Seahorse Page 6

  Just before it rolled over, the calendar glistening with zeroes, three in a row, portals looking over the endlessness of the sea. What would it bring over the horizon? Everything new. Much of the same.

  I graduated, and studied again. A Master’s in English Literature, and then moved to the south of the city. My hometown became a place of sporadic visitations, Christmas, the death of a grandparent, the birth of a niece.

  I settled for the usual options, open at the time to someone cropped from the Humanities—editorial jobs at newly-opened publishing houses. Although never television. Or the newspapers. Somehow, I found them categorically unappealing, with their terse daily deadlines, their massive, unrelenting production of images and text. Eventually, I joined a magazine as copy-editor. It was steady, if unexciting, until, because of an absent colleague, I started handling the arts pages. I did it for an issue, then two, and more. The absent colleague moved to Bombay. And my editor took it for granted I’d continue, and so I did. If the Delhi of the previous decade had sowed the seeds of capitalism, this one saw its rampant flourishing. Only now was it possible to lay out six pages of a magazine dedicated to art. And as many to shopping, gigs, eating out, nightlife, cultural events. In South Delhi, a new gallery opened almost every month—in wealthy neighborhoods of marble-brick houses and leafy streets, Golf Links, Panchsheel, Defence Colony, Neeti Bagh, in previously unfashionable Lado Sarai and industrial Okhla. We were inundated by an outpouring of installations, video art, photography—I attended shows, and interviewed artists, I sat in un-crowded galleries on early weekday mornings, looking at art that I sometimes loved, sometimes detested.

  I did this for three years, until my absent colleague returned.

  Nithi didn’t take her job back, of course. She offered me one instead.

  To work for a new art and cultural journal, at their small yet not immodest office in Delhi. It was an exciting venture—the publication offered the space to write long-form, exploratory pieces. “To encourage insight, experimentation,” she said, dragging on her cigarette in short, abrupt puffs. “Why should art writing be relegated to a last-page column? Clubbed with ‘Entertainment’ like sordid Siamese twins.”

  We published monthly, which, after working for a weekly magazine, seemed an immense luxury. It gave me time to focus on idea and craft. I found a book by Marjorie Munsterberg, a guide to writing about visual art. John Berger’s Ways of Seeing. Joshua Taylor’s Learning to Look.

  I don’t know whether I turned to art or whether it turned to me. Perhaps we were pulled to each other by similar longing. You see, I’ve always thought that people write, paint, compose music, for remembrance. Like what Philip Larkin said—that at the bottom of all art lies the impulse to preserve. Lest we forget. Works of art are beautiful scars.

  Over the last few years, our journal did sufficiently well. Receiving favorable attention, a few journalism awards, and harnessing steadily growing subscriptions. At work, a promotion. Deputy editor.

  I moved from a cramped one-bedroom flat in Malviya Nagar to a reasonably more comfortable one-bedroom place in East of Kailash. On some nights I had company, those who stayed over, some who didn’t—else I read, played the radio, or drifted through the vastness of the Internet, page upon page, swallowing up the hours. Once, I brought home a stray cat, and it stayed a while, sometimes falling asleep on my lap while I wrote. Wandering the rooms, un-restful, at night. Then it wandered out one evening and didn’t return.

  More often, rather than love, there were fleeting encounters.

  For most of us, the years pass with few markers.

  And we are surprised to find that the events in our lives—that meeting with a friend, that trip to Cairo, that casual reunion—took place so distantly in the past. “A couple of years ago,” you begin, and then correct yourself, “No, six years ago now.”

  And we move along, mired in memory. Although the paradox of memory is that it gives you back what you had on condition that you know it has been lost. To regain it, you must remember it has gone; to remake the world, you need to first understand that it has ended.

  So it rolls on until over a decade since the century turned—and I’m not quite certain whether the world is now amazingly smart, or incredibly foolish. At the edge, there were the two towers, yet I prefer not to count the years by war, on terror or otherwise. Somewhere in-between, the tsunami. Unlike hurricanes, tsunamis have no name. Just the Tsunami, a word that rolls off the tongue like a wave. Towards this end of the decade, the great crushing economic catastrophe. And it lingers, how it lingers. For this too, there is no name.

  The problem is with reappearances. It’s not what isn’t there that shapes us as much as what might return. I suppose it all might never have happened if I didn’t move to London.

  When I told acquaintances in Delhi I was leaving for a year, they said they were thrilled for me. “Ah, if you are lucky enough to have lived in London as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for London is a moveable feast.”

  “Paris,” I corrected. “That’s about Paris.”

  But, I realized, it didn’t matter. All these cities were identical, cloaked with the same shiny, glittering appeal, pronounced with reverence, like a hushed prayer. I haven’t been to Paris, but I found that London was filled with old light.

  Since I landed, it was shifting into autumn, and I wanted the trees to stay that way forever. Flickering with fire. Dropping flames onto people’s shoulders, at their feet. People usually make their life’s discoveries when they’re young—their first kiss, sex, alcohol, drugs. I was in my early thirties and I’d discovered a new season. An entirely new season. I felt self-congratulatory. It was a revelation. The world was ending, and also somehow being renewed.

  With the crisis, financial and otherwise, the journal almost folded. My colleague considered moving back to Mumbai. She called herself the human yo-yo, constantly swaying between two cities. And I? I was lost. Not that I had no options—many galleries still stayed open, people still bought and sold art (in fact, this was a good time to in-vest, said one shrewd acquaintance, when the prices were low. “Warhol for a pittance.”) There was talk also of a major private, not-for-profit art centre opening on the fringes of Delhi, amid the towering steel and glass structures of Gurgaon. They’d definitely be looking to hire.

  At first, I fell into a flurry of activity, sprucing up my CV, trying to fix up meetings with all the right people… and then? And then, I stopped. Not only because the journal miraculously survived—but I was weary.

  The city was a heavy place. Full of incestuous circles and petty rivalries. I felt I had escaped one small town and landed in a city that had tightened around me like a noose.

  Delhi’s vast, mighty spaces felt so reduced. Evaporated into something as thick and wretched as what floated down the Jamuna.

  And so, I was in London.

  Yet wouldn’t it be more gratifying to attribute this stint to reasons higher and more majestic than that of diversion? To offer it the weight of chance or predestination. In Greek mythology, the Moirai were three white-robed sisters who controlled man’s fate. Clotho, the spinner, who spun the thread of life, Lachesis, the allotter, who determined its length, and Atropos, the unturnable, or the cutter. If our lives are thread, thin and silvery, it’s easy to imagine them entangled across the globe, sometimes parting, never to touch again, or else unexpectedly meeting, re-entwining.

  That’s what happened with Santanu and me.

  We’d kept in touch infrequently after our university days. All of us scattering like a handful of seeds. I stayed on. He left Delhi for elsewhere. He wasn’t around for the few college reunions I attended. I wasn’t there for the others. Boozy get-togethers on and off campus, where old acquaintances and adversaries exchanged numbers and pleasantries.

  Last year, I decided to send him an email.

  I’m not sure you remember me… I wrote for the college magazine while you were editor…


  He replied far more promptly than I expected—Nem, you were the only one who turned in articles on time. How could I forget you?

  It was a promising start.

  So I explained how I was interested in a fellowship from the Royal Literary Fund programme at the college where he was senior lecturer. At the Centre for Cultural, Literary and Postcolonial Studies. I was eligible to apply for a grant, but I required, what they called, a “formal nomination”. The fellowship ran for a year; it was prestigious, both for the Centre and for him. And for me, a tidy stipend too, considering all I needed to do was keep office hours a few days a week, and offer students writing support, and foster “good writing practice” across all disciplines.

  Santanu’s reply was suitably succinct. Sure.

  After that, only matters of procedure and paperwork remained.

  I handed in a request for a sabbatical from my job. Which was rejected.

  “There’s something called the Internet,” said Nithi. “You can work from home.”

  And then the longest plane ride, a move, timeless and suspended.

  On most evenings, Santanu and I met at a bar across the road from where he worked, close to an old Faber & Faber building where, I learned, T. S. Eliot had once been an editor. From 1925 to 1965. If the bar had a name, I don’t remember it. Run by a student union, it was a Spartan place, of white melamine counters and silver-grey metallic tables. A standing blackboard announced the day’s special offers—jugs of sangria, extended happy hours, Belgian beer fests. Basic, unfussy, dependable. It was, as Hemingway had written, our clean, well-lighted place. Santanu had been a stubbly, longhaired student in perpetual open slippers, slip-sliding down the corridors, clutching a sheaf of papers and folders. He’d changed—neater clothes and smart closed shoes—but didn’t seem to have aged, his bony, sculptural face still boyishly unshaven, his hair still at a length that evoked gentle rebellion. As people hinged by the past are bound to do, we often spoke of old acquaintances—life stories bordering on the tragic, and the illuminating. The ones who’d married, had children, had moved away, or remained. The ones missing from memory. Do you remember…? What happened to…? Did you hear…? Names were conjured and discarded—apart from one. Nicholas.

  On one occasion, we stood outside the notably fancier Marquis, at the end of Marchmont Street, a quiet, unobtrusive road in Bloomsbury. Decked out on the simpler side of art nouveau, with a pale blue and white façade, and sweeping arches over the door and windows. The awning, striped gaily like a fairground tent, stretched taut and bright over the sidewalk, sheltering a row of empty benches.

  We were dressed in dark winter coats and looked like a pair of birds.

  “It’s a gastro-pub,” said Santanu, “Where the potato wedges are hand-cut and everything’s organic.” He didn’t sound impressed. Nevertheless, we stopped for a quick drink. Inside, I had the impression of vast amounts of wood, smooth and polished, like the interior of a ship. Scattered with low chairs and tables, while quilted maroon leather couches lined the edges. The lights, low and inviting, cast a rich glow on paneled walls and parquet floors. We headed to the bar, a walnut-topped counter lined with beer pumps standing in a row of shiny golden armor.

  “What can I get you?” The young lady behind the counter looked remarkably cheerful for someone who’d had to ask that question a hundred times a day. Her autumn-red hair was twisted into a bun, but some of it had escaped, falling around her face in rebellious wisps. If she wore it open she’d look like a Pre-Raphaelite virgin. (Or, since the artists were Victorians, a lovely penitent prostitute.)

  “Pint of Guinness, please.”

  I would’ve preferred whisky, but perhaps it was somewhat early in the day. “I’ll have the same…”

  We tipped our glasses.

  The stout was deliciously cool, drifting into a lingering aftertaste.

  I’d grown to enjoy this ruby-rich drink laced with bitter dreams.

  Admittedly, one of the less strange libations Santanu had prompted me to try. He was on a self-appointed mission to sample every available ale in the country—and had made me his willing accomplice. Each new one we came across was recorded in a small black notebook.

  “Hooky Bitter, Old Ember, Harvest Pale, Worthington White Shield, Old Speckled Hen… and my favorite… Sheepshaggers.”

  One day, he declared, when he was done teaching the evolution of Bengali culture from the seventeenth to nineteenth century, he’d write a book on the anthropology of brewing.

  “Beer culture and the politics of identity.”

  It was, I concurred, a worthy follow-up.

  Through the large windows, on the sidewalk, I could see people out on their evening run, mothers pushing baby strollers, shoppers with bulging Waitrose bags, students wandering past to and from one of the many colleges clustered near Russell Square, corporate workers in their suits and air of self-assurance. The city of London I imagined as a giant clockwork being, fueled by souls. By Santanu. By the Pre-Raphaelite bartender. Even, somehow, myself. Every interaction, a ripple, moving beyond our sight.

  Santanu, who was checking his phone, said, “Eva’s coming, but she might be a little late.” He added, “We’re invited to drinks at her place this evening.”

  Eva was his English-Japanese friend; she worked at the institute, organizing events, conferences and festivals, showing up always meticulously attired in slim pencil dresses the color of peacocks.

  “My grandmother sends me silk from Osaka,” she told me once. “I never buy clothes in this country. The English only wear beige.”

  Santanu downed the last of his Guinness. “Another?”

  I hastened to finish my pint. “No, not if you prefer I didn’t slur during my reading.”

  Inside, the room was carved into niches by bookshelves running all the way up to the low ceiling, neatly divided by geography. Nations—Japan, China, India—and the more all-encompassing Middle East, South Asia, Africa. Up front, a space had been cleared for chairs and tables, armed with glasses and bottled water. While Santanu greeted people, I quietly lost myself in the crowd. I was good at this, being as inconspicuous as a corner chair or a potted plant. Besides, it was difficult to feel out of place in a bookshop, where I could pretend to browse, slipping books off the shelves, carefully tracing my fingers along their spines. For a while, I studied the Chinese woodblock prints on the wall, intricately lined figures on cool peppermint-blue paper. And the Islamic calligraphy of Bihnam Al-Agzeer, whose words become pictures.

  I stood at the edge and studied faces, none of whom were recognizable or familiar. Looking back now, I’d attribute the pre-event hum with an air of serendipity. Something, I was certain, was about to happen. In a corner, I spotted a pot of fragrant rosemary. And rosemary, as we all know, is for remembrance. Pray, love, remember.

  At the shelf, it slipped from my hands to the floor, a book of Cavafy’s poems.

  An echo of the days of pleasure.

  Even if it could merely have been my nervous anticipation of the evening.

  We were gathered for a literary reading, part of the Kaagaz Series organized twice a year by The Asian House in London. Their guest “curator” this time was Santanu. I held the pamphlet in my hand—the cover carried a composition, explosive and colorful, of a contemporary mandala, ringed circles of delicate floral patterns, fantastical beasts, glimpses of the cosmos. I flipped through the pages, thick and inky, marking my name, my name would be reading a “work in progress”. Scrawled hastily in a notebook, a last-minute print out thrust into my pocket. The words seemed unfamiliar, as though a different self had set them down.

  “Which one would you like?” I’d asked Santanu, holding out my literary offerings.

  As RLF Fellow at the institute, he’d invited me to contribute.

  He was unfussy. “What do you have that can fill three pages?”

  Around me, the crowd had swelled, and the bookstore buzzed with the murmur of conversation. White faces, and brown, a man in a turban, a wom
an wearing a shade of pink lipstick I could see from across the room. Another in an embroidered kaftan. Someone hastened through the door, the color of her coat catching my eye—fitted and belted in stil de grain yellow. Eva. And following close behind, a lady I’d sometimes seen around the institute. She was dressed more demurely, in a navy top coat, and a petite felt-corsage beret. Two familiar faces and no other.

  That’s when I noticed him, a solitary golden-haired youth.

  Perhaps because of the birds.

  He was standing under a flight of red paper swallows hanging in the corner, swaying slightly, touched by an invisible hand. Tall and slender, he wore skinny jeans and a tweed coat he hadn’t taken off indoors. Settled over his features, finely etched as they were, was the unmistakable mark of boredom.

  Soon, we readied for the event; I followed the other writers taking their places. People shuffled around choosing seats, the back rows filled up while the front remained stoically empty. A few chairs away to my left, Santanu tapped the microphone—“Good evening, everyone… important things first, there is wine after…”

  The room rippled with laughter.

  The next half hour was filled with small speeches and readings—a poet from Taiwan, a writer from Hong Kong, the Nepalese artist who’d contributed the cover art. Soon, I heard my name—“our Royal Literary Fund Fellow from India…”, the title of the journal I worked for in Delhi.

  “Thank you, Santanu.” My voice was soft, too soft. Louder next time. I didn’t want to lose everyone to whispers. While I read, the room fell silent, apart from a sudden car horn outside, and a jangling cell phone. The person stopped the ringing, but stepped out to answer the call.

  I stumbled over the word “obfuscate” and wished I’d never used it in the first place. Perhaps this was the wrong piece to be reading. I’d picked something I’d written on a photography exhibition of Delhi in the 1970s, inspired by a review I’d read on Rembrandt that spoke of “reversing the gaze.” The reviewer imagined the painter’s self-portraits coming alive at night, in the quiet of the gallery, and I did the same—I can see them, those grainy black-and-whites frozen on the wall, prisoners of paper and light. They are ghosts—the people in the photographs, the city, the photographer herself. These multiple selves spill from the frames, and the rooms, though empty, fill with shadows…