Seahorse (8 page)

I held my silence.

My father was done. “I think I've made myself clear.”

It wasn't enough to keep me from seeing him.

My parents sent me away to Delhi. They thought it for the best. They'd heard of a college there, founded on good, wholesome Christian principles, where students lived on campus, which had special seat allocations for people like me who came from places and communities far from the capital, marked as underprivileged and marginalized. I was sent away. I was offered to Nicholas on a plate. Something like fate.

If time is measured in a god's blink, I didn't emerge from my room for a million years. I don't know if it was the next day, or the next week—or had a month passed?—after I heard about Lenny. At some point, on some day, before dawn, when the murmuring voices were silenced, and darkness glowed with a light that seemed to come from nowhere, I walked out of the residence hall, down the brick-lined path, away from the campus and into the forest. I picked my way through stone and undergrowth, the leaves glistening with dampness. Somewhere, perhaps, a moon. Ancient, watching through the branches of charcoal trees. The air still and silent, pulsing with unknown things.

I came to a tower. A tall sandstone tower, which I entered, and climbed, because from the top I'd be able to see all the reasons why. The air would be fresher, and filled with promise. From there, I'd be distant, removed from the clutches of this great and quartering heaviness. I'd almost reached the end when suddenly there was no ground to stand on. Like stepping on water. Falling through the air.

I lay curled at the bottom of the spiral staircase, the floor stone-cold and grainy against my skin. Hours later, a figure appeared at the doorway, and stood in a pale rectangle of light. His brows furrowed, his hands hesitantly reaching out to stop a fall that had already happened.

I didn't look up, didn't ask why or where, as I was half-carried and led out into the forest, the trees green and reverent around us. Something ached but I couldn't tell where the pain arose from, it seemed to surround me, dense as the humid late summer air.

After a while, we reached a wide road lined by Gulmohar trees, bathed in a rich and luxurious silence. The slow, persistent purr of a passing car. The faint jingle of bells. We stopped at a gate where a man rushed out to help us. The exchange of words between them was brief and muted. Soon, I sensed we were indoors, in a cool and high-ceilinged corridor, the creak of doors, the slap of footfall, the voice of a woman. Hands, gentle as cotton, lifted me over, suspended me for a second in
mid-air like I'd been only just before, while falling, and then a sudden release onto a soft, smooth plane that stretched endlessly like a field of snow. The unmistakable smell of fresh linen. Of something sharp and lemony. The warmth of wind and sunshine. A heated touch swept over me, a cloth struck at my skin, rough, spongy and damp. Something peeled, layer after infinitesimal layer. And then the deep, dark mercy of sleep.

II

I
N ALL THESE YEARS
, I'
VE
come to learn that the greatest lie is the face of a clock.

Time doesn't hang on a wall. It doesn't tick by on a wrist. It's infinitely more secretive and intimate. Time, contrary to all notions, does not flow. It's not beautifully fluid, a murmuring river passing under a bridge. In our heads, it hastens and halts and stumbles. On occasion, it dissolves. It ceases to exist.

Nicholas disappeared in the last century.

(
Ni. Cho. Las.
How easily his name trips off my tongue even after all this time, when I'd broken up the syllables and stashed them like three shells in a box).

Just before it rolled over, the calendar glistening with zeroes, three in a row, portals looking over the endlessness of the sea. What would it bring over the horizon? Everything new. Much of the same.

I graduated, and studied again. A Master's in English Literature, and then moved to the south of the city. My hometown became a place of sporadic visitations, Christmas, the death of a grandparent, the birth of a niece.

I settled for the usual options, open at the time to someone cropped from the Humanities—editorial jobs at newly-opened publishing houses. Although never television. Or the newspapers. Somehow, I found them categorically unappealing, with their terse daily deadlines, their massive, unrelenting production of images and text. Eventually, I joined a magazine as copy-editor. It was steady, if unexciting, until, because of an absent colleague, I started handling the arts pages. I did it for an issue, then two, and more. The absent colleague moved to Bombay. And my editor took it for granted I'd continue, and so I did. If the Delhi of the previous decade had sowed the seeds of capitalism, this one saw its rampant flourishing. Only now was it possible
to lay out six pages of a magazine dedicated to art. And as many to shopping, gigs, eating out, nightlife, cultural events. In South Delhi, a new gallery opened almost every month—in wealthy neighborhoods of marble-brick houses and leafy streets, Golf Links, Panchsheel, Defence Colony, Neeti Bagh, in previously unfashionable Lado Sarai and industrial Okhla. We were inundated by an outpouring of installations, video art, photography—I attended shows, and interviewed artists, I sat in un-crowded galleries on early weekday mornings, looking at art that I sometimes loved, sometimes detested.

I did this for three years, until my absent colleague returned.

Nithi didn't take her job back, of course. She offered me one instead.

To work for a new art and cultural journal, at their small yet not immodest office in Delhi. It was an exciting venture—the publication offered the space to write long-form, exploratory pieces. “To encourage insight, experimentation,” she said, dragging on her cigarette in short, abrupt puffs. “Why should art writing be relegated to a last-page column? Clubbed with ‘Entertainment' like sordid Siamese twins.”

We published monthly, which, after working for a weekly magazine, seemed an immense luxury. It gave me time to focus on idea and craft. I found a book by Marjorie Munsterberg, a guide to writing about visual art. John Berger's
Ways of Seeing.
Joshua Taylor's
Learning to Look.

I don't know whether I turned to art or whether it turned to me. Perhaps we were pulled to each other by similar longing. You see, I've always thought that people write, paint, compose music, for remembrance. Like what Philip Larkin said—that at the bottom of all art lies the impulse to preserve. Lest we forget. Works of art are beautiful scars.

Over the last few years, our journal did sufficiently well. Receiving favorable attention, a few journalism awards, and harnessing steadily growing subscriptions. At work, a promotion. Deputy editor.

I moved from a cramped one-bedroom flat in Malviya Nagar to a reasonably more comfortable one-bedroom place in East of Kailash. On
some nights I had company, those who stayed over, some who didn't—else I read, played the radio, or drifted through the vastness of the Internet, page upon page, swallowing up the hours. Once, I brought home a stray cat, and it stayed a while, sometimes falling asleep on my lap while I wrote. Wandering the rooms, un-restful, at night. Then it wandered out one evening and didn't return.

More often, rather than love, there were fleeting encounters.

For most of us, the years pass with few markers.

And we are surprised to find that the events in our lives—that meeting with a friend, that trip to Cairo, that casual reunion—took place so distantly in the past. “A couple of years ago,” you begin, and then correct yourself, “No,
six
years ago now.”

And we move along, mired in memory. Although the paradox of memory is that it gives you back what you had on condition that you know it has been lost. To regain it, you must remember it has gone; to remake the world, you need to first understand that it has ended.

So it rolls on until over a decade since the century turned—and I'm not quite certain whether the world is now amazingly smart, or incredibly foolish. At the edge, there were the two towers, yet I prefer not to count the years by war, on terror or otherwise. Somewhere in-between, the tsunami. Unlike hurricanes, tsunamis have no name. Just the Tsunami, a word that rolls off the tongue like a wave. Towards this end of the decade, the great crushing economic catastrophe. And it lingers, how it lingers. For this too, there is no name.

The problem is with reappearances. It's not what isn't there that shapes us as much as what might return. I suppose it all might never have happened if I didn't move to London.

When I told acquaintances in Delhi I was leaving for a year, they said they were thrilled for me. “Ah, if you are lucky enough to have lived in London as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for London is a moveable feast.”

“Paris,” I corrected. “That's about Paris.”

But, I realized, it didn't matter. All these cities were identical, cloaked with the same shiny, glittering appeal, pronounced with reverence, like a hushed prayer. I haven't been to Paris, but I found that London was filled with old light.

Since I landed, it was shifting into autumn, and I wanted the trees to stay that way forever. Flickering with fire. Dropping flames onto people's shoulders, at their feet. People usually make their life's discoveries when they're young—their first kiss, sex, alcohol, drugs. I was in my early thirties and I'd discovered a new season. An entirely new season. I felt self-congratulatory. It was a revelation. The world was ending, and also somehow being renewed.

With the crisis, financial and otherwise, the journal almost folded. My colleague considered moving back to Mumbai. She called herself the human yo-yo, constantly swaying between two cities. And I? I was lost. Not that I had no options—many galleries still stayed open, people still bought and sold art (in fact, this was a good time to in-vest, said one shrewd acquaintance, when the prices were low. “Warhol for a pittance.”) There was talk also of a major private, not-for-profit art centre opening on the fringes of Delhi, amid the towering steel and glass structures of Gurgaon. They'd definitely be looking to hire.

At first, I fell into a flurry of activity, sprucing up my CV, trying to fix up meetings with all the right people… and then? And then, I stopped. Not only because the journal miraculously survived—but I was weary.

The city was a heavy place. Full of incestuous circles and petty rivalries. I felt I had escaped one small town and landed in a city that had tightened around me like a noose.

Delhi's vast, mighty spaces felt so
reduced.
Evaporated into something as thick and wretched as what floated down the Jamuna.

And so, I was in London.

Yet wouldn't it be more gratifying to attribute this stint to reasons higher and more majestic than that of diversion? To offer it the weight of chance or predestination. In Greek mythology, the Moirai were three white-robed sisters who controlled man's fate. Clotho, the spinner, who spun the thread of life, Lachesis, the allotter, who determined its length, and Atropos, the unturnable, or the cutter. If our lives are thread, thin and silvery, it's easy to imagine them entangled across the globe, sometimes parting, never to touch again, or else unexpectedly meeting, re-entwining.

That's what happened with Santanu and me.

We'd kept in touch infrequently after our university days. All of us scattering like a handful of seeds. I stayed on. He left Delhi for elsewhere. He wasn't around for the few college reunions I attended. I wasn't there for the others. Boozy get-togethers on and off campus, where old acquaintances and adversaries exchanged numbers and pleasantries.

Last year, I decided to send him an email.

I'm not sure you remember me… I wrote for the college magazine while you were editor…

He replied far more promptly than I expected—
Nem, you were the only one who turned in articles on time. How could I forget you?

It was a promising start.

So I explained how I was interested in a fellowship from the Royal Literary Fund programme at the college where he was senior lecturer. At the Centre for Cultural, Literary and Postcolonial Studies. I was eligible to apply for a grant, but I required, what they called, a “formal nomination”. The fellowship ran for a year; it was prestigious, both for the Centre and for him. And for me, a tidy stipend too, considering
all I needed to do was keep office hours a few days a week, and offer students writing support, and foster “good writing practice” across all disciplines.

Santanu's reply was suitably succinct.
Sure.

After that, only matters of procedure and paperwork remained.

I handed in a request for a sabbatical from my job. Which was rejected.

“There's something called the Internet,” said Nithi. “You can work from home.”

And then the longest plane ride, a move, timeless and suspended.

On most evenings, Santanu and I met at a bar across the road from where he worked, close to an old Faber & Faber building where, I learned, T. S. Eliot had once been an editor. From 1925 to 1965. If the bar had a name, I don't remember it. Run by a student union, it was a Spartan place, of white melamine counters and silver-grey metallic tables. A standing blackboard announced the day's special offers—jugs of sangria, extended happy hours, Belgian beer fests. Basic, unfussy, dependable. It was, as Hemingway had written, our clean, well-lighted place. Santanu had been a stubbly, longhaired student in perpetual open slippers, slip-sliding down the corridors, clutching a sheaf of papers and folders. He'd changed—neater clothes and smart closed shoes—but didn't seem to have aged, his bony, sculptural face still boyishly unshaven, his hair still at a length that evoked gentle rebellion. As people hinged by the past are bound to do, we often spoke of old acquaintances—life stories bordering on the tragic, and the illuminating. The ones who'd married, had children, had moved away, or remained. The ones missing from memory.
Do you remember…? What happened to…? Did you hear…?
Names were conjured and discarded—apart from one. Nicholas.

On one occasion, we stood outside the notably fancier Marquis, at the end of Marchmont Street, a quiet, unobtrusive road in Bloomsbury. Decked out on the simpler side of art nouveau, with a pale blue and
white façade, and sweeping arches over the door and windows. The awning, striped gaily like a fairground tent, stretched taut and bright over the sidewalk, sheltering a row of empty benches.

We were dressed in dark winter coats and looked like a pair of birds.

“It's a gastro-pub,” said Santanu, “Where the potato wedges are hand-cut and everything's organic.” He didn't sound impressed. Nevertheless, we stopped for a quick drink. Inside, I had the impression of vast amounts of wood, smooth and polished, like the interior of a ship. Scattered with low chairs and tables, while quilted maroon leather couches lined the edges. The lights, low and inviting, cast a rich glow on paneled walls and parquet floors. We headed to the bar, a walnut-topped counter lined with beer pumps standing in a row of shiny golden armor.

“What can I get you?” The young lady behind the counter looked remarkably cheerful for someone who'd had to ask that question a hundred times a day. Her autumn-red hair was twisted into a bun, but some of it had escaped, falling around her face in rebellious wisps. If she wore it open she'd look like a Pre-Raphaelite virgin. (Or, since the artists were Victorians, a lovely penitent prostitute.)

“Pint of Guinness, please.”

I would've preferred whisky, but perhaps it was somewhat early in the day. “I'll have the same…”

We tipped our glasses.

The stout was deliciously cool, drifting into a lingering aftertaste.

I'd grown to enjoy this ruby-rich drink laced with bitter dreams.

Admittedly, one of the less strange libations Santanu had prompted me to try. He was on a self-appointed mission to sample every available ale in the country—and had made me his willing accomplice. Each new one we came across was recorded in a small black notebook.