The Impressionist (6 page)

This is how Amar Nath chooses to face his illness. For it is real: this particular hypochondriac is facing the skull-necklaced embodiment of his worst fears. He picks at his chest, imagining in his increasingly disordered mind that he can pluck flu organisms off his body like mites. He sweats and the walls shimmer and the fever vibrates his body like a hammer hitting a metal string.

Distantly he hears screaming, the sound of a bedstead being turned over. His son’s voice, Anjali’s voice, cursing each other roundly. He turns his head, trying to make out what they are saying to each other. But it comes from the other side of the world. In his bath of onions, Pandit Amar Nath Razdan is pleading the ultimate case.

Gita runs crying down the stairs to the courtyard, as her mother (personifying fate, doom, justice, karma and all manner of other vast impersonal forces given to crushing ant-like mortals underfoot) jabs Pran in the kidneys with a monkey stick. He doubles up, and she brings her weapon smartly down on his knees and elbow joints, each well-aimed blow producing sudden and excruciating pain.

Anjali’s victory is swift and total. Hampered by his pyjamas, which are twisted around his ankles, Pran is unable to resist. As he tries to crawl underneath the protective frame of the charpai, she sprinkles his squirming body with a few choice curses, pincers his ear between fingers made vice-like by years of pea-shelling and okra-chopping, and drags him off to see his father.

She raps on the door. An ominous squelching sound comes from the other side.

‘Master? Master, are you there?’

There is no response. Impatiently, she tries the catch, and the door swings open into an onion stench of such ferocity that her eyes begin to stream. Pandit Razdan is in the thirtieth hour of his bath. Now he is definitely, conclusively ill, sweating and shivering like a man having a fit. His head protrudes over the white swaddling like that of a premature baby, his eyes red-raw, his skin flushed and unpleasantly puckered. He looks as if he has been pickled, which is more or less the case.

‘I am dying,’ he says in a tiny voice.

‘Maybe so,’ raps Anjali brutally, gathering the palla of her sari over her face. ‘However, I think I know the reason.’ Pandit Razdan’s expression becomes urgent, and he wags his head, indicating that she should continue. Filled with the gravity of the moment, she raises a hand in the direction of the heavens. ‘This household,’ she intones, ‘is under a curse.’

The master succumbs to a violent fit of coughing.

How does one tell a sick man that his only son, the son he has cherished for fifteen long years, is in fact the bastard child of a casteless, filth-eating, left-and-right-hand-confusing Englishman? The gifts of tact and sensitivity are given to very few, and Anjali is not among the blessed. She spares nothing; no surmise is left unfloated, no nasty insinuation unslithered into the long grass of the master’s mind. She besmirches Amrita’s memory with delicate indirectness, avoiding anything which might tempt the cuckolded husband to defend his dead wife. Then she paints a lurid (though admittedly not too far exaggerated) picture of Pran’s faults, drawing the incontrovertible conclusion that the boy exhibits all the signs of tainted blood.

This would be enough for most people, but Anjali is only beginning. She expounds on the theme of miscegenation, and all its terrible consequences. Impurities, blendings, pollutions, smearings and muckings-up of all kinds are bound to flow from such a blend of blood, which offends against every tenet of orthodox religion. Small wonder the city of Agra is suffering a plague. She, for one, would not be surprised to discover that the entire influenza epidemic, all twenty million global deaths of it, was down to Pran. The boy is bad through and through. Finally she produces her trump card: the battered photograph.
Ronald Forrester, IFS.

‘Now tell me who he looks like.’

Razdan turns the snapshot over in his onion-encrusted hands. Forrester’s sepia face stares back at him. The nose, the fine lines of the mouth. But for the skin it could be an Indian face. The photograph-man seems to smile at him, a distant, water-damaged smile which cuts through his fever like acid etching a metal plate. For the first time since Anjali dragged him into the room, he turns to look at Pran Nath.

The boy is kneeling on the floor, blood flowing from a wound on his temple. Dishevelled and snivelling, he looks faintly revolting. At last Razdan realizes why he avoids him. He always thought it was because of the mother. She would whisper to herself. When he entered a room he would feel he was interrupting. Yet despite his public campaigns for purity, since her death he has made secret visits to the lamplit rooms upstairs in the bazaar. There he tells the women to behave in a certain way, to touch him in places he finds embarrassing to name. The son has always been an unwelcome reminder of the mother who planted that guilty seed in his consciousness, a sign of his enslavement to carnality.

No. It is simpler than that.

With a feeling like drowning, he realizes that the servant-woman is telling the truth. Pran Nath and the photograph are two versions of the same image.
This is not his son.
With that, something snaps. His orderly life scatters like an up-ended wooden tray of letters at a printing press. His breath leaves his body in a drawn-out sigh of disappointment.

‘Father?’ asks Pran Nath plaintively. There is no response.

They do not even wait for the corpse to cool before they throw him out. The servants drag him straight to the front door and sling him into the street.

Pran lies in the dust, smelling the onion-stink on his clothes. A crowd gathers, fascinated by the unprecedented events unfolding before their fortunate eyes. The chowkidar brandishes a lathi and Anjali gives a reprise of her miscegenation speech, adding that the evil boy has, to cap it all, just caused Pandit Razdan’s untimely death. Then the door is slammed shut, the bolt drawing across it with a heavy metallic rasp.

Pran gets up and hammers on the door, the familiar door with its iron studs and hinges, its scuffed blue paint. The crowd scrutinizes him eagerly for signs of Englishness, pointing out to each other the alien features which suddenly seem so obvious.

‘Please!’ he begs. ‘Let me in!’

From the other side, the chowkidar growls at him to clear off.

‘Please! Open up!’ There is no response. ‘My uncle,’ he shouts tremulously, ‘will come and flog you. Then you’ll be sorry.’

To his delight, the bolt scrapes back, and the blue door opens a chink. A hand appears briefly and drops a little sepia square in the dust. Then the door slams shut again. Pran picks up the photograph and carries on pounding with his fists, crying and pleading. In his confusion he turns to the crowd, only to be faced with a ring of people who have no reason to like him. The sweet-seller, the old woman from next door, the man who sells dry goods, the druggist’s boy – all are smiling the same wolfish, unsympathetic smile. He starts to wish he had not played quite so many practical jokes.

Out of the crowd arcs a lump of dung, which hits him, hot and wet, on the back of the neck. As he scrapes it off, another missile splats into his face. He lunges forward, and a gaggle of little boys scatter, howling with mock alarm. The adults laugh indulgently. Then he goes sprawling on to the ground, tripped by an unseen foot.

He spends the afternoon skulking around outside his house, his mind as blank as one of his school notebooks. A string of people knock at the blue door, members of the community who have heard about Pandit Razdan’s tragic death, and have come to pay their respects. They all seem to know about Pran’s disgrace. Though he rushes up to them, begging for help, most will not even make eye contact. One by one they are admitted, the door thudding behind them. He cannot understand it. He is Pran Nath Razdan: the beautiful, the son and heir. It is like a bad dream.

As night falls, stallholders hang oil lamps over their wares and the woodsmoke smell of cooking begins to lace the air. Pran starts to feel hungry and asks for some pakoras. Digging in his pocket, he finds he has no money, and for some reason no one will give him credit, even when he explains that his uncle will soon pay them back. For a while he loiters, hoping someone will take pity on him. No one does. Little by little his empty stomach starts to rumble, an unfamiliar, frightening sensation. He wanders around, his bruised body aching, a reek of dried excrement rising up from his crusted clothes. Standing on the corner under the high mansion wall, he has to flatten himself against it to let a funeral procession go past. A smattering of lamp-carrying mourners follows a bier, carried by half a dozen white-masked men. The corpse, wrapped tightly in cotton strips, is strewn with marigold petals. A couple of subdued and portly priests bustle ahead, obviously eager to finish the job.

‘Ah, it’s the nasty little half-baked bread. Come to beg on my corner?’

The voice is raucous, mocking. Pran looks down to see the old beggar with the withered legs. This man has sat in the same spot for as long as he can remember. His drawn face is grained with dirt, his skin the colour of coal, pocked by some childhood disease. He sits in front of a bowl hollowed out from a piece of orange peel, which contains a couple of small coins. Pran cannot meet his eye. Once, on impulse, he stole the beggar’s coins and ran away. It seemed funny at the time. Now he shuffles about and looks at the floor, and at the pair of grotesquely tapering stumps stuck out accusingly at the world.

‘I recall the time you stole my bowl and dared me to run after you and fetch it.’

Pran makes a non-committal noise in his throat.

‘How I laughed,’ says the beggar.

Pran nods. The beggar seems to want to chat, so he decides to ask the question which has been preying on his mind.

‘You don’t by any chance have some food, do you?’

The beggar stares at him with a look of wonder, and mutters a couple of lines of prayer. Pran takes this to mean he probably does not have food.

‘Well then, what am I supposed to do about eating?’

The beggar laughs so loudly that people in the street turn round to look. He thumps his hand against his thigh and drums his stumps on the floor.

‘He’s hungry!’ he shouts. ‘He’s hungry!’

Passers-by laugh and smile.

‘When my uncle comes –’ Pran starts, but the beggar only laughs harder.

‘What shall I do?’ he asks crossly.

When the beggar finally regains control of himself, he curls his lip into a nasty sneer. ‘Go and eat with your own people. They’ll feed you.’

‘Who are my own people?’

The beggar seems to find this even more funny.

‘You’ll find them at the Telegraph Club. Don’t worry, little half-baked. I’ll tell you what to say.’

The Agra Post and Telegraph Club is not the grandest club in the city. It is a plain Victorian building, a functional box of red brick with a stone portico attached to the front like a snub nose. Inside lingers a smell of fried food which cannot be eradicated, no matter how hard the cleaners scrub and polish. The cleaners scrub and polish hard, even violently, scouring the surfaces, waxing the floors, dusting until their arms ache. It is never good enough. There is still the smell of food fried in ghee, the rich unmistakable smell of India.