawn by Lucian Freud. That’s why I like to believe he’s an artist, and that if he’d lived longer, perhaps he’d have come to realize it too.

  Instead, he was enrolled, through his parents’ persistent coercion, in a science degree—zoology? biology?—in a college in our hometown. Except, I never saw him attend class, or complete assignments, or venture near an academic building of any sort. He did what all parents found impossibly infuriating—he drifted.

  I knew Lenny all my life. We grew up in the same neighborhood, although he was older and we became friends much later, when I was fourteen. Unexpectedly, at the side of a basketball court. One of those dilapidated public sports grounds where youngsters congregated in the evening for lack of anything else to do. Mostly, I hovered around the edges, invisible, pretending to follow the match, watching the big boys play, the ones who jumped like they had wings on their feet.

  One day, Lenny showed up and declared it the silliest game he’d ever seen.

  “Is this what you do?” he asked. “Sit around watching these guys fight over an orange ball?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Do you play?”

  I thought it pointless to lie. “No.”

  He lit a cigarette, and threw his head back. His face pieced together by an irreverent sculptor—an uneven nose, slanting eyes, a rough chin, and sharp plane cheeks. He smelled of smoke and pine forests, of something wild and unexplored.

  He said nothing until he’d finished the cigarette, until he threw it to the ground and it flickered and died, burning itself out.

  “Come.”

  And I followed.

  Before Lenny, I was unattuned to much else apart from my parents’ precise clockwork regime. Weekdays stretched taut between school and homework, punctuated by weekend visits to my grandparents, and church service on Sunday. When I was with him, though, time dissolved into insignificance. It lost its grasp, and loosened, unfurling endlessly as the sea. He’d rent VHS tapes from a movie parlor in town, and watch one after another—it didn’t occur to him to stop if it was late, or dawn. Or he’d walk, for hours, winding his way to unfamiliar neighborhoods on the other side of town. Often, he’d ride his old motorbike out into the countryside, beyond the furthest suburban sprinkle. He ate when he was hungry, slept whenever he happened to be tired, awoke at odd hours between early afternoon and evening. He was out of time. Removed from it like a modern-day Tithonus, existing at the quiet limit of the world.

  I’d hurry over to Lenny’s room after school, or on weekend afternoons. It was a basement level space, down a narrow flight of steps accessible only from the outside of the house. Dimly-lit, oddly shaped, with jutting walls and sudden corners, and quite bare apart from a single bed, a writing table, and cupboard. In the corner stood a wooden shelf sinking under the weight of books, some so old they’d turned brittle, riddled by silverfish. They once belonged to a tenant upstairs, an elderly Bengali gentleman who died on a cold winter’s night, leaving Lenny’s family in the awkward position of having to pack up his belongings and giving them away to charity—for he had no family, here or elsewhere, that they knew of. Lenny persuaded his parents to let him keep the library—an eclectic collection, ranging from the obscure (The Collected Letters of Henry J Wintercastle) to the mildly collectable (an 1895 edition of A Tale of Two Cities). I remember how they lay thick and heavy in my hands, slightly musty, the smell that makes me think of Lenny when I walk into a secondhand bookshop.

  In the afternoons, we’d go for walks in the pine forest behind his house, and smoke cheap cigarettes, seated on mossy rocks or, if it was a dry month, lying on the ground.

  In between the roots of trees, the spines of the earth. Everything suddenly inverted, an upturned silence, grass behind my neck, a tilted view of patchy sky through crazy tangle of twigs and needle-leaves. We’d talk, or rather he’d talk and I’d listen. His voice murmuring like a stream. A book he’d read. This movie he’d seen, about a man wrongly sent to prison. A line he liked. You know what the Mexicans say about the Pacific? They say it has no memory. A poem by Auden. His favorite. All we are not stares back at what we are. Or we’d be quiet. And if we were quiet and unmoving long enough, the forest would flourish over us. They would return, like slivers of sky, a pair of long-tailed blue jays. Elsewhere, a cluster of playful sparrows ventured closer. The clouds seemed to stop and linger. I’d feel heavier and lighter, quieted by the fall of pine needles, feeling their smooth silkiness under my hands. The prickle of tiny black ants clambering over my fingers. For them, I was tree root and stone. Here and there, the sudden fickle flit of yellow butterflies. We were woven, all at once, into the fabric of a spring afternoon.

  On other days, colder and shorter, Lenny would take me to tea shops, scattered around town, near bustling markets, on busy main roads. We’d dip slabs of rice cake into small chipped cups of bitter tea, and watch the crowd swell and thin around us. Folk who dressed rough and spoke rough, butchers and builders who worked with their hands. (Of whom my parents would have disapproved, saying they were not “our type.”) Sometimes, we headed away from the clamor of the centre, past the car parks and newsstands, the bakeries and pharmacies, and slipped into a narrow lane flanked by a sludgy canal and the bricked back of a building. Its smoothness interrupted by a chink, an opening that led into a triangular one-room tea shop manned by a lady with an aged face and young eyes. She served us heaped plates of food, brimful cups of tea and called Lenny “my butterfly.” I couldn’t quite follow their banter—their language wrapped in lively innuendo.

  “How many plums have you eaten recently?” she once asked Lenny.

  I reminded them it wasn’t yet the season.

  But it pleased me to be with them, to feel part of something adult and amorous.

  More often, deterred by relentless rain, we’d stay indoors, in Lenny’s room. Reading, or playing our own version of darts on an enormous map of the world on the wall—a patchwork of colors amid posters of longhaired musicians in white vests and tight leather pants. Lenny would aim for South America—because he said he loved that vision of wildness—and land mostly in the Pacific or Atlantic. I’d aim for England—he’d call me boring—and end up in North Africa, or the deep blue Mediterranean.

  We’d fling the darts from across the room, lazily lying on his bed, and then I’d scurry over to gather them.

  “I have to get out of here, Nem,” he’d tell me, as he aimed for Brazil.

  “You will,” I’d say loyally, because I truly believed he could achieve anything.

  For the longest time, I placed it there—the reason for Lenny’s restlessness. His plummeting moods and sudden disappearances. Those afternoons when he wouldn’t permit me to accompany him out. “But where are you going?” I’d ask and he wouldn’t reply, sending me home instead. “Go finish your homework.” Those evenings when he didn’t return to his room at all. Later, the unexplained mud on his motorcycle wheels, his shoes, the frayed edges of his jeans.

  I placed it there.

  The smallness of our small town, its bland familiarity and quiet, terrifying dullness.

  Yet how are we to truly map others? To fully navigate the rooms they carve in their hearts. The whispers they alone understand. What is love to their ear? The crevice it fits into is different for each of us. We are separate worlds illuminated by strange suns, casting unrecognizable shadows.

  In the end, we follow spirits only our eyes can spy.

  I have to get out of here, Nem.

  Eventually, I suppose, that’s what Lenny did. In a way that left him with no hope of return.

  A few weeks after I found out about Lenny, Nicholas and I went to a bar in Model Town, a neighborhood near the university, comprising circles of apartment blocks built around a lake. We took an autorickshaw, weaving through the traffic, between lumbering DTC buses, honking cars and pedestr
ians who’d spilled onto the road from sidewalks choked with garbage and abandoned construction material. In certain places, Delhi swayed in a perpetual state of chaos, and that night I was glad for the tumult. The bar was located in the unsavoury side of Model Town, just off the imaginatively named 2nd Main Road. Clusters of men loitered around, hovering close to a paan and cigarette stall. How they stared at us—this strange duo, a tall white foreigner and his small-built companion who looked as much an outsider.

  Inside, a low smoke-cloud hung over the room. The clientele, middle-aged and solely male, dotted the tables, seated with their drinks and plates of glistening murg tikka masala and seekh kebabs. I don’t remember what we were drinking, but it was different from the usual stuff we swilled in college—foul Haywards 10,000 for a cheap, quick high or a blindingly acidic whisky called Binnie Scot. It wasn’t long before I lost count of the refills. The bar transformed into a warm cocoon. A small planet spiraling into free fall, plummeting through space. The lights were brighter and dimmer all at once, the air pulsing with a musical beat that arose from all corners.

  I know who killed Lenny.

  I thought I heard myself say those words; I wasn’t certain.

  Nicholas placed his hand on my arm. He wasn’t killed, he said.

  He was.

  “Your sister explained… there were complications…”

  No, he was killed.

  In my head, I was adamant.

  “Why do you say so, Nehemiah?”

  I stayed silent.

  He asked me again.

  Much as I wanted to confide in him, at the time I couldn’t bring myself to explain.

  If art is preservation, it is also confession.

  Few lectures stay with me from my university days—a class on DH Lawrence’s language of synesthesia, Woolf’s complex layering of time, Ismat Chughtai’s seething denouncement of the world—and those that do were mostly delivered by Doctor Mahesar. A professor of petite yet rotund build and razor-sharp articulation. His tutorial room was atop the college building, on the open, flat roof, overlooking the lawns and trees, where in the evening, squawking parrots came to roost. In the summer, it was unbearable, a compact, vicious furnace, with only the rare, welcome visitation of a breeze.

  One morning, we discussed “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”

  We watched beads of sweat form on Doctor Mahesar’s forehead, and stream gently down the contours of his face. Before him, bent over our Annotated T. S. Eliot, we similarly perspired—the smell of sweat, pungent as a sliced onion, hung in the air. Last year, under identical sweltering conditions, Doctor Mahesar had thrown his text on the table. “I give up.” He said he couldn’t teach “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day” without crumbling under the weight of irony.

  Naturally, he was everyone’s favorite professor.

  That day, everyone in the room hoped for a similar tirade, seeing there was mention of fog and cool winter evenings, but no such shenanigans took place.

  “How does the poem begin?” he asked, holding the text up to us like a mirror.

  There was a mumble of voices—Let us go then, you and I… when the evening is spread out against the sky…

  “That is incorrect.”

  Small circles of confusion spun around the room. Finally, a girl in the front row spoke up, “It begins with an epigraph.”

  “Thank you, Ameya. Yes, it begins with an epigraph.”

  “You mean the part we can’t understand,” said someone from the back.

  “Yes, Noel. The part in Italian, which, if you’ve heard of it, is a Neo-Latin Romance language spoken mainly in Europe.”

  The class sniggered.

  “S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse, a persona che mai tornasse al mondo… Now, I’m sure there’s someone here who can recite it for us word for word in translation.”

  There was deep and resolute silence.

  The professor spoke the lines softly.

  “If I but thought that my response were made to one perhaps returning to the world, this tongue of flame would cease to flicker… But since, up from these depths, no one has yet returned alive, if what I hear is true, I answer without fear of being shamed. So you see, the poem begins with the promise of a secret between the soul of the dead… and you.”

  He placed the book on the table and mopped his forehead with a large white handkerchief.

  “Why do you think this is poised as a confession?” The class stared back, blank as the blackboard behind him. “Because that’s the psychology of secrets,” he explained. “People have a primitive or compelling need to divulge their emotional experiences to others. Confessions can be written as letters, notes, diaries, or in this case, an entire poem…”

  For a long time I couldn’t tell Nicholas about who’d killed Lenny.

  I felt it was the promise of a secret between the soul of the dead and me.

  It may have been a coincidence, as these things usually are, but after the talk in the conference hall, I frequently noticed Nicholas around campus. It wasn’t all too difficult to spot him, since he was one of few Caucasians around, although admittedly Delhi University had seen its fair share of white folk, most of whom eccentric. A French sociologist who cycled around wearing a Vietnamese nón lá (some say that’s how he’d traveled to India from Paris), an Anglo-Indian professor of literature who couldn’t ever remember who’d written what, “Shelley’s Ode to a Nightingale”, and a visiting biologist from Germany who brewed his coffee in intricate laboratory apparatus. Nicholas, though, was more object of fervent curiosity.

  Often, he’d visit the senior member’s common room, mingling with the other professors, obtrusive for his youth—the rest were mostly grey-haired gentlemen and a few prim salwar or sari-clad ladies—and attire. Pale shirts of impossibly fine cotton, pressed and pristine, sharp-cut trousers, stylish loafers. Simple yet hard to imitate; everything I could afford in the market looked—there’s no other way to say this—cheap. Sometimes, he’d lounge in the college café, drinking endless cups of tea, writing in a black notebook, picking at a serving of mince cutlets and buttered toast. Or he’d read, on the fringes of the lawn, under the generous canopy of peepal trees.

  I’d watch him, follow his movements, keep a lookout for when he’d visit the campus.

  As, I suspect, did many of the other students.

  It wasn’t only because he was a white stranger.

  There was something thrillingly mysterious about him.

  Or so everyone liked to believe.

  From here and there, I caught snatches of rumor.

  That he was a new lecturer who’d recently joined the faculty, that he was a visiting scholar from Cambridge. Someone else said he was here on fieldwork, conducting research at the National Museum.

  Among the students, the girls in particular, he was of special interest; they sought him out and jostled for his attention. Some claimed to have befriended “Nick”, saying he’d paid keen attention to their theories on the earliest figurative representations of the Buddha.

  Occasionally, in the corridors and lawns, I saw him with Adheer.

  And strange as it may sound, I was stung by jealousy. That Adheer was marked out from the rest. That it wasn’t me. Although then it seemed impossible, unthinkable even, that I could be similarly acquainted with the art historian.

  I was in most ways unremarkable.

  I’d always felt so. Once, I read about Italo Svevo, a nineteenth-century Italian writer whose characters are often referred to as uomini senza qualità… men without qualities… people whose qualities are ambiguous, dilute… perhaps in some ways even inept with the world.

  And I thought that could be me.

  When I looked in the mirror, I always wished I occupied more space, that my reflection was less inconsequential. In college I wasn’t painfully thin, or scrawny—I played football often—just… slight. And I’d examine my face, in the time it took for me to splash it at the sink, knowing they were there to stay
—the eyes, a shade slanted, that diminutive nose, a full stop rather than an exclamation mark. My mouth. Like squashed fruit.

  Above all this, I had no reason to approach the art historian. Even if I did, I was certain I’d be unable to muster up the courage. And why shouldn’t it be Adheer? Marked out from the rest. From a royal family in Indore, I’d heard. With his elegantly tailored kurtas, long and light, flowing like a breeze around him. Adheer was the most sophisticated of us all (though, at the time, we preferred “pretentious”). While we listened to Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones, rich and tragic ragas drifted out of his room. While we thumbed through Salinger and Camus—like every generation before us we held Catcher in the Rye and The Outsider intimately and preciously our own—he claimed to have read all of Krishnamurti, all of Kabir.

  “Perhaps,” I’d offer, “they didn’t get along.”

  I’d be met by incredulity. And a look. You’re an idiot.

  One thing I was certain of, though, was that Adheer wasn’t unremarkable.

  A month into term, I tried to let my interest slip. Although it was difficult to ignore the whispers and hushed discussions swarming around Nicholas, alighting on him like bees. Once, outside the college café, where students usually gathered to smoke, I caught his name in conversation. Two girls, chatting, holding glasses of nimbu paani. I’d seen the one with short hair and a nose ring in last term’s college production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She’d played Titania, the fairy queen, and scandalized the senior members, and thrilled the rest, with her Biblical choice of costume—little more than flowers and leaves. Her companion, a willowy girl with sleek, straight hair and a pale almond-shaped face, came from my part of the country. A “chinky,” as they called us here in the north. She was studying English in the year below mine, and even though I hadn’t ever spoken to her, I knew her name was Larisa.