The Impressionist

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Hari Kunzru was born in 1969 and lives in south-east London. He was an associate editor at
Wired
and was named the
Observer
Young Travel Writer of the Year in 1999. He is a contributing editor of
Mute
magazine and music editor at
Wallpaper. The Impressionist
was the winner of the Betty Trask Prize 2002 and the Pendleton May First Novel Award, and shortlisted for the
Guardian
First Book Award and the Whitbread First Novel Award. Hari Kunzru was named one of
Granta’s
20 Best of Young British Novelists, 2003. This is his first novel.

The Impressionist

HARI KUNZRU

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group
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First published by Hamish Hamilton 2002
Published in Penguin Books 2003
19

Copyright © Hari Kunzru, 2002
All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978-0-14-191025-3

‘Remember, I can change swiftly. It will all be as it was when I first spoke to thee under Zam-Zammah the great gun
–’

‘As a boy in the dress of white men
–
when I first went to the Wonder House. And a second time thou wast a Hindu. What shall the third incarnation be?’

Rudyard Kipling,
Kim

Contents

1. Pran Nath

2. Rukhsana

3. White Boy

4. Pretty Bobby

5. Jonathan Bridgeman

6. Bridgeman, J. P. (Barab.)

7. The Impressionist

Pran Nath

One afternoon, three years after the beginning of the new century, red dust which was once rich mountain soil quivers in the air. It falls on a rider who is making slow progress through the ravines which score the plains south of the mountains, drying his throat, filming his clothes, clogging the pores of his pink perspiring English face.

His name is Ronald Forrester, and dust is his speciality. Or rather, his speciality is fighting dust. In the European club at Simla they never tire of the joke:
Forrester the forester.
Once or twice, he tried to explain it to his Indian subordinates in the department, but they failed to see the humour. They assumed the name came with the job. Forester Sahib. Like Engineer Sahib, or Mr Judge.

Forrester Sahib fights the dust with trees. He has spent seven years up in the mountains, riding around eroded hillsides, planting sheltering belts of saplings, educating his peasants about soil conservation and enforcing ordinances banning logging and unlicensed grazing. Thus he is the first to appreciate the irony of his current situation. Even now, on leave, his work is following him around.

He takes a gulp from a flask of brackish water and strains in the saddle as his horse slips and rights itself, sending stones bouncing down a steep, dry slope. It is late afternoon, so at least the heat is easing off. Above him the sky is smudged by blue-black clouds, pregnant with the monsoon which will break any day. He wills it to come soon.

Forrester came down to this country precisely because it has no trees. Back at his station, sitting on the veranda of the Government Bungalow, he had the perverse idea that treelessness might make for a restful tour. Now he is here he does not like it. This is desolate country. Even the shooting is desultory. Save for the villagers’ sparse crops, painstakingly watered by a network of dykes and canals, the only plants are tufts of sharp yellow grass and stunted thorn bushes. Amid all this desiccation he feels uncomfortable, dislocated.

As the sun heats up his tent in the mornings, Forrester has accelerated military-march-time dreams. Dreams of trees. Regiments of deodars, striding up hill and down dale like coniferous redcoats. Neem, sal and rosewood. Banyans that spawn roots like tentacles, black foliage blotting out the blue of the sky. Even English trees make an appearance, trees he has not seen for years. Oddly shaped oaks and drooping willows mutate in lock-step as he tosses and turns. The dreams eject him sweating and unrested, irritated that his forests have been twisted into something agitated, silly. A sideshow. A musical comedy of trees. Before he has had time to shave, red rivulets of sweat and dust will be running off his forehead. He has, he knows, only himself to blame. Everyone said it was a stupid time of year to come south.

If asked, Forrester would find it difficult to say what he is doing here. Perhaps he came out of perversity, because it is the season when everyone else travels north to the cool of the hills. He has spent three weeks riding around, looking for something. He is not sure what. Something to fill a gap. Until recently, his life in the hills had seemed enough. Lonely, certainly. Unlike some, Forrester talks to his staff, and is genuinely interested in the details of their lives. But differences of race are hard to overcome, and even at the university he was never the social type. There was always a distance.

More conventional men would have identified the gap as woman-shaped, and spent their leave wife-hunting at tea parties and polo matches in Simla. Instead Forrester, difficult, taciturn, decided to see what life was like without trees. He has found he does not care for it. This is progress, of a sort. To Forrester, the trick of living lies principally in sorting out what one likes from what one does not. His difficulty is that he has always found so little to put on the plus side of the balance sheet. And so he rides through the ravines, a khaki-clad vacancy, dreaming of trees and waiting for something, anything, to fill him up.

That something is no more than a mile off as the crow flies, though with the undulations of the dirt track, the distance is probably doubled. As the sun sinks lower, Forrester makes out a glint of light on metal and a flash of pink against the dun-coloured earth. He halts and watches, feeling his jaw become inexplicably tight, stiffening in the saddle like a cavalryman on parade. He has seen no one for the last day and a half. Gradually he discerns a party of men, Rajput villagers by the looks of them, leading camels and escorting a curtained palanquin, bumpily carried at shoulder height by four of their number.

By the time the party is within hailing distance, the sun has dipped almost to the horizon. Bands of angry red show against a wall of thick grey cloud. Forrester waits, his horse stamping its hoofs on one bank of a dried-up stream bed. The palanquin-bearers stop a little way off and put down their load. Heads swathed in enormous pink turbans, moustaches teased out to extravagant length, they appraise the sweating Englishman like buyers eyeing up a bullock. Eight sets of black eyes, curious and impassive. Forrester’s hand flutters involuntarily up to his neck.

From the rear pops up a lean middle-aged man, clad in a dhoti and a grubby white shirt, a black umbrella under his arm. He looks like a railway clerk or a personal tutor, his appearance strange and jarring against the waste land. He is clearly in charge, and just as clearly irked that his servants have not waited for instructions to halt. Shouldering his way forward, he salaams Forrester, who touches the brim of his topi in response. Forrester is about to speak to him in Hindi, when the man salutes him in English.