The Artist of Disappearance (4 page)

I could not read them, partly from the unfamiliarity of the scripts, but also because the glass that separated these wonderful worlds from the spectator was filmed with dust. No hand had touched them since they were framed and hung. There were no visitors to admire them, just the old caretaker who seemed more proud than knowledgeable, and I who could say nothing but 'Ah!' and 'Ahh!'

 

If I had been shown just these two chambers, I should have felt satisfied and certain of the value of this collection, but we did not stop here. The caretaker, bowing slightly, was showing me through the door to another chamber, this one filled with fans and kimonos. Disembodied, they contrived somehow to beckon and flirt. It was easy to imagine the fine tapered fingers that must have wielded these fans of carved ivory and pleated silk painted with scenes of gardens and festivals, or the slender figures that had worn these silk gowns, opulent and elaborate with sweeping sleeves and trailing borders of indigo and verdigris, bronze and jade, amethyst and azure. They seemed to plead for their glass cases to be opened so they might step out of these frozen tableaux and assume the roles of queens and courtesans to which they were born.

But such exposure might have revealed them to be ghosts, a touch of air might have turned them to dust. The sleeves were empty, the hems ended in no slippers and no feet. Their fans stirred no air. It occurred to me that the little toylike object, which had caught my eye in my friend the tea-estate manager's house, might once have stood among these ghosts, their plaything, before it was spirited away by some light-fingered viewer. And so they had no vehicle, not even a miniature palanquin.

I found myself invaded by their poetic melancholy and would have liked to linger, fancying myself a privileged visitor to a past world, but the caretaker gave a warning cough to remind me of his presence and our purpose in being here; I turned round to see him holding open another door to another chamber.

And so I was marched through one filled with masks of wood, straw, leather and clay, painted and embellished with bone, shells, rings, strings and fur, masks that threatened or mocked or terrified, then one of textiles—printed, woven, dyed and bleached, gauze, muslin, silk and brocade—and after that one of footwear—fantastical, foolish, foppish—followed by one of headwear—caps and bonnets of velvet, straw, net and felt ... What kind of traveller had this been who desired and acquired the stuff of other people's lands and lives? Why did he? And how had it all arrived here to make up this preposterous collection?

The guide, smiling enigmatically, would give me no clues. Now he was showing me cases filled with weapons of war—curved swords, stout daggers, hilts engraved with decorative patterns that concealed murderous intent—and now he was glancing to see my reaction to a display of porcelain and ceramic—delicate receptacles painted with scenes of arched bridges and willow groves, mountains and waterfalls, or abstract patterns of fierce intricacy in bold and brilliant colours.

I felt sated, wanted to protest, hardly able to take in any more wonders, any more miracles, but detected a certain ruthlessness to my guide's opening of door after door, ushering me on and on, much further than I wished to go. I had thought of him as aged and frail, but his pride and determination to impress me seemed to give him a strength and stamina I would not have imagined possible and it was I who was exhausted, overcome by the heat, stopping to mop my face, even stumbling, yet also curiously unwilling to admit defeat and leave what I had undertaken incomplete.

And there was a chamber we came across every now and then that I would have gladly lingered in, the chamber of scrolls and manuscripts, for instance, which I would have wished to examine more closely. Was this scroll Chinese, or Japanese or Korean? And what did it say, so elegantly, in letters like bees and dragonflies launched across the yellowed sheets, only half unrolled, with faded seals scattered here and there like pressed roses, the insignia of previous owners? Did states, lands, governments exist that produced documents of marriage, property or cases presented in court with such artistry—settlements of wills and disputes, perhaps decrees and laws and declarations of war and peace? What were they? I compared them in my mind to the tattered files that piled up in heaps on my desk, and marvelled. But only insects examined the ones here, eating their way through papery labyrinths, creating intricate tracks before vanishing, leaving behind networks of faint channels the colour of tea, or rust, and small heaps of grey excrement.

Whole worlds were encrypted here and I looked to my guide for elucidation but he only gave a slight shrug as if to say: what does it matter? The young master collected them and that was what made them precious.

And there was still more to see: cases that held all manner of writing materials with inks reduced to powder at the bottom of glass containers, pens and quills no one would ever use again, seals that no longer stamped; a chamber of clocks where no sand seeped through the hourglasses, water had long since evaporated from the clepsydras, bells were stilled, cuckoos silenced, dancing figures paralysed. Time halted, waiting for a magician to start it again.

The sense of futility was underlined by the sounds my footsteps made on the stone flooring. My guide's feet were shod in slippers that only shuffled. We might have been a pair of ghosts from the museum the owner had conjured up in a dream.

My curiosity was now so reduced that, like a fading spectre, it barely existed. I found myself hurrying after my guide, no longer stopping to admire or decipher, wishing only to bring the tour to an end.

But now we came to a halt in the dustiest and shabbiest chamber of all, as if here the voyager's travels were being rounded up and stored away. It held all the appurtenances of travel itself—leather suitcases with peeling labels of famous hotels still clinging to them, railway and shipping timetables decades out of date and obsolete, baskets held together with string, canvas bedrolls with splitting leather straps and rusty buckles, Gladstone bags as cracked and crushed as broken old men, bundles of bus, ferry and railway tickets preserved by an obsessive, entrance tickets to castles, museums, palaces and picture galleries, reminders of experiences that must once have seemed rich and rewarding. On the walls, peeling posters for lands where beaches were golden, palm trees loaded with coconuts, cruise liners afloat on high seas, flags fluttering—their original colours now barely perceptible. On a table in the centre, an antique globe, round as a teapot, with a map on it centuries out of date, showing continents that had shifted or disappeared and oceans that had spread or shrunk, and portraying marine life—spouting whales, flying fish, as well as mythical creatures like sirens and mermaids, all beckoning: come, come see!

Perhaps this had been the restless young man's source of inspiration. As for me, all desire I had ever felt for adventure had been drained away by seeing these traces that he had left of his, this gloomy storehouse of abandoned, disused, decaying objects. Their sad obsolescence cast a spell on me and I wanted only to break free and flee.

But my guide had one more thing he wanted to show me. Pointing at a long, shallow box that stood open along one wall, he said, 'This was the final box we received. It was empty and Srimati Sarita Devi knew it was the last. She said to me, "There will not be another."'

'And there wasn't?' I asked, wondering if I was meant to take this as some miraculous revelation of a mother's bond to her child or if it would lead to another tale.

'No, no more boxes.'

'And did he himself not return?'

He shook his head and, as if to avoid a show of emotion, turned aside and pushed open the last heavy door.

 

And suddenly we found ourselves expelled from the darkness and gloom and outside on the wide stairs open to the white blaze of day. I tried to adjust my eyes to the harsh contrast and to think of something to say, but my mouth was dry and stale, in need of a drink of water. I turned to my host to take my leave and was startled to find he did not at all intend to let me go. Instead, he was hurrying down the stairs to the dusty, uninviting field below, no longer the meek, obsequious clerk who had come to petition me at the circuit house, nor the proud curator of what he clearly deemed a valuable piece of property, but a small, determined man doggedly performing his duties to the last.

'Where are we going now?' I protested, unwillingly following him to the foot of the stairs.

He turned back, suddenly snapped open an umbrella—a large black dome lifted on its rusty spokes—that he must have picked out of the unlucky elephant's foot without my noticing and said, 'This way, please, this way. I have one last gift to show you,' and holding the clumsy object over my head to provide me with shade, proceeded to cross the field. We came to what was evidently the end of the extensive compound where there was a brick wall—or the remains of one—rising above the top of which I could see a stand of susurrating bamboo bleached by the sun.

He led me through a doorway—it was actually a gap in the wall and doorless—and suddenly we were in the bamboo grove that I had glimpsed from without. Here, in a rustling, crackling bed of dry, sharp-tipped leaves shed by the bamboo stalks, and looming up in the striped shade like a grounded monsoon cloud, restlessly shifting from one padded foot to another as if fretting at its captivity, an elephant stood chained. Its trunk swung downward as if wilted by the heat and gave out long deep sighs that stirred the dust on the ground. Although the animal glanced at us from under lashes like bristles, with small, sharp, canny eyes, it gave no sign of curiosity or alarm. Weariness perhaps, that was all.

A man, bare-bodied, his waist wrapped in a brief, discoloured rag, rose from where he had been squatting in the shade by some buckets and troughs filled with leaves, and came forward to meet us with, I thought, the same weariness as his charge.

To my surprise, my small timid host went up to the great grey wall of the elephant's side and placed his hand on it, proprietorially. The creature stood listless, the merest twitch running through its flank as if it had been bothered by a fly. And there were flies. Also heaps of dung for them to feed on.

The two men spoke to each other in one of the local dialects unknown to me, the one in rags not even troubling to remove the stalk on which he was chewing from his mouth, and the clerk/curator giving him what sounded like instructions. The keeper of the elephant shrugged and said something laconic from the corner of his mouth and scratched the sparse hairs on his chest. He and his charge, the one minute and the other monumental, shared a surprising number of tics and mannerisms.

The clerk/curator turned to me and his elderly face with its white wisp of a beard looked tired and older still than it had earlier seemed.

'She was the last gift Sri Jiban sent his mother. She travelled to us over the border from Burma; it was a long journey by foot and this was her final destination. Her keeper brought us no letter and no explanation except that she was sent us by
him,
and we have had the care of her and the feeding of her ever since. And it is now many years. Srimati Sarita Devi saw to it as long as she had the strength and the means, then left her in my care. She gave me whatever remained in her hands, then departed for Varanasi where she has lived ever since. I did not hear from her again. Perhaps she is no more. She went there, you see, to die.'

I saw that he laid his hand on the great beast's flank with an immense gentleness; it might have been the touch a father bestows on an idiot son, a mad daughter or an invalid wife, gentle and despairing, because she also provided him with the purpose of his life.

'If she lives longer,' he murmured, 'and requires more feeding, I will have to start dismantling the museum, disposing of it piece by piece. It is her only inheritance.'

I had no idea what I should do or say, and stood there in the shade of the monstrous cloud, staring at the flies and the shifting padded feet and the dust they stirred up, away from the two small, spare men who, I now saw, were not only older and shorter than I, but also emaciated, probably lacking even the basic nutrition and necessities, while their ward lived on and on and fed and fed.

Then the clerk put his hands together and turned to me in pleading. 'Sir, please help us. Please appeal on our behalf to the government, the sarkar, to take the museum from us into its custody and provide for us, and for this last gift we were sent. I am ashamed, sir, but I can no longer care for her myself. Forgive me for begging you.'

I could not think of what to say, how to meet his request, his evident need. I mumbled something about it being late, about having to get back, about how I would think about what could be done and how I would let him know as soon, as soon as—

 

That year of my training in the service is long past. I have been for years now in senior positions, mostly in the capital. I have been transferred from one ministry to another, have dealt with finance, with law and order, with agriculture, with mines and minerals, with health care and education ... you could call it a long and rewarding career of service. I might even say my father took some pride in it. I am of course no longer the lonely bachelor I was when I was first sent out to the districts and compelled to stay in that benighted circuit house; my mother was able to arrange a marriage for me to a wife who is in every way suited to me and my life, and I am a family man with grown sons and daughters. In fact, I rarely think back to that time now.

I am ashamed to say that once I was transferred to the capital I did not look back, I did not keep in touch with the keeper of the museum and I never found out what happened to it, or to him. What is that saying about ships passing in the night? Is there a landlocked version of it—caravans passing in the desert, or elephants in the forest?

Elephants—now those are creatures which make me uneasy still. Of course I rarely encounter one. Even when my children were young, I avoided zoos, circuses, any place an elephant might be sighted. I feared to have that sad, shrewd eye turned on me, taking my measure and finding it wanting.