The Impressionist (10 page)

The two tall women walk delicately but with a wicked twist of the hips, never touching the thicket of people around them. They make their way up the train, past third and second, past the guards’ van and the dining car to first class. Finding their compartment, which is marked with a typewritten notice, they ascend the metal steps, slide the catch on a dark wooden door and walk into a stale fug of sweat and hot upholstery. The porter puts two small trunks on the rack, is paid, salaams, departs. At once hands are thrust through the window, offering nuts, demanding alms, hands which are still there as the train comes to life, rolling slowly along the platform, only withdrawing as it speeds up beyond running pace. Then come yellow-brown fields flashing past, raw and unprocessed, the sensation of change.

‘You can lift the veil now,’ says one of the women kindly.

Pran does not move.

‘Do you know why you are here?’

He looks out of the window, directly into the sun. He opens and closes his mouth, but cannot find any words.

Afternoon turns to evening. Windows are clicked shut against the cold. A man comes to take orders for food, shouting through the closed door, then returning with metal tiffin-boxes of dal and chapatis which he leaves outside in the corridor. Purdah, complete and airtight, even on the move.

Pran tastes the food in his mouth, but cannot tell what he is eating. None of the objects around him have names. They are just things, vibrations on the eye and ear. Something crucial in his mind has been disconnected and is refusing to recognize the present. All that misplaced consciousness is backed up somewhere, imagining itself lying on the roof of a big house, hearing the swish swish of a maid’s broom. Yet his body carries on recording. The rhythm of the tracks, the texture of mashed lentils, the sensation of an old cut on his forehead, the aches and emptiness of weeks lying in a cell: these things filter through, knocking on the door, inviting him to step back out into the now.

Evening to night. Hot sweet tea, handed in through the window from a darkened station platform. The tea is scalding, all sorts of tricks needed to make it drinkable before the empty glasses are collected in a last-minute rush. The two women hoist their veils off their faces, doze, eat fried snacks, speak to each other in lowered voices. Once they join together and sing a song in a language Pran does not understand. They have odd voices, raucous warbling falsettos which grate on the ear. Dimly, he examines them for the first time. Their faces are big and plain, with strong jaws and heavily made-up eyes. He looks away again.

For hours he sits and stares into the darkness beyond the grimy window. Gradually the sensation of movement becomes comforting. The metronomic clatter of the pistons, the rush of displaced air; all of it hints at change, progress. Slowly something begins to congeal in the Pran-flux. The pearl faculty is recovering. So he is travelling. Something new is happening. There is still hope. The women argue.

‘What shall we call her?’

‘What do you think?’

‘Zia?’

‘Tuhina?’

‘Noor?’

‘Rukhsana.’

‘Call who?’ asks Pran. The women laugh, hearty rasping guffaws that show off mossy teeth and viperous tongues.

‘Little one,’ they say, ‘we mean
you
of course. Rukhsana, the Nawab of Fatehpur’s new hijra.’

Some questions are better left unasked. Others, if asked, are better left unanswered. All the progress Pran has made in self-reassembly, all the comforting hours of tea and train-travel, falls apart in an instant. Pran has seen hijras. They are frightening women-men who dance outside weddings, banging drums and mocking the guests as they go in and out. When a child is born they appear, as if by magic, heralding the infant with lewd mimes and filthy parodic songs. To make them go away again you must give them money, otherwise they will curse your household. They are outcasts, as ancient as the hills, a human dirty joke which has been told and retold since the hero Arjun was cursed to spend a year as a hermaphrodite conjurer. Arjun the great warrior, going from village to village in his skirts: Now
then, ladies and gents, if someone has a bangle they could lend…
Some hijras look after the zenanas in rich noble houses, accompanying the women on journeys, acting as gatekeepers, policemen, chaperones. Rich noble houses like that, perhaps, of the Nawab of Fatehpur.

Pran looks down at himself, at his body modestly swathed in black. He looks across the carriage at the pair of too-tall women, with their raucous voices and strong jaws and exaggerated way of walking. The women smile back. Then he remembers something else, a really bad thing, the other thing everyone knows about hijras. They are eunuchs.

Involuntarily he cups a hand to his lap. The two hijras watch him intently. Their smiles broaden a little, as if they know what he is thinking.

Snip-snip.

The train moves northwards, through Delhi, through Panipat, through Ambala and into the Punjab, land of five rivers and innumerable canals. He listens to the singing of the rails and soon begins to dream of the cell he has just left, the ants, the crack on the wall glittering with strange and beautiful visions. Eventually night turns to morning, and a hazy orange sun swells into life over yellow farmland. He sits up to watch small boys squatting on fieldside banks of earth, women washing their hair at wells or hip-swaying along with brass water jars on their heads, men following ploughs, thrashing grumbling buffalo through shin-deep paddies, all of them stopping for a brief moment to watch the train as it cuts supernaturally through their slow-paced world.

Rajpura… Ludhiana… Jalandhar… and then comes another platform and a sign sliding into view that reads
LAHORE
. There is a bustle of trunks and lowered veils. Pran’s arm is gripped and he steps down from the carriage.

Outside the station, surrounded by gawping urchins, with a uniformed chauffeur standing ramrod straight by its side, sits a car. And not just any car. The gleaming beast squatting like a metallic alien in the Lahore market dust is none other than the star of the coming Paris motor show, imported from France at astronomical expense, powered (mesdames et messieurs) by a
V-I2
aero engine, incorporating a patent four-wheel braking mechanism, capable of an unearthly top speed of eighty miles an hour, presented in fetching cream with red upholstery – the Hispano-Suiza
H6
.

‘This is for us?’ Pran asks the hijras. And it is.

The chauffeur stows the trunks in the boot, toots the horn imperiously and guns the enormous engine. Then in a roar of dust and tumbling urchins they take off through the busy streets. Pran’s heart leaps beneath his sweltering burka, the feeling of propulsion reinforcing his hope that he might yet outrun the forces of confusion scissoring at his crotch.

As Lahore fades into open countryside Pran notices that the car’s upholstery is worked with the sign of a dove and a crescent moon, a device repeated on the chauffeur’s epaulettes and, in delicate inlay, on the wooden dashboard. The flat farmland rises and breaks into undulating hills. They rattle over potholed dirt tracks unconducive to the achievement of record-breaking top speeds, and by the roadside peasants stand to watch them, then salaam, going down on their knees or bending from the waist as the roaring dust plume passes their fields.

They speed through a small town and the effect is the same, shopkeepers pressing their hands together, people backing out of the way to let them pass. Then, some distance further on, one of the hijras touches Pran on the shoulder.

‘There is the palace,’ she says.

In front of them, at the end of a long straight road that is lined, at intervals, with peculiar white statues, is a vast mass, a disturbing mirage of spikes and pinkness. As the Hispano-Suiza growls its way closer, the pinkness is broken up by contrasting shades, whites and blues, the occasional flash of other colours, here a lozenge of emerald green, there a bright red stripe. Two or three bulbous central domes (it is hard to tell exactly how many) rise over a complicated arrangement of walls, liberally sprinkled with battlements, crenellations, flying buttresses, decorative rails, urns and other architectural features whose purpose is not immediately clear. On each side of the main cluster of domes perhaps half a dozen spires and minarets poke up, some ending in Rajput domes, some tipped by shining gold crescents, and one tapering into a gothic steeple. At the front, a sweeping gravel drive leads up to a magnificent set of steps, alternately black and white. The Hispano-Suiza rolls past these to a side entrance, hidden beneath a looming candy-striped wall topped with a large figure of a bare-breasted woman holding a trident. Here the chauffeur leaps out and opens the door.

In
The Eighth Lamp,
his ‘Critical Introduction to the Architecture of India’, G. H. Dalrymple writes that ‘the unwholesome confection of European and Oriental motifs which characterizes the New Palace at Fatehpur leads the unlucky visitor to wonder whether some law or treaty could not have been invoked to prevent this devilish work from being undertaken’. Dalrymple, a disciple of Ruskin, had ‘the grave misfortune’ to spend three weeks as the guest of the fourteenth Nawab in 1895. He had, he wrote, ‘no inclination to pry’ into the history of the building which upset him so much. Had he been interested, he would have discovered that the palace had not one but three official architects.

The first, a Highlander, produced a set of drawings and models in the Scottish Baronial style then popular in his home country. However, a subcontinental Balmoral was not at all what the thirteenth Nawab had envisaged, so he sacked him in favour of a Palladian who was instructed to incorporate the best aspects of both European and Asian traditions. The Nawab considered the Royal Pavilion at Brighton a suitable model, a structure that embodied an acceptably English species of Indianness. It did not look like anything in the real India, but this in itself was a benefit, distinguishing it from the lavish palaces in Florentine, Indo-Saracenic or Rajput styles then being erected by his fellow rulers. So the new architect was ordered to make something like the Pavilion, only different. The Nawab was, after all, concerned not to appear derivative. One way around the problem was, he suggested, to make everything bigger. He had seen Buckingham Palace and was shocked to find it far smaller than the homes of many middle-ranking Indian rulers. The English were obviously far too restrained, in architectural matters as in so much else. So the New Palace was to be like a
much
larger version of the Pavilion, bigger, generically Oriental rather than Indian in design, and above all the kind of thing that English people would appreciate if invited to the kingdom to ride or shoot. This brief was set down in writing, for the sake of clarity.

The task proved too much for the second architect, a man of delicate health and fine artistic sensibility. He produced hundreds of drawings, took to opium and nautch girls, and one night sat down at his desk and shot himself through the temple with a silver-inlaid pistol the Nawab had presented to him when he accepted the commission. His papers were cleaned up and presented to the third architect, a syphilitic Italian adventurer called Tacchini, who made up for his lack of formal qualifications with a boundless, if erratic, enthusiasm.

Using the second set of plans as his basis, Tacchini incorporated several elements from the first, including the use of flying buttresses and a spire which was a scaled-down copy of the one on Chartres Cathedral. Then, assisted by a manual called
Elements of Architectural Style,
he decorated his structure with more or less anything that took his fancy. Gargoyles, urns, Islamic arches, Mughal glazed tiles and numerous copies of Greek and Roman statuary all found their way into the completed building. The Nawab was delighted, happily ordering coloured marble from Ferrara, stained glass from Oxford, and employing a team of Venetian mosaic-workers, headed by the architect’s cousin.

During the period of construction, Tacchini’s behaviour became increasingly eccentric. Apart from changing elements of the design, most radically to incorporate a rococo grotto modelled on one at Siena, ‘II Maestro’ (as he insisted on being addressed) began to direct operations in states of semi-nudity. Eventually clothing was abandoned altogether, in accordance with I1 Maestro’s theory that creative energy was emitted through the skin, which had to be exposed to avoid dangerous aesthetic blockages. At first this was put down to artistic temperament, and even elicited some praise from the Nawab, who admired committed men. But when Tacchini announced that the women’s quarters had to be built by women, also working in an aesthetically unblocked state of nature, a doctor was called. He diagnosed tertiary syphilis, and Tacchini was committed to an institution, where he died some years later, shouting out detailed dessert recipes. In his delusion it appears that he had returned to an earlier phase of his life, in which he had worked as a pastry chef in Trieste. The palace, his lasting monument, is curiously enough thought by many to resemble a large pink iced cake.