The Artist of Disappearance (3 page)

'And—?'

'One room after the other was filled with these objects. We brought in carpenters to build glass cases and put up shelves to display them. Each container provided the contents for a different room, the rooms that had been empty for so long—we had been selling items of furniture and other belongings ever since we fell upon hard times—and now they were filled again. Visitors came to the house and were astonished by what they saw. One even wished to make a catalogue of these objects and publish it to make the collection known. Srimati Sarita Devi could not tell them anything about the objects or where her son had obtained them, but they gave her great solace because they allowed her to accompany him on his voyage. Only I was perturbed: I did not see the use of such things. They were objects of beauty and interest, but what was the use of collecting them? I could not see, but Srimati Sarita Devi did. She told me, "Bijan, we are creating a great museum. My son's collection is forming a museum that people will hear about all over our land and will come from far to see."'

Ah, so there
was
a museum! I found myself growing excited to learn this had not been merely a rumour or a folk tale but actually existed. I even asked him if I could come and visit it.

At this he first closed his eyes as if in weariness, then opened them wide with a radiant gaze, and cried out, 'Sir, this is my dearest wish! Come, please come and visit us, advise me what to do! I am old now, as you see, and I do not know what will become of it once I am gone. Already people—visitors, perhaps even members of our own staff who have learned there are no guards, no security—have been removing some small objects. I have myself seen these things appearing in markets here and there. The only way open to me to keep it intact is to request the government, the sarkar, take it over and maintain it. If you come and see it for yourself, you will see how great the need is for security and support. Without it—' He broke off, as if the alternative was unthinkable, and mopped his face with a cloth he withdrew from his pocket.

But was there no alternative? Did the errant son not return to his ancestral property? What of Srimati Sarita Devi, his mother? What were her wishes in the matter? I tried to probe tactfully.

'Sir,' the unhappy man confessed, 'she left us with no instructions.'

This seemed vague to me. Had she died and 'left for her heavenly abode' as they say in the classified columns of our newspapers? Or moved out of the museum/mausoleum and left it to him? He seemed strangely unwilling to say. He had come to the end of his narrative and had, he seemed to indicate, no more to say. 'The collection' was all that was left at the end of it.

My own enthusiasm came to an abrupt halt as if it had met with an obstruction, a speed break. I began to see only too well the tangle of legal problems ahead. Not at all what I had imagined, although I should have done so. I felt let down by the realisation that it all came down to practicalities, legal and administrative. Just as if I hadn't had my fill of these. While others dreamt dreams and lived lives of imagination and adventure, my role was only to take care of the mess left by them.

My curiosity about the museum and my desire to see it were quickly evaporating. But, if they afforded me a break from the daily routine of office and courtroom in this oppressively limited outpost, why not accept? I told him I would have my driver bring me, asked for directions, and found a suitable date. His gratitude made him practically bow before me—a display of obsequiousness that was more than I could bear. I turned my head and went in to my dinner, leaving him to find his own way out.

 

I should have known better than to expect some miraculous Xanadu. As my jeep bumped and bounced its way along the mudbank that passed for a road between flattened fields of stubble with only an occasional coconut tree or grove of bananas beside a stagnant pond to break the monotony of a landscape bleached of colour, my expectations dwindled and sobered. The last stretch ended at what no doubt had been an imposing gateway, but now consisted of two pillars of brick with parasitic trees growing out of the cracks, and only some rusty hinges left to show where the wrought-iron gates had hung.

Ahead of us lay what had probably been the driveway but was now a grassy field in which a few skeletal cows grazed, watched over by a cowherd with a staff. He stood with one foot resting against the knee of the other leg like a flamingo blackened by the sun. His face did register some astonishment at seeing a motor vehicle make its way over the hummocky grass, but other than that he made no acknowledgement of our intrusion. And the cows merely switched their tails and flicked their ears at our passing and a few cattle egrets took off from their flanks with lazy flaps of their wings.

Having traversed the length of the field we came to what had to be 'the palace' I had come to see. What did I expect? There was a broad flight of stairs with grass growing between the flagstones, and beyond it the mournful remains of what I had been assured was once the most substantial house in the district. At first sight I could make out no architectural features in the blackened, crumbling ruin.

Only time, and dissolution.

But here came my acquaintance, the clerk/caretaker, tumbling recklessly down the irregular stairs while adjusting the cap on his head and the buttons of his long black cloth coat as if these gave him his identity and status. Yet his manner on greeting me was gracious and courtly in a way that could only be called 'cultured' or even 'aristocratic', and I felt a twinge of shame at recalling how brusquely I had dismissed him. Although, when he launched into a flowery speech of gratitude at my coming, his joy at seeing me, the honour it accorded him and the house he served, I could not help cutting him short and being curt once again. I suggested we set about doing our tour.

He insisted, however, that I first rest a little and take some refreshment. On the broad veranda spread around the rooms like a lap on which they had settled, a table had been set with an embroidered cloth and a tarnished silver tray on which was a jug, covered with a square of net edged with beads, and some tall metal tumblers. A servant boy emerged from somewhere— a coal-hole, I conjectured—to pour out some coloured sherbet drink that I was not able to refuse.

'Bring the keys,' my host the clerk commanded, assuming the posture of one whose right it was to give orders. Before my eyes he became stiffly upright—still small of course but upright nevertheless—his mouth set in a firm line, his eyes sharp and watchful, his bearing almost arrogant. Here was a person, I saw, who was much more capable of commanding than I was. I observed him and the air with which he accepted the ring of keys from the servant boy as though they were the keys to a castle, his castle. Then, to my surprise, he held them behind his back with one hand, and with the other gestured to me to precede him through an open door. Were the keys only some part of a charade?

We entered the hall of the palace of the past between two marble—or highly polished ceramic—slave figures holding up lamps filled with dust and dead moths; they had onyx for eyes that bulged grotesquely out of their heads.

The room itself was empty except for a small marble-topped table on ornate legs, carved like dragons. Under it was what looked like a china chamber pot—but could that be? Perhaps I have imagined or misinterpreted it, and other details. On the faded, mottled walls portraits hung from long ropes and huge nails, tilting forward as if to peer down at us. They were photographs in the main but tinted by hand to look like paintings, a strange technique by which one art was imposed on another, leaving the surface oddly ambiguous. One was of a small man in a large turban who stood in front of a dead tiger with its mouth propped open in a snarl; another of a large man with whiskers that bristled like the tiger's, seated upon a gilt chair. Yet another image of perhaps the same man standing, his foot on a recently murdered elephant, a gun in his hand and a row of barely clad servants—beaters?—on either side.

And then one of a woman, scarcely more than a child, slender, her cheeks tinted pink and with strands of pearls around her neck from which hung one large gem tinted green. She wore an old-fashioned blouse with long puffed sleeves that ended in lace at the wrists, and a sari that fell in sculpted folds from her shoulders to her slippered feet, its silver trim draped over her head where her hair was parted in two wings over wide-set eyes. This was the only female portrait, and as we passed it, I heard the clerk sigh, 'Srimati Sarita Devi.' Or perhaps I imagined that because I wished it to be her, the child bride. Since he had not said 'The late Srimati' I still did not know if she was alive, somewhere in the recesses of this faded mansion, and if I would be taken to meet her, or if she was the late, departed Srimati S. My escort remained silent on the matter.

He was already showing me into an adjoining hall where the beasts slaughtered by this family had been embalmed and stuffed to look lifelike or had had their pelts removed and stretched out upon the walls under a forest of antlers and the mounted heads of glass-eyed stags. I tried to avoid looking up at them: I did not enjoy the sensation of being watched, accusingly I thought. 'The men in the family were great hunters,' my guide said, as if explanation were needed, and I could detect neither apology nor pride in his voice because he kept it as low as if we were in a mausoleum. I decided it was merely respectful so I too tried to look respectful but must have failed: my father had also been a hunter in his days and I had not liked to look on his trophies or hear about his exploits which sounded boastful and made my mother cringe. I probably looked merely blank as I stared at the scalloped and scaly skin of a crocodile or of a python, mottled and moth-like, one resembling broken rubble, the other faded netting. I turned to the clerk, who had his hands behind his back and his head uplifted to these specimens he was set here to guard, and indicated I wished to hurry on. But, before leaving this chamber of death, I had to pass a large, pot-like object by the door. From its folds and wrinkles and the massive flattened toenails, I discerned it to be the foot of an elephant. In case I missed the point of this dismemberment, some umbrellas had been placed in it, their cloth covering frayed and their tin ribs exposed.

Unfortunately the next chamber was one of stuffed birds and they did little to improve my spirits. If anything, the glass eyes set in grey sockets were even more accusing and I was certain that their faded, iridiscent feathers were creeping with parasitic life.

The only living creatures visible in these chambers were the spiders that spun their webs to make shrouds for the birds and the geckoes that probably fed on the spiders. I saw one lizard flattened against the wall, immobile, a pulse beating under its nearly transparent skin to show it was just waiting for us to leave, for night to fall, so it could come to life again. In one doorway, a gecko caught by the slam of the door had left its fragile skeleton splayed against the plaster like a web spun by one of the spiders, to stay till it peeled.

'Is this,' I demanded, 'is
this
the young master's collection?' If there was sarcasm in my tone, it was intentional.

My guide, proving aware of it, quickly responded, 'No, no, no. No, this was left to him by his ancestors. Now we will go to see
his
collection.' And, to my huge relief, we came out into a corridor completely bare of trophies, one side opening onto a courtyard where a marble goddess stood in the shallow basin of a waterless fountain. Her limbs were broken at the joints and lichen had crept up her sandalled feet to the hem of her robe. This stretch of corridor evidently led to the wing that held the items sent to the estate by the absconding master in containers that had created such a stir in the district and a legacy for the inheritors—if any.

And now my guide produced the ring of keys from behind his back because we had come to a door that was locked. Choosing one extraordinarily long key from the ring, he inserted it into the lock and turned it with a great sense of drama. I followed him in with some trepidation and impatience: how many more hunting trophies and murdered spoils was I to be shown? The heat of the day was gathering in these closed, unventilated rooms, and although it must have been noon by now, there was very little light here.

Except, I was astonished to find, what the collection itself radiated. The chamber we had entered was hung, draped, laid and overlaid with rugs in the splendid colours of royalty—plum, wine, mulberry and pomegranate—woven into intricate patterns. I hesitated to step on one, they were surely precious and, besides, had not been touched in ages by hand, still less by foot. Only a raja might recline on one, with his rani, while listening to the music of sitar and sarod, tabla and tanpura. I could imagine these invisible potentates and pashas lifting goblets in their ringed hands or, better still, the chased silver mouthpiece of a hookah. Lives lived in such a setting could only have been noble and luxurious—not of this poor, hard worked land around.

It was only when I lowered my eyes to examine them more closely that I noted what the imperial colours concealed: patches that were faded, threadbare, some even darned and mended, clumsily.

My guide watched my reactions as they flickered across my face—I'm sure my expressions gave me away—and seemed gratified, a small smile lifting the corners of his compressed lips. But before I could bend and examine more closely these Persian, Turkish, Afghan, Moroccan and Kashmiri treasures, he ushered me into the next room.

And this was even more richly rewarding, for here hung the miniature paintings of Turkey, Persia, Moghul India, Rajasthan and Kangra. I was not enough of a connoisseur to identify them and it would have taken days, even a lifetime, to examine each separately and study the clues enclosed by the gilt margins. Here were jewel-like illustrations of floral and avian life, tiny figures mounted on curvaceous horses in pursuit of lions and gazelles, or kneeling before bearded saints in mountain caves. I glimpsed a pair of cranes performing a mating dance on a green hillock before passing on to a young maiden conversing with her pet parrot in a cage and another penning a letter to a distant beloved, and so to a sly young man spying from behind a tree on a bevy of young girls bathing in a river, clothed, but transparently. Here elephants with gilded howdahs on their backs carried noblemen up bare hills to crenellated forts on the summits, and now blue storm clouds appeared, driving white egrets before them; a dancing girl performed in a walled courtyard; a prince posed with a pink rose in his hand, another proudly exhibited a hawk upon his wrist. Hunting dogs streamed after deer in a forest, a hunter following them with a bow and arrow. A ship set sail. Lightning struck. Lines of exquisite script curled through the borders, naming their names, telling their tales.