The Impressionist (4 page)

For its part, the monkey has no intention of changing shape. Lacking royal connections or powers of augury, its primary interest is the strong onion smell wafting under its nostrils. Onions are edible. It sits on a crumbling section of wall and cocks its head at a shape it has spotted moving about in an open doorway, unable to decide whether it too is edible, or perhaps dangerous.

The shape is Anjali the maid, and she is trying to stay out of sight. It is lucky she came. Something told her, a tightness at her temples, that she should keep a close eye on her daughter today. Look at the filthy boy! If he touches so much as a hair on little Gita’s head, he will pay for it. This is not an idle threat. Anjali the maid knows things about Pran Nath Razdan. In fact she knows rather more than he does himself. One touch, and she will tell.

Anjali was brought up in the moneylender’s house at the edge of the desert. Some years older than the moneylender’s daughter, she had been placed with the family as a maid as soon as she was old enough to plait hair and wield a flat iron. She watched her young mistress withdraw from the world, and tended to her as she lay inert on her bed, transfixed by the invisible objects of her imagination. Among the servants, Amrita’s madness was said to be of that very holy type which reveals the illusory nature of the world. Some of the women would even contrive to touch her clothing when they brought her tea. Anjali was not one of them. She found the girl frightening. Trying to get Amrita to take a sip of water or a mouthful of dal, she would stretch her arm out straight, keeping herself as far from the bed as she could, on guard against evil spirits which might jump from the afflicted body to hers. When she was told she would be accompanying her on the journey to Agra, the first thing she did was consult a palmist, who told her to beware of water.

Perhaps it was this advice which saved her. After the flash-flood, she and two of the porters were the only ones still left alive, or so they thought. Searching for other survivors, they waded down a gully until they found a dacoits’ cave, with Amrita sitting outside it, dressed in a khaki shirt and a pair of shorts. They pulled the Englishman’s naked body out of the mud a few miles further south. It was not hard to imagine what had happened.

Amrita mumbled poetry-words about trees, and about the water. Anjali dressed her in a sari and made her decent, repeating charms to ward off the evil eye. Inside the shirt pocket was an illegible document, with a photograph of the dead Englishman. She slipped the picture discreetly into her skirts. Once they finally reached Agra, pulling into Fort Station on the third-class carriage of the train, she lost no time in breaking the shocking news to the servants of her new household. The girl had polluted herself. Surely she would have to be sent away.

In the uncle’s house, Anjali was locked in an upstairs room, while the uncle held meetings with brothers and cousins. Then one of them summoned the girl and gave her a silver bangle, a nose stud and a pair of heavy earrings. She understood that she was to keep her mouth shut. They had found a husband for Amrita, a Razdan, and they would not tolerate any impediment to the marriage. Had anyone asked her opinion, Anjali would have said she thought it was an ill-fated match. She had often seen the girl naked. She had examined her closely, and she had a mole on her stomach, right at the very centre just under her breasts. The meaning, as she whispered to the mali, was clear. The new bride would die young.

The unlucky bridegroom was a very serious young man by the name of Amar Nath, who had recently started practising law and was a member of societies for the promotion of hygiene, tradition, cultural purity, cow protection and correct religious observance. He had recently published an article in
The Pioneer
on the question of loss of caste through foreign travel, coming down firmly against the notion of leaving Indian soil.

Amar Nath’s studies had left him little time to acquire social graces. On first meeting his betrothed, he stuttered a few words, then stared at his shoes until the chaperones got bored and called the tea party to a halt. Amrita, of course, said nothing at all, a ghost of a smile playing over her face. She was beautiful, which helped. She gave no immediate sign of insanity. Amar Nath was a dutiful son, and his elderly parents were worried that he showed no interest in anything except books and moral rectitude. So they accepted her uncle’s assurances, and pressed their son to do their bidding. The wedding went ahead.

It passed off smoothly. An auspicious hour was determined, and the ceremony duly performed. The priest spoke the mantras correctly, and the bride’s smile was coy and demure as she was decked with jewellery by the young women of her new family. Sweets were distributed to an improbable number of relatives, and the groom looked more or less dashing as he arrived at the head of the wedding procession. There was, however, one thing of which Anjali strongly disapproved: the sapphire set into the bride’s necklace. Sapphires are tricky gems, and though they can deflect Saturn’s harmful rays, they can also focus them.

Amar Nath was obviously taken aback by his wife’s eagerness in the marriage bed. Anjali, who had joined the household with her mistress, sat up late and listened to his gasps of surprise, little kittenish sounds that carried out of the window and up to the roof where she lay. As she would later remark to the paanvendor, it was a fair bet that this serious boy was not expecting his silent bride to take charge in such a manner. Lucky for her he was so unworldly. Anyone else would have become suspicious. But although rumours of the bride’s adventures had already reached as far as the hijras who came to mock the wedding guests, Amar Nath and his family were too lofty to listen to the prattle of eunuchs or servants. With his new wife installed safely in his house, the bridegroom returned to his ruminations about disputed land boundaries and the value of Persian in the education of young gentlemen. So nine months passed, or perhaps a little less, while the young husband attended public meetings, the young wife grew big and Anjali surrounded herself with a delicious web of speculation and rumour. Then one afternoon, a shriek echoed around the courtyard. Amrita had gone into labour. The baneful influences of the sapphire and the mole started to take effect.

The astrologer was called well before Pran Nath made his entry into the world. The family installed the man under a fan on a shady veranda, where he sat drinking sweet tea and clutching his case of charts.

He waited for a very long time.

He finished his tea. He put his case neatly on the table in front of him. He ate some fruit, peeling it carefully with a sharp knife. He declined more tea. He stood up and stretched, feeling his vertebrae click satisfyingly into place. He declined lime soda. The screams of the labouring mother echoed around the garden.

Later the astrologer took a short walk, smelling the jasmine and enjoying the shade of the trees. The gardener was watering a bed of delicate white lilies, and the astrologer stopped to praise him for his work. The mali beamed with pride. Then the two of them fell silent, listening as the gasps and sobs from the mother’s apartment became more anguished.

As the sun dipped low over the roofs, he was offered a bed on which to relax. He accepted, but found it difficult to doze. Though his business was birth and its meanings, he always found the actual event distressing. The blood and pain. It was a woman’s thing, beyond the fathoming of a man, even one educated in the science of Jyotish, to whom most common mysteries are transparent. He preferred to think of birth as a mathematical event, the stately progression of planets and constellations through clearly defined houses, gridded sections of airless space. This agony, the scurrying of maids, the scene of mess and horror that was no doubt unfolding in the upstairs room, all of it was most unpleasant. It was not nice to think of the planets tugging so hard at this unfortunate woman’s womb. The astrologer always imagined stellar influence as something ethereal, light to the touch.

Then everything fell ominously silent. He strained his ears into the gathering darkness, hearing the immense noise of insects, the rasp of parrots arguing in the trees. Nothing else. Nothing human. Soon a maid came, carrying an oil lamp which she set on the table in front of him. At once, moths started beating against its glass sides.

‘The baby is born,’ said the maid, with an odd, triumphant expression on her face. ‘It is a boy. The mother is dead.’

He nodded resignedly. Then he looked at his watch, opened his case, took out pen and paper, and set to work.

The chart was strange and frightening. The stars had contorted themselves, wrung themselves into a frightening shape. Their pattern of influences had no equilibrium. It was skewed towards passion and change. To the astrologer this distribution looked impossible. Forces tugged in all directions, the malefic qualities of the moon and Saturn auguring transmutations of every kind. It was a shape-shifting chart. A chart full of lies. He kept going back to the almanac to check his results, covering his brown-flecked paper in calculations.

The boy’s future was obscure. The astrologer could predict none of the usual things – length of life, marital prospects, wealth. Patterns emerged, only to fade when another aspect of the conjunction was considered. Planets seemed to flit through houses, hovering between benign and malevolent positions. Clusters of possibilities formed, then fell apart. He had never been so confused by a reading.

Perhaps (though he would not have liked to bet on it) there was a route through the chaos. If so, then it was certainly a bizarre one. How could so many delusions lead to their opposite, to the dissolution of delusion? He glanced up at the square of light in the upstairs window. The child would have to endure suffering and loss. Could he really tell the father this? The man was grieving for his wife. On the table, a mandala of crisped moth corpses lay around the lamp. The astrologer thought of the dead woman, and shuddered.

When the maid came back, she found him sitting in front of a fresh, neat chart depicting a bland future of long life, many sons and business success. The torn-up pieces of the first attempt had been stuffed, out of sight, into his case.

When the astrologer brought the master his new son’s chart, Pandit Razdan seemed satisfied, but everyone knows that astrologers say what their clients want to hear. If a man’s beard is on fire there is always someone who will warm their hands on it, but then again who gives a tip to the bearer of bad news? As soon as Anjali saw the white-skinned baby, she knew it was ill-starred.

The baby cooed and gurgled, and a boy ran down to the cremation ghats for a priest, and the midwives burned bloody sheets in the garden. No one, it seemed, had a thought for the dead mother beyond disposing of her body as quickly as possible. The girl had been an anomaly, an irritant against the skin of a smooth-running household. Now there was a silent agreement to treat her as a vision, a temporary phenomenon which had simply evaporated.

Anjali too thought it was for the best that Amrita had died. It was a wonder she had lasted so long. The family seemed overjoyed by their son. So big! So healthy! Yet she could not look at the child without thinking of his true parentage, of a Brahmin woman defiled by the pale man in the photograph. Still, she might have been able to hold her tongue – if the child had not become such a monster.

*

It was obvious even when Pran Nath was small. He spat, kicked shins, and then threw tantrums when anyone dared to punish him. He was given fine clothes, which he tore to shreds, and a roomful of toys, which he pounded to splinters. The presents were a substitute for speaking to the boy, which his father did rarely, and then only in the form of clipped admonishments, like excerpts from a book of household hints.
Keep your hair clean as a precaution against infestation. Memorize the various ways of starting a letter.

When Pran reached the age of six, a tutor was employed to administer the tripartite programme of moral, intellectual and physical education which Amar Nath Razdan had outlined in his article ‘Towards an Uplifting Hindu Pedagogy’. He left after a week, nursing a broken ankle that had been caused, he claimed, by his charge tripping him down a steep flight of stairs. He was followed by a series of others, none of whom lasted more than a few months. After the injured man came an ex-army sergeant who had a breakdown when he found his cherished cache of love-letters burnt to cinders, a Bengali with a squint, an alcoholic Sindhi with a fondness for Keats, two or three terrified university students and even an Englishman, who left after one lesson, saying that he would never set foot in the house again.

Anjali put these failures down to bad blood, and was prepared to argue her case against all comers. Though at first Pran Nath had his defenders, one by one they slipped away, alienated by his arrogance or his unappealing practical jokes. There were those who pointed out that the boy was actually quite bright, but they found his cleverness was mostly directed towards destroying their possessions, or finding some new and disgusting thing to secrete in their food, hair or bedclothes. His talent for mimicry, another potential saving grace, was employed in cruel parodies of the chowkidar’s limp, or the way the dirzi’s hare-lipped son ate dal. People tried to explain to him, but it was like feeding salt to a monkey. One by one they came to agree with the cook: the boy was a curse.

Still, officially he was the only son. Everything he said or did was, by definition, perfect. With his father shut in his study, and no mother, brother or even a consolation-prize sister to turn to, he was also more or less alone. The household bit its collective lip. Pran Nath was oblivious to their dislike, supremely convinced of his central position in the cosmos. This was based on the admiration of his extended family, but after a few years even they had started to turn away. One by one the proud aunties died or ceased visiting. His paternal uncle suffered a stroke, brought on, it was whispered, by Pran Nath imitating the sound of a wild animal outside his window one night.