Seahorse Page 8

  Later that night, I went home with the Nepalese artist.

  To his studio flat in Hammersmith. On one side, a hurricane of paper, brushes and paints, on the other a neatly arranged cupboard and double bed. Without his glasses he kept his eyes closed, his lips parted, as I touched him. His fingers dug into my arm, a faint moan, pulling me closer, lifting himself so I could reach easier, quicker, to the softness underneath. While my mouth stayed on him, a silky grip, he laughed at the quick nip of my teeth. I remember his slim shoulders, his burnished seashell-skin, the light from a lamp smoothly slanting off his chest. Above me, he was weightless as a leaf, shaped as one by his ribs, rising and falling. Then we scissored ourselves together, slick and moist. Urgent, clumsy hands. Entangled limbs. A deep-shallow breathing that ended in long, uneven gasps.

  He fell asleep, with his hand between my thighs, as though to feel me even in his dreams. Somewhere in the darkness along the edge of the room, a boiler wept and gurgled.

  I too was restless.

  On the ceiling, I watched fleeing shadows, falling through the window. Outside, on the road, there were shouts, I couldn’t tell, of playfulness or anger.

  It was past two when I left. I rode the night bus until Embankment and walked the rest of the way home. All along I followed the river; it was high tide and the Thames had swelled its banks, ripe with the sea. I passed steadily docked boats, lamps burning holes of light into the sky, and solitary figures who vanished like smoke into the night.

  When Nicholas wrote the note he was in a place by the sea.

  That’s what I liked to imagine.

  A place by the sea where memories cawed at him as seagulls.

  Like him for me, they were alive yet they were ghosts.

  I leaned over the railing for a moment; the Thames lay still and seamless. At the horizon, stitched magically, invisibly to the sky. A narrow yet empty expanse, a curiously inverted world. In the summer months a deep twilight lingered long into the night, the sky turning the darkest shade of blue, but never black. It had changed, though, from the end of September, when a certain hardening came over the days. Everything around me chill and brittle.

  As I walked, the wide road, with its Victorian houses and avenue of trees, soon morphed into something smaller, less charming, until I lost sight of the river altogether. Eventually, I reached the white and green expanse of Trinity Gardens, and its lofty memorials, bearing the lists of lost ships and sailors. The streets in this part of the city, lined with high-rise glass buildings, were empty. In the evenings, pubs here swarmed with carousing revelers in suits.

  I reached a particularly desolate stretch, passed a closed Pret A Manger, and finally came to the small studio flat I was renting, opposite a church. On some evenings, I’d hear bells, and they reminded me of my hometown, the call of worship filling an empty sky.

  My room was on the fourth floor, up a musty, narrow flight of stairs lined by an ugly wheat-brown carpet. The room was dark when I entered; I’d forgotten to leave a light on when I left earlier that afternoon. In the corner my bed was wedged between two cupboards, a small couch against a wall, and a writing desk beside a window that overlooked the street. It held a low table lamp, my laptop, a pocket guide to London, and a piece of bric-a-brac, incongruous simply because it was the only one there—a small carved oxen of mottled jade, no higher than a finger. The layout was unelaborate. One door led to the kitchen, a tiny space of shelves and counters fitted like a Rubik’s cube, and another to a bathroom with the single most luxurious feature in the apartment—a deep, creamy tub.

  I hung up my coat and emptied my pockets. I placed the envelope on the table, and walked into the kitchen, turning on the electric kettle. There was wine in the fridge, but I would settle for tea. The air had cleared my head a little, but the evening’s drinks still ran deep and strong. My fingers smelled of the artist.

  I paced the room, slipping off my shoes, my jumper. I stood by the window and lifted the blinds—the shape of the church rose up before me, and behind that I imagined the city, carved from shadow and light, rising and falling, an endless tide.

  All the while, I tried to ignore it. The white rectangle, light and innocuous as a feather, but it kept pulling me back. An unstoppable ocean current. I glanced at it. Touched to see if it was real.

  I’d opened it earlier in the bookshop, while people milled around, drinking wine. Casually, I’d stepped out, and returned before anybody noticed, just in time to be called over by Santanu—“Nem, I’d like you to meet…”

  Outside, it was raining, drops slashing into the ground beyond the awning, in silver sideway streaks. The sky had darkened and vanished, and the air glimmered with hidden light. They say looking at a painting is like watching the artists’ immediate gestures.

  Nothing is more immediate than a handwritten note.

  Dear Nehemiah,

  My builder of new worlds.

  I hope you find your chariot of winged horses.

  NP

  And if that wasn’t cryptic enough, something else fluttered out of the envelope to the ground. A rectangular piece of paper, thicker than the note. I picked it up, wiped it clean—it was a ticket. To a musical performance in London, over a month away. I switched on the laptop on the table. It hummed into life, the screen filling with bright, sudden light. A window within a window. I could search for anything in the world, apart from what I was looking for. I typed the words carefully. “The Orpheus String Quartet”, then hit delete and entered “Lauderdale House London” instead. This is where Nicholas wished me to go. Perhaps that’s where we would finally meet again.

  If you visit the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence, and walk into the hallway where David is displayed, it’s difficult to look at anything else. When you enter, he’s to the right. And you are suitably entranced. They’ve positioned him beneath a glorious dome, and he’s bathed in natural light. He is an angel. You circle him slowly, gazing up, casting your eyes over his limbs. Studying the shape of perfection carved out of a nineteen-foot block of marble. Your thoughts are sparse, limited by awe. Somehow, words and emotion seem inappropriate, inadequate, out of place.

  Yet if you enter and turn left, you encounter something else entirely.

  Michelangelo’s “Prisoners.” Placed in a dark corridor, rows of figures commissioned for the never-completed tomb of Pope Julius II. They are unfinished, perpetually wrestling with stone. Unlike most sculptors who built a model and then marked up their block of marble to know where to chip, Michelangelo always sculpted free hand, starting from the front and working his way back. These figures emerge from stone as though surfacing from a pool of water. They will not stun your mind into silence, rather they rouse it. You are moved by their frailty, their endurance. They are endless metaphor. And infinite possibility. Much the same as anything unfinished in our own existence.

  We treasure the incomplete, for it lends us many lives—the one we lead and the million others we could have led. We are creatures of inconsistency. Passionately partial. Unexecuted. Unperformed. Undone. Unaccomplished. And un-concluded.

  David will only be David.

  At first, I was gripped by nothing less than exhilaration. The clutch of excitement at inexplicably arbitrary times. While paying for oranges at Tesco’s, or waiting to cross the street. Questions flying out like small sharp arrows—Why? How? What did he mean? What would happen now?

  And then it faded.

  The note transformed into a paperweight. While I wasn’t looking, it changed shape.

  We are perpetually chained. Compelled to want and not want. To complete and leave incomplete. Eventually, though, the note conjured annoyance. Somehow, even a trace of fear. By meeting Nicholas at the concert, I’d finally acquire what was called a verifiable outcome. It could be changed from the poetic to the quotidian. The lushly imagined to disappointingly real. There would be a continuation. Possibly even an ending.

  Quod erat demonstrandum.

  What if it couldn’t compare to ever
ything I’d imagined all these years?

  What if that was all we ever wanted? The things that didn’t happen.

  As though that was the only way to free ourselves from the responsibilities of the real.

  And yet. And yet there was the tug of it.

  The sudden proximity of the threads of our lives. Perhaps they’d been running closer than I ever fathomed. Perhaps, in the way that we like to believe these things are fated, we were meant to always touch.

  It was a constant swaying. The pendulum-gut feeling of it.

  Over many nights, I don’t know how long I lay awake in the darkness. Moving fitfully into the hours most deep and silent. The bed soft and warm beneath me, the quilt cast aside. In the distance, the sounds of a police car, an ambulance. The startling emergencies of the night. At some point, I would drift away, without knowing, into the black void of sleep. The next time I opened my eyes it was morning, I would hear the sound of rain. Water. That’s what usually woke me. I was searching for water, holding in my hand a blue and silver fish, running through a building that could only appear in dreams—stitched together from many others, familiar but difficult to place. In my dreams, I was looking for a room with an aquarium.

  After my fall in the forest, I awoke wrapped in near darkness.

  It was a long disorientation, stretched out, those seconds, wondering where you are, when the familiar is veiled momentarily by strangeness. This time, the veil didn’t lift. I was in a place I’d never seen before.

  The curtains hung thick and voluminous, shielding me from daylight. I reached to my left, touched a bedside lamp, and fumbled to switch it on. It was a large room—easily twice the size of the ones back at the student residence—and the furniture, all heavy, polished wood, looked quietly, confidently luxurious. Both Kalsang and I could probably fit into the cupboard in the corner, a beautiful piece, carved around its edges into something elegant and floral. The full-length standing mirror next to it tilted upwards, reflecting the plain, clean geography of the ceiling. In the centre, a low table held a cluster of carvings—an elephant, a fish, an ox—and a pile of magazines. Not the ones I usually saw in people’s homes and my own, Femina or India Today, but thick, glossy foreign publications. Everything struck me as tastefully subdued. The only clemency of color came from a row of paintings on the wall, which now I would recognize as intricate madhubani. At the time, though, the peculiar figures only seemed to amplify the alarm I was beginning to feel.

  I’d awakened in a stranger’s house, in a stranger’s room.

  Then I remembered the hands that had lifted me, their careful benignity. They hadn’t hurt me last night; nothing would harm me now. The silence was commiserative. In here I was safe.

  My clothes, like my surroundings, were also not my own. I’d been stripped of the jeans and t-shirt I was wearing—they were nowhere in sight—and clad in a white shirt, loose yet soft and light as smoke, and a pair of long pajamas that pooled around my feet. Who had changed me? How much, I wondered, had they seen?

  I stepped out of bed and stood in front of the mirror.

  A dull ache ran down my arms, spreading across my back, my thighs. I was in pieces. Somehow held together by skin. When I peeled away the shirt, I saw it—a deep, greenish-purple bruise on my right shoulder. At the very crest, a finger-width of scraped flesh that had been cleaned, carefully bandaged. Eventually, it healed, but I carry the scar, a flat, lightened reminder, a sliver of white.

  Today, I’d awoken. Lenny never would.

  If I could, I would have stayed in that room always. The room with no calendar, no clocks. To confront no one. The people whose voices I’d heard. My family. My loss.

  From the window, through the leaves of an overhanging neem, I could see a patch of grassy lawn, edged by a sprinkling of flowers—cosmos and begonias. The kind my father planted back home. I would have liked to stay there, swaddled in the comfort of the unfamiliar. The utter newness of things. All around me a blank slate, the fantastic lightness of the unknown. It was a relief. These clothes, this room, the furniture, the paintings, the table, all bearing imprints not my own.

  There wasn’t any requirement to leave; I could stay here until someone came looking for me. But how long would that be? I supposed I mustn’t overreach my welcome.

  Yet if I could, I’d climb back into bed, its own kingdom, and pull the covers, cool and smooth, over my head, and pretend, for days, and years, to be asleep.

  Finally, I pushed the door open and stepped into a corridor.

  To my left, an empty dining room, with the table set for ghosts. On my right, an archway that opened into a spacious drawing room.

  This is what I would do: I’d find my host, say thank you, and leave. And ask for my clothes, of course. I couldn’t walk away in these.

  Yes, I’d say, I was fine now, thank you.

  Yesterday… well, I’d come up with an explanation when asked for one. Something probable if I could manage it, fittingly credulous. I ventured into the forest for a walk, and decided to explore the tower. No, I hadn’t noticed the sign. How silly of me.

  Feeble, but I wasn’t sure I could do any better.

  I greatly appreciated their kindness, I’d add, the much needed rest, and now I must be on my way back.

  Out the door, through the lawn, and the gate. Down the wide, quiet road. The forest. At the other end, the college building. At the back of the campus, the residence hall in which I shared a room with a boy from Tibet. No one else need to know. I’d attend classes, sit for tutorials, write my assignments, speak when spoken to, drink and eat, get into bed and out, one foot in front of the other. Like I was doing now. Like I’d keep doing until I missed a step, or found, like yesterday, that there wasn’t any ground to stand on.

  I wandered through the bungalow, larger than my house or Lenny’s back in my hometown, and different in almost every way—the high ceilings, the bare, cool stone floors, the large, airy windows. Our houses were braced against the weather, long rains and cold winters, everything compact, sternly economic.

  Perhaps my impression was reinforced by the emptiness.

  Where could everyone be?

  Was I the only one there?

  It didn’t feel right to walk around someone else’s house—even if it wasn’t done in stealth and secrecy. So instead, I decided, I would wait, politely, in the drawing room, until someone showed up. Surely they’d remember they had an unusual, unlikely guest?

  The drawing room windows overlooked the lawn, where a gardener wielded a shovel in one hand and a wicker basket in the other. The length of a large wall was crammed with knick-knacks—souvenirs, I presumed, from journeys around the world. Miniature windmills and wooden clogs. Wooden carvings of human figures. A replica Fabergé egg. Sunny, smiling matryoshka dolls. A pair of Indonesian laughing-weeping masks. A snow globe—the only thing I lifted and shook—with miniature figures of skaters on a pond.

  For a while, I sat on an armchair, examining, during my wait, a set of paintings opposite, large canvasses dabbed with flat blocks of rich earthy shades and intense whites.

  They hadn’t struck me as extraordinarily remarkable then, but some years later, I attended a retrospective of Amrita Sher-Gil’s work, and left wondering whether the ones in Rajpur Road were by her hand.

  What also drew me was a writing table, littered with letters, written in a long, rounded swirls, each line slanting up at the end. Without willing to, I caught a few phrases—tonight, I long for you… how many months apart… these trees they only show me your absence… My eyes moved, inordinately, to the end of the page, where it was signed All my love, M. So was the next one, and the next.

  They were all from the same person.

  I want you in me.

  I flushed, placing them back, trying to remember the order in which I’d found them, and moved away from the table. I walked to the opposite wall, covered by thick velvety curtains. What would I see from there? A view of the back garden? I drew them aside to reveal a sliding g
lass door opening into a sheltered veranda.

  And there he was, the art historian, bent over an aquarium.

  Standing barefoot. His hair falling over his face. The sleeves of his navy cotton shirt clinging wet and limp to his wrists.

  He was trying, carefully, to net a fish.

  (How vulnerable a person who doesn’t know they’re being watched. Even the air around them shifts to accommodate their unguarded gestures.)

  When I pushed the door open, he looked up, startled, and almost dropped the net. Something leapt out, and slid across the floor. It was a fish, lying there, flapping, gasping for breath it couldn’t reach.

  “I’m sorry…” I rushed to pick it up.

  Silver and blue, on my palm, with eyes like shiny raindrops.

  “Come over here, quick.” He held out a glass bowl filled with water.

  I dropped the fish in; it darted around in fright.

  He turned to me. “You’re awake.”

  His eyes were light grey, flecked with silver—or gold?—a peculiar color. Once, I had traveled with my family to Puri on the coast, and we rose early to catch the train back to our hometown.

  His eyes were the color of the sea at dawn.

  “How are you feeling?” he asked.

  “I’m well now, thank you.”

  “That was quite a fall…” I tried to decipher the expression on his face, but it was cryptic, like the tone of his voice.

  “It was stupid of me… to go up.”

  “Despite the warning.”

  “Yes, despite the warning.” I could feel the warmth climb up my neck, my face.

  “I thought I’d take you to the hospital, but you seemed more dazed than hurt. Nothing broken.”

  If he only knew.

  “Thank you… for bringing me back here.”

  “That’s alright.” The art historian laughed. “I wasn’t sure where else to take you.”

  “I live close by…” I told him where.