Seahorse (2 page)

The map on the wall flickered, replaced by the image of a stone figure, fractured and antique. “One of many works that French historian Alfred Foucher acquired on his expeditions to Shahbazgarhi between 1895 and 1897…”

The figure was decked in the accoutrements of religious ritual—robes, fluid as real cloth, twisted around a slender waist, falling to slippered feet. Carved ornaments crossed its bare torso, and its turbaned head was framed by a full-moon halo.

“We tend to decipher figurative sculpture instinctively… employing a tool we use everyday… subconsciously perhaps, but, in fact, almost all the time in our waking lives.”

The speaker stepped closer to his audience. “Can anyone tell me what it's called? The study of body language…”

“Kinesthetics.” It was Adheer, a final-year history student. With a pale, artistic face, and, even though he was no more than twenty, peppery grey hair.

“That's right… you may have heard this before, that figurative sculpture aspires to one thing—to arrest the body and capture life. True, but not always.”

He turned, appraising the image.

“Scientifically, we may determine Foucher's bodhisattava is over a thousand years old… carved in light grey-blue schist, from an area now in northern Pakistan… But how would you
read
him?”

A few observations were proffered—the figure was serene, princely, in prayer, the right hand raised in blessing.

“All accurate, no doubt, but at the heart of it, the key to truly unlocking an image is iconography… it comes from the Greek
eikón,
“image” and
grafein,
“to write”. If literature depends on the slower rhythm of the word, iconography relies on the swifter rhythm of the eye. The artist takes an elaborate temporal succession of events, and condenses them into an image… it holds everything.”

Each element, from the flaming halo down to the carved base, served as a clue.

“The bodhisattva's hand, for instance, is fixed in
abhaya mudra,
a gesture of fearlessness. And this,” he pointed to the fingers, which—I hadn't noticed—were webbed, “is not an amphibian motif, but an indication, some say, of supernatural power. If you look carefully at his turban, you'll see it contains a small figurine… of Garuda, a mythical bird-like creature, carrying a naga.”

“Why is that?” asked Adheer.

The speaker shrugged. “The motif is most likely related to a Greek myth… the abduction of Ganymede by Zeus in the form of an eagle. It appears widely in ancient south Asian art, but in this context its significance remains a mystery.”

I remember, at the end of the talk, I waited while the hall emptied, flooded with stark-white tube light. The speaker glanced around the room and I wondered whether he saw me—slouching in the corner in my faded jeans and t-shirt. He stashed away his papers in an old-fashioned briefcase, and joined a professor waiting by the door. They headed out. I caught snatches of conversation. Laughter. Someone flicked the lights off and once again the room sank back into watery darkness.

Later, I saw a poster pinned on the college notice board announcing—like a prophet of the past—the event I'd accidentally attended. Organized by the Department of History. A talk by art historian Doctor Nicholas Petrou.

While Nicholas was an art historian, Lenny was the artist.

Or so I like to believe, even if it probably isn't a label he'd have claimed for himself. In our hometown, as in hundreds of small towns in India in the late 1980s, there was little room for the imaginative and abstract. The elusive and intangible. Our options indelectably confined to medicine, engineering, or government service—safe, sturdy careers, long, narrow ladders leading to a future ostensibly improved. A quest always for security, hardly for meaning—or what the Greeks called eudaimonia, a human flourishing—and, especially within the puritanical Christian circles our families moved in, rarely for enjoyment. Lenny wasn't devoted to an artistic profession, but I remember how effortlessly creativity alighted on him, the startling deftness of his hands. He'd sketch portraits of strangers while sitting at roadside
teashops, on scraps of paper and napkins. A quick, light touch, each one taking him less than a minute. Or fold paper into birds, which he'd place along his window sill, longing for the sky. Strum the guitar, casual and easy, singing low and tuneful.

A month ago, I was at the National Portrait Gallery in London, for a retrospective on Lucian Freud. The man who only painted portraits. Room after room of faces, distraught, humiliated, indifferent, tenderly in love. A lifetime spent in attempting to capture all of humanity—its myths and frailties—with unrelenting intensity. I followed the eyes, and the eyes followed me. Paintings are always once removed, but not on this occasion. Each canvas raw and visceral. Turned to skin, loose, marked and scarred.

The people he painted, he took their soul.

There's a sketch Lenny sent me before he died that looks as though it could have been drawn by Lucian Freud. That's why I like to believe he's an artist, and that if he'd lived longer, perhaps he'd have come to realize it too.

Instead, he was enrolled, through his parents' persistent coercion, in a science degree—zoology? biology?—in a college in our hometown. Except, I never saw him attend class, or complete assignments, or venture near an academic building of any sort. He did what all parents found impossibly infuriating—he drifted.

I knew Lenny all my life. We grew up in the same neighborhood, although he was older and we became friends much later, when I was fourteen. Unexpectedly, at the side of a basketball court. One of those dilapidated public sports grounds where youngsters congregated in the evening for lack of anything else to do. Mostly, I hovered around the edges, invisible, pretending to follow the match, watching the big boys play, the ones who jumped like they had wings on their feet.

One day, Lenny showed up and declared it the silliest game he'd ever seen.

“Is this what you do?” he asked. “Sit around watching these guys fight over an orange ball?”

“Sometimes.”

“Do you play?”

I thought it pointless to lie. “No.”

He lit a cigarette, and threw his head back. His face pieced together by an irreverent sculptor—an uneven nose, slanting eyes, a rough chin, and sharp plane cheeks. He smelled of smoke and pine forests, of something wild and unexplored.

He said nothing until he'd finished the cigarette, until he threw it to the ground and it flickered and died, burning itself out.

“Come.”

And I followed.

Before Lenny, I was unattuned to much else apart from my parents' precise clockwork regime. Weekdays stretched taut between school and homework, punctuated by weekend visits to my grandparents, and church service on Sunday. When I was with him, though, time dissolved into insignificance. It lost its grasp, and loosened, unfurling endlessly as the sea. He'd rent VHS tapes from a movie parlor in town, and watch one after another—it didn't occur to him to stop if it was late, or dawn. Or he'd walk, for hours, winding his way to unfamiliar neighborhoods on the other side of town. Often, he'd ride his old motorbike out into the countryside, beyond the furthest suburban sprinkle. He ate when he was hungry, slept whenever he happened to be tired, awoke at odd hours between early afternoon and evening. He was out of time. Removed from it like a modern-day Tithonus, existing at the quiet limit of the world.

I'd hurry over to Lenny's room after school, or on weekend afternoons. It was a basement level space, down a narrow flight of steps accessible only from the outside of the house. Dimly-lit, oddly shaped, with jutting walls and sudden corners, and quite bare apart from a
single bed, a writing table, and cupboard. In the corner stood a wooden shelf sinking under the weight of books, some so old they'd turned brittle, riddled by silverfish. They once belonged to a tenant upstairs, an elderly Bengali gentleman who died on a cold winter's night, leaving Lenny's family in the awkward position of having to pack up his belongings and giving them away to charity—for he had no family, here or elsewhere, that they knew of. Lenny persuaded his parents to let him keep the library—an eclectic collection, ranging from the obscure (
The Collected Letters of Henry J Wintercastle
) to the mildly collectable (an 1895 edition of
A Tale of Two Cities
). I remember how they lay thick and heavy in my hands, slightly musty, the smell that makes me think of Lenny when I walk into a secondhand bookshop.

In the afternoons, we'd go for walks in the pine forest behind his house, and smoke cheap cigarettes, seated on mossy rocks or, if it was a dry month, lying on the ground.

In between the roots of trees, the spines of the earth. Everything suddenly inverted, an upturned silence, grass behind my neck, a tilted view of patchy sky through crazy tangle of twigs and needle-leaves. We'd talk, or rather he'd talk and I'd listen. His voice murmuring like a stream. A book he'd read. This movie he'd seen, about a man wrongly sent to prison. A line he liked.
You know what the Mexicans say about the Pacific? They say it has no memory.
A poem by Auden. His favorite.
All we are not stares back at what we are.
Or we'd be quiet. And if we were quiet and unmoving long enough, the forest would flourish over us. They would return, like slivers of sky, a pair of long-tailed blue jays. Elsewhere, a cluster of playful sparrows ventured closer. The clouds seemed to stop and linger. I'd feel heavier and lighter, quieted by the fall of pine needles, feeling their smooth silkiness under my hands. The prickle of tiny black ants clambering over my fingers. For them, I was tree root and stone. Here and there, the sudden fickle flit of yellow butterflies. We were woven, all at once, into the fabric of a spring afternoon.

On other days, colder and shorter, Lenny would take me to tea shops, scattered around town, near bustling markets, on busy main roads. We'd dip slabs of rice cake into small chipped cups of bitter tea, and watch the crowd swell and thin around us. Folk who dressed rough and spoke rough, butchers and builders who worked with their hands. (Of whom my parents would have disapproved, saying they were not “our type.”) Sometimes, we headed away from the clamor of the centre, past the car parks and newsstands, the bakeries and pharmacies, and slipped into a narrow lane flanked by a sludgy canal and the bricked back of a building. Its smoothness interrupted by a chink, an opening that led into a triangular one-room tea shop manned by a lady with an aged face and young eyes. She served us heaped plates of food, brimful cups of tea and called Lenny “my butterfly.” I couldn't quite follow their banter—their language wrapped in lively innuendo.

“How many plums have you eaten recently?” she once asked Lenny.

I reminded them it wasn't yet the season.

But it pleased me to be with them, to feel part of something adult and amorous.

More often, deterred by relentless rain, we'd stay indoors, in Lenny's room. Reading, or playing our own version of darts on an enormous map of the world on the wall—a patchwork of colors amid posters of longhaired musicians in white vests and tight leather pants. Lenny would aim for South America—because he said he loved that vision of wildness—and land mostly in the Pacific or Atlantic. I'd aim for England—he'd call me boring—and end up in North Africa, or the deep blue Mediterranean.

We'd fling the darts from across the room, lazily lying on his bed, and then I'd scurry over to gather them.

“I have to get out of here, Nem,” he'd tell me, as he aimed for Brazil.

“You will,” I'd say loyally, because I truly believed he could achieve anything.

For the longest time, I placed it there—the reason for Lenny's restlessness. His plummeting moods and sudden disappearances. Those afternoons when he wouldn't permit me to accompany him out. “But where are you going?” I'd ask and he wouldn't reply, sending me home instead. “Go finish your homework.” Those evenings when he didn't return to his room at all. Later, the unexplained mud on his motorcycle wheels, his shoes, the frayed edges of his jeans.

I placed it there.

The smallness of our small town, its bland familiarity and quiet, terrifying dullness.

Yet how are we to truly map others? To fully navigate the rooms they carve in their hearts. The whispers they alone understand. What is love to their ear? The crevice it fits into is different for each of us. We are separate worlds illuminated by strange suns, casting unrecognizable shadows.

In the end, we follow spirits only our eyes can spy.

I have to get out of here, Nem.

Eventually, I suppose, that's what Lenny did. In a way that left him with no hope of return.

A few weeks after I found out about Lenny, Nicholas and I went to a bar in Model Town, a neighborhood near the university, comprising circles of apartment blocks built around a lake. We took an autorickshaw, weaving through the traffic, between lumbering DTC buses, honking cars and pedestrians who'd spilled onto the road from sidewalks choked with garbage and abandoned construction material. In certain places, Delhi swayed in a perpetual state of chaos, and that night I was glad for the tumult. The bar was located in the unsavoury side of Model Town, just off the imaginatively named 2
^nd
Main Road. Clusters of men loitered around, hovering close to a paan and cigarette stall. How they stared at us—this strange duo, a tall white foreigner and his small-built companion who looked as much an outsider.