The Artist of Disappearance (16 page)

After a while Manju Rani came in with the milk pail and on seeing that she kept her face averted and acknowledged his presence only by drawing a fold of her headscarf a little lower over her forehead, Ravi went out into the yard among the animals. He looked for a corner where he would be out of the way. There was a log beside the cowshed and he went and sat there quietly to let the disturbance he had caused subside. The children stood and stared, not knowing what to make of all this: was he staying? Was he not going back up the hill?

When their mother called them, they went in, and Bhola came out to fetch Ravi. He indicated that Ravi was to sit beside them on the swept clay floor by the fire and passed him a tin plate that Manju Rani had filled with the potato curry she had made and some thick rotis that smelled of roasted wheat and were pleasantly charred. He ate, they all ate, no one spoke and there was no sound other than of eating and the occasional crackle of the fire. Its smoke thickened the darkness, making the darkness visible. No one was at ease.

Then Bhola led him out and showed him where he could wash at the pump, which he did, water splashing onto his sandals, making a puddle of mud around. Then he took him to an outhouse where stacks of firewood and implements were stored in the lower half and a ladder led to a shelf where there was hay and straw for the cow. Bhola had already been there and laid a rough wool blanket to make up a bed. Ravi, visibly relieved to find he was not expected to sleep with the family in the main hut, impulsively turned to thank Bhola, or in some way express his gratitude, but could not overcome his reserve, and simply nodded in acceptance of all he had been given. Bhola neither expected words nor required them and left him there.

Bhola's sons brought news to their father of the film crew's movements—down in Ravi's glade or up on the hill and around the burnt house. The children followed them around, fascinated, ready to hoot and guffaw, till they were called away roughly by Bhola who did not pass on any information to Ravi, telling him only 'It is better that you stay here. Till they are gone.' He found Ravi a Himachal cap such as he wore himself, with a band of red velvet on grey felt, to put on his head. It completed the disguise.

All day, while Bhola was gone with the beasts and the boys were supposedly at school but in truth up on the hill, Ravi had nowhere to go and nothing to do. He sat on the log by the cowshed, watching the chickens pick at grains and the insects they found among the stones, or rising up in sudden flurries of beating wings and frightened squawks at the shadow of an eagle crossing their earth, and Manju Rani going in and out about her chores, her head tied up in a long Himachal scarf and her eyes averted from him. Bhola had brought her back from Tehri as a bride; it had marked the end of his boyhood, of catapults and cricket games. After that he had been a householder, with responsibilities, and Manju Rani clearly had hers. Ravi never looked directly at her but was aware of her movements as she filled a bucket at the pump or clambered up the hillside to cut grasses for the goats with her curved scythe, tossing them into the basket strapped to her back. Her youngest child, a girl of about four, followed her around. Her feet were always bare, her nose was always running, her flowered frock filthy as was her hair, but her face was as round and pink as a rose in bloom. Mostly she clutched at her mother's kameez and followed her, but sometimes she broke away and came to study the man seated on the log, wondering at his stillness and silence in the midst of such continuous sound and movement. Her mother would call her sharply and she would run away, laughing.

It was a long time since Ravi had been around a woman. His mother, his female relatives in Bombay, Miss Wilkinson the last. He had no way of making any connection with those in Bhola's family but he knew he did not want to: they in no way compensated for what he had lost—his space, his enclosure, the pattern and design he had created, was creating within it. Would those barbarians from the city have stepped on it? Touched it, broken and wrecked it? Their gaze alone was a desecration. Then there were all the natural changes that were wrought daily and nightly by a passing breeze, a fall of leaves, a dwindling and dying of what had been fresh and new the day before, or else the eruption of the renewed and unexpected—and he was not there to observe and mark and celebrate them. He knew he would never go there again. It would revert to wilderness. His longing to resume what was his real life was left smouldering inside him like a match blown at but not put out. Brooding, he sat studying his hands as if they were all that were left to him now that he had nothing to work on.

Then, after a glass of tea and some bread in Bhola's hut one morning, after everyone had gone their separate ways, he saw that Manju Rani had left an empty matchbox on the clay hearth. He picked it up and went outdoors with it in his hands. It was his way, to observe and study. Seating himself on the log in his corner, he slid the flimsy container open and studied its emptiness with his habitual concentration. It might have been a crib, a cradle—but to hold what? Looking around for something small enough to fit in it, he found a sliver of bark and a scrap of moss but they left room for more. In the ground at his feet he spied a fragment of quartz that could be added. He slid the box shut and put it in the deep pocket of his shirt. All day long he reached to touch it, finding there a source of contentment and wonder at what other collections might be made.

He began to look out for empty matchboxes. Each offered a world of possibilities for the minute objects and the patterns he could make of them, patterns that he could alter endlessly as pieces of coloured glass can be shifted in a kaleidoscope. Lying open, they revealed themselves like constellations in the night. Shut in a box, they became invisible. And he could carry them on him, keep them to himself; no one would know.

 

Up at the burnt house, the film crew prowled around with their camera, searching for the hermit. From the veranda they could look down at the clearing, at Bhola's hut, the chickens picking around it, Manju Rani going in and out with armfuls of grass, her child in a pink frock following, a man seated by the cowshed, idly, a dog asleep in the sun.

'There's no one there,' Bhatia pronounced authoritatively. 'He's gone.'

Crouching around the projector later in the back room at the photographer's, they viewed the film they had shot 'in the garden' as Shalini called it. It was a scene drained of life, with neither colour nor fragrance nor movement. Tree, rock, leaf, stone, together or separately, they remained lifeless, the backdrop of a stage on which nothing happened.

The spool unwound with a long, rasping whirr, and its last flashes and symbols vanished into the dark. They remained crouched, unwilling to turn on the light and face each other.

Finally Bhatia said, 'We can't use this. Who would want to watch it? We'll just have to throw it away. It's dead, a dead loss, a waste of time.'

Shalini turned to face him, her face full of protest, but Chand merely sighed, accepting defeat. She realised he would not fight.

As they went to their separate rooms at the Hotel Honeymoon with Bhatia loudly bellowing, 'We can leave in the morning! First thing! It's a wrap!' Shalini said to Chand, in a low voice, 'I
could
have made it better, if we'd only found the artist who made it to show us around and talk about it,
that
would have been the ending we needed.'

'But we didn't,' Chand said with a resigned shrug. 'Perhaps he doesn't exist.'

 

The jeep descended the tawny hills, curve by curve, in the wake of the dust raised by a long line of buses and trucks ahead. The air grew warmer with each turn. The pine trees grew fewer, the grasses drier.

The traffic moved sluggishly, then came to an abrupt halt. Chand braked sharply to avoid crashing into the truck in front. At the bend two or three men appeared, waving red flags. Their appearance was followed by a series of dull thuds that seemed to come from inside the hill, rocking the jeep on its wheels. White dust spouted into the air, spreading in balloons and descending in parachutes, so thick it caused everyone to cough and choke.

All traffic had halted, exhaling fumes that added to the dust cloud. Bhatia jumped out of his seat—now that they were on their way back, he seemed filled with energy and determination—and joined some drivers who had climbed out along the verge. As Shalini and Chand watched, still half blinded by the explosion, they heard him give a shout and saw him throw out his arm, pointing downwards like an explorer who had made a discovery.

With reluctance and resentment, the two got down to join him and follow the direction of his pointing finger. The shelf on which they stood seemed dangerously precarious: right under it they could see great gashes that had opened out into caverns of white limestone. Even as they stood staring, another explosion went off and more white dust came boiling up towards them while echoes of the dynamite blast continued to reverberate.

Once those died away, men were seen to detach themselves from the hillside on which they had been crouching, their hair and clothes cloaked in white dust that made them look like ghostly figures in a photographic negative. With pickaxes and shovels, they began to dig, hammer and excavate.

Shalini turned away, closing her eyes to the grit and dust, and Chand doubled over, coughing, but Bhatia was triumphant. 'That is what we need for a finish!' he shouted. 'Get the camera, let's shoot!'

A line of trucks went rumbling down a newly made track into the gully, and the ghost men below began to load them for the journey down to the plains.

Grateful thanks to Alison Samuel for her generous giving of time, attention and insight to the book through its several stages.

To Deborah Rogers for her loyal support through the years and yet another book.

Also to Jane Robison of Casa Colonial in Oaxaca, Mexico, and to Eve Halpern and Cris Sandoval of Casa Werma of Patzcuaro, Mexico, for so hospitably and protectively providing quiet spaces in which to work.
Gracias.

 

The English language translation 'Everness', from
Selected Poems
by Jorge Luis Borges, edited by Alexander Coleman (New York: Viking, 1999), p.227; translated by Alastair Reid. Permission by Alastair Reid, through the Colchie Agency, New York. All rights reserved.