The Dwellers

The wall of blue was finished for the day.

Justin, with blue eyes and the will of a monk, stood still, inspecting the wall. A diligent monk: in his stoop he seemed to emulate his great grandfathers – the generation of snow leopard hunters that prowled in the hills of his deep distant personal past, a past he had never been privy to. He now travelled the world trying to acquire different histories, making them his own. It was so much more interesting to have invented a maternal lineage from the Sahyadris with perhaps an ancestry of hunters, village chiefs and mountain climbers.

Justin painted. He painted chipping walls and rusted windows and whitewashed stained surfaces and poster-plastered pavement walls and advertisement glue and betel leaf stains, a shade of rare red to his eyes. He liked touching the cool red oxide plinths of the small house shrines with their fragile-bodied, crystal-eyed priests in the sleepy nooks of Madgaon and Ponda.

Fisherwomen screamed out loud after this fair sky eyed boy, ‘O Justyin! Khain vattha re! Maatsche hanga yo re’ as he walked through the market on his way to work. By night he sat by his table, ruminating on the thesis he hoped to submit by the following fall. Everything was very quiet about him, like the unnatural calmness that besieges a man after returning from war.

*

Lisbon House, the house Justin had just finished colouring, reverberated with memories and traces of outsiders, guests and visitors. The silent trees in the backyard overlooked a deep forgotten well. The sunken grinding stone next to it always held some rainwater, where moss and green fern watched the sentient trees every evening. The house danced to the glimmering light that teased its doors on autumn evenings.

Somebody knocked. Justin opened the door to find a short, warmly chubby woman in her sixties, dressed in a nightgown with a towel across her shoulder. She was standing two steps below with a casserole in her hands. In the casserole was cold brown porridge that wobbled and glistened like restless jellyfish in the sifting sunlight. Swaying back and forth with the wobbling porridge, she couldn’t but help blushing at this tall fair figure at the door. The itch on his nose had made the skin around it turn red.

‘Ah, are you new here? Is Miss Aurora Counto home? I thought I’ll give her some satthva I made this morning. My grandchildren were supposed to visit but never turned up so there is so much leftover. I recently moved into the yellow house next street.’ ‘Oh, I see. Sorry I don’t know about Miss Aurora. I’m only here to paint this house. She must have left the week before I was asked to come in. But I don’t mind having some!’

‘Well, of course of course, you keep it. I’ll come and take the dabba later. Hmm, so she is getting the house painted, haan,’ she said, peeking in. ‘Which country you are from?’

‘I’m from Canada’, he replied.

Canada – she imagined the land of all white, all snow, lit green with the Borealis light. Nodding appreciatively, she turned to go. Justin stood at the gate watching her stooped figure recede with a delicate wobble just like the porridge in his hand. Perhaps the porridge and the blob of grey emulsion on his fingertips tasted the same – he resisted, yet again, the edgy craving for the paint that he inhaled day and night.

Perhaps Carla’s tears also tasted the same as the last time he saw her cry in the porch of her summerhouse on a windy autumn afternoon. He had developed a sharp disgust for afternoons since then. They felt incomplete, like unresolved sentences trembling, uneasy and tinged with sad impossibility. Evenings came and everything turned possible. Nights brought with them the promise of tomorrow’s possibility. And in the mornings the possibility of the day lay ahead. But afternoons, they were like a middle child, an uncertain adolescent, troubled and difficult. Here in Goa, the whole town went into deep slumber, to tide over this discomfort and wake up to a cool fluid dusk. For Justin, dusk was the time of new thoughts, and walks. Long walks, mostly alone, sometimes with the small spectacled chubby priest of one of the house shrines around Lisbon House.

*

Carla’s fallen arches always acted up at moments of flight. They needed soft cushioning. And the Saturday afternoon was not helping her in any way. The arches of her soles kept falling and failing. It was a childhood condition for which doctors prescribed ugly shoes. Sometimes she would try to stretch long, up on her toes, and imagine she had left the floor. She adored her French-Moroccan cousin sister, her only sibling in her tiny modern family – not an intimate adoration but one that grows from a happy distance, knowing very well that the truth and quality of distortion that comes with this happy distance, is what would sustain the adoration life-long. They exchanged letters but never called.

Not many people would appreciate Carla’s affection for this distance. Let alone, enjoy it. Justin saw things more simply and he never understood the syntax of Carla’s distance. She seemed to live in constant elusion. She never would look him in the eye. The infinite blackness of her pupils disturbed the clear watery-eyed Justin. Then when he had to leave for India, the dark well of her eyes gushed like a melting glacier. But he would not lean over and kiss goodbye.

Rishikesh reminded him of Carla, tucked away on the banks of the Ganges with its rustling prayer flags whistling through the early morning breeze. Carla and her slightly hazel-honey hair, her indecisive calmness, and her frazzled morning eyes when she sat in the cold winter sun catching a few extra minutes of sleep with her morning tea.

Then came the afternoons and the cold feet. Her feet would turn cold and detached as if they had had enough of her and gone for a walk by themselves. Toes like the bars of a piano that couldn’t keep up with a world moving too fast for her. She would wiggle wiggle. No luck. Frozen toes had to wait till the blood cells decided to return to them. Perhaps her heart was aging; a heart made of slightly hesitant tissue, lazy valves and arteries full of questions. It would take more than mere necessity to make her heart pump all that warmth down into her toes. Sometimes, loving helped, sometimes, woollen mittens. Her troubled eyes looked reticent at all times. Yet they gleamed, even, in full ebb.

‘Why do you have to be everybody’s secret keeper?’ were her last words to Justin, on the very same porch. That evening, Justin flew out of her map.

*

The bus ride to Bombay felt shorter than expected. Justin stepped out, eager to take the city in with all its might. But his nostrils could barely inhale the stifling blanket of humid air he found himself in. The coast would be a kind host to our blue-eyed painter. His grey sponge roller stuck out of his backpack and peeked at the new surroundings, colouring the surfaces it watched.

He imagined he heard the scraping and hissing of other fellow painters wafting from every surface of every building – old, fragile and wrinkled buildings taped on their sides, dripping with salt water held up through their failing cracks with M-seal and plaster.

In one such apartment somewhere in Mulund, Aurora now lived. Aurora, who had gone into seclusion ever since a television arrived in her living room.

She spent her evenings by her rusting grilled window, gazing into the dark crevices of the opposite building wall, imagining silhouettes of sniper men waiting to shoot from the terrace tops into tunnelling futures. Each window, each grill gridlocking four square inches of Bombay’s time within it. The flaking chips and lime off Bombay’s walls curdled thick into a vast enormous falooda in her cup combined with surfaces, skins and sheeting, blue tarpaulins, flex, latex, spandex and the lycra swimsuit hanging unused and still new in the Godrej almirah in Aurora’s house.

*

On summer nights when Justin was stooped over a Chemistry textbook at his table he would hear the playground outside squealing with collective laughter, as if the laughter club members from the morning had woken up a little too early for their laughter rounds. It was a bunch of college graduates from the Pilani campus who would gather around the large gable wall of an empty three storied house and project films on it. Once they projected Bustor Keaton’s The General: train wrecks, chases and mime policemen. Justin took a break and watched the film for some time from his window. The grainy lines of the projection and the peeling plaster of the walls merged into a comfortable tapestry design. There was one particular chipped plaster patch shaped like a hammer that seemed to find itself perfectly on top of the policemen’s head. Coincidences gave Justin the goose bumps. He could never imagine how two events could ever match or intersect, so when they did, he would savour the happening. Like wiping away a small patch of frost on glass for that little moment of clarity, of total possibility and beauty, that childlike thrill of recognising perfect symmetry. Carla and Justin together were an image of asymmetry, their togetherness was childlike.

Somewhere along the way, the image had reached symmetry. Like two sides of a number line meeting at zero. Justin had been suddenly aware of this while walking back from a late-night evening at a friend’s house. The street was calm, yellow, lilting in a nippy summer breeze and they could hear their feet brushing clumsily against pavement, kicking a stray piece of stone here and there, in silent synchrony.

After that night’s walk, something changed. Carla’s dial could not stay at the zero mark for too long, she was slippery, eely – the needle on her dial moved. Justin’s gravity was stronger, his sense of place and balance had fuller certainty. He was someone who valued and wagered his faith on the thin line by which people’s lives existed; he was only too aware of the tiny bit of ugly force that would push one off this line, and the equal amount of joy that would keep one on it. Slowly, the ends of their tapestry, once with a whole body, came undone and the image disintegrated into loose threads of colour.

Justin collected histories, one could say, drifting from one experience to another with a stern but happy heart, but none would ever know that; he kept no record of this history-collecting hobby. The only traces he left behind were the painted walls, the lime flakes and the dried flat brushes with stiffened paint. The paint buckets would be left half open, half empty: the musk melon paint inside turned helplessly viscous and heavy as days passed, the paint on the walls stared wide-eyed hour after hour, tracing within them the shadow of the aging mosque from the across the flyover. As the afternoon lethargically entered the crusted grills of Aurora’s window and rested on her sweating lumpy arms, the scrap-station from the adjacent road noisily unloaded the remains of an ancient Premier Padmini. The little red light from the tower station that pinned the frame of her window vanished in a rising smog.

*

The things that remain modestly regular remain ominously bothersome. Like a small bit of chipped nail, that one must sculpt off from the wholeness of the body or the curry leaves and fried sesame seeds popping out of hot oil in the frying pan onto singed skin, already pocked with marks from several meal cooking ordeals. Seasoning dal was Aurora’s most cherished part of cooking. The oil, the simmer, the nostril-teasing waft of curry leaves and the chemical flash in the blackened aluminium ladle, everything gave Aurora the euphoria of witch-crafting a concoction lethal enough to burn down her entire apartment into a molten lump of decayed concrete.

Aurora had felt sinfully attracted to the purple-lipped witch in the Disney cartoon film – the one who stole the pretty mermaid’s voice. She had spent many lazy Saturday afternoons with her niece watching this cartoon on VCR, back in her Lisbon house. The television set would look miniscule in front of the large gable wall against which it sat plopped rather hurriedly. There it stayed alone, and important on top of a carton box full of old copies of Filmfare and textbooks of history in Portuguese. The overlapping faces of her niece and her, and the cartoon faces on the screen in the afternoon glare were now her only clear memories of their time together. She seemed to almost forget where this niece was now – ah yes, doing a management degree in some foreign land.

When the newspapers carried the news of Wikileaks, Aurora patted herself for her long-standing disinterest in this regard – she ran no risks of leakages – she refused any sort of knowing to enter into her. She might as well have been a cow munching plastic by the roadside; she did not have any ambition to be otherwise. Aurora did not entirely lack curiosity – it was just rather skewed. She was curious about the pigs in her neighbourhood. On her list of curiosities, men came last. She always felt she was born with enough knowledge about how they operated, almost like a machine manual. She never wanted to know anymore. She wished men would wear lipstick and skirts more often, her scrapbook used to be filled with cutouts of the bagpiper men from the Whisky cartons in her backyard. The closest in real life was a man in a lungi but they were rare in the city.

Her first and only attachment was with a pen pal, long years ago, who, in her imagination, wore a chequered lungi all the time. They only wrote to each other, and when finally a photograph arrived, she stopped writing altogether.

The pigs were napping today.

Time for a shower. The ceiling of Aurora’s bathroom was rather low. You could raise your hand and touch it and you did not have to be tall at all. The white tiles had stains of age and metal. The little sink with a metal rimmed soap dispenser with soap that smelt of almonds and a hint of cashew reminded her of Goa. Lisbon House had always smelt of almonds and cashew. There used to be a fish shaped soap hanging by a nylon rope. Then a nephew had replaced it with this dispenser. The soap dispenser looked like a nun from St. Mary’s school in orange the shade of cream on biscuits.

Smelling of fresh almonds now, Aurora stretched out on her bed and dreamed of the young boy in the newspaper who had scored a century in just sixty balls at the local underage cricket tournament. Maybe she should invite him over for some pudding with a hint of cashew and kishmish. Carla loved the word kishmish. She had read it in an Indian cookbook at her friend’s place. ‘There is no word in my dictionary for kishmish,’ she had thought. Only sounds and colours, nameless and strong, like a chromatic scale gone wrong. The three stars on her left arm, moles from a constellation were slowly sliding off as her aging skin grew supple and rippled.

*

Justin rang the bell of 35 Pandurang Nagar. He stood for fifteen minutes staring at the lamination sheet peeling off the rim of the door near the lock – no answer. Then he remembered he had to pick up the key from the neighbour. The house was empty as expected.

The painting job this time was not a big one. A small two room apartment in suburban Kanjurmarg. It had once belonged to Aurora and later, to a relative of hers. Now most of her relatives lived abroad. The house was empty, marked by the people passing through. There were scribbles in ball point pen on the walls from a toddler who was most probably a full-grown man or woman somewhere. The poster in the bedroom had peeled off, with the patch of autograph vehemently stuck onto the plaster. The bathroom door carried a chipped patch of paint that resembled a dog looking back at Justin with a blank cold stare. Standing by the window he recalled the image of Clara frantically scrubbing the wine stains off the wooden floor of her house. The stains had refused to go – they had ended up with more laughter, more love and more wine.

Justin decided to delay the paintwork by a day. Putting his tools aside, he took out his mobile phone and clicked pictures of all the marks in the house. The weeping wall plaster, the cracks in the beams, the hanging tie on the grill, the old purse on the hook in the bedroom, the bleached patch on the floor. The crayon scribble next to the switchboard. But he forgot to take a picture of the dog on the door, a dog he would never really forget in the years to come.

Near the switchboard of the kitchen he found a mysterious phone number. Later that night, the number reappeared in his sleep, and he decided to call it the next day.

*

Carla would be travelling to her new-born niece by now, thought Justin as he dialled the number he had found in the apartment. At the other end of the call was the faint hint of a barking dog and a pressure cooker whistle. Aurora’s cracked voice answered. It appeared to peel off just like the gable wall of Lisbon House. Picture Aurora sleeping amidst barbed wire gardens, drowsy lions and weeping willows. The legs of the dining table were rusty with a layer of settled dust.

‘Hello?’

‘Yes?’

‘Yes?’

‘I’m the painter. Justin. Here to paint the apartment in Kanjurmarg.’

‘oh hoy, great. Paint it nicely, haan. No purple and red colours. Goa must be hot no?.’

‘Yes but not as sticky as Bombay. I was wondering if…’

‘You are from here? or not? You have a strange accent!’

‘um … yes, I’m from Canada originally. Cannot help the accent, I’m afraid.’

‘From Canada! Arey wah. Welcome to India. You must try gulab jamuns. You won’t get them in Canada.’

‘Sure, uh, thanks, ok I will get to work then.’

‘Wait … why…’

He hurriedly cut the call, despite himself. He couldn’t understand why he had suddenly felt uncontrollably shy. The call had not at all been awkward or uneasy but seemed devoid of tone or history. What was the point of this conversation he had just had besides the fact that it sated his curiosity about an anonymous number found in an unknown apartment. Justin formed a random image of Aurora in his mind, which could be just one in a million images that would turn up if he had Googled her name.

Aurora felt slightly faint in her heart; she had been mentally transported for a moment into the living room of Lisbon House. She had left the living room long years ago with the anger of volcanoes surging up from her. The slammed door had caused a patch of cream plaster to crumble from the ceiling edge. The patch was plastered over clean by Justin now. He had rescued the door-slam from eternal hell in an imaginary black hole. Aurora’s exit had been reconciled at Lisbon House.

*

Aurora and Carla were aging, slowly inevitably and in strange synchronicity, lodged in their ways of life in different places; only Justin grew younger by the day with the steadiness of a monk. His paint was his chant, his meditations were the walls of all those anonymous homes he would never inhabit. With this house, it was different, there was incessant disturbance from these silent walls that Justin wished to listen to. He woke up the next day to realise that he had been painting incessantly in his sleep again. The real walls stood there bare and exposed. The doodle on the door of the bathroom stared back at him, fountain-pen ink pressed and crushed against plaster – it must have been drawn on a summer visit. Perhaps she had been angry, perhaps she had been sad – whoever had penned that ink splutter.

Justin thought of secret societies and their secret gardens full of hurtful cacti with beautiful flowers, red and yellow, that bloom full and circular. In their fullness they compelled onlookers to stop, see and describe them to friends as they ate their jacket potatoes and admired the rain. The nib, the full flowers, the rain-washed pavement and the wellness of it all, none touched yet everything bleeding. Here secrets were only on display, not for sale.

*

The bathroom is spacious, vacant, beige in the afterglow from the evening light outside the grilled window. The extra-long bathtub sits like a fossil waiting to be revived. Shikakai shampoo by the side and the damp earthy smell of hair, lingering in its dampness. The sink stands diagonally against the shower and plastic green frames the mirror that once watched the same daily bathers. Bathers, who would suddenly turn around and find a friendly face from the past alongside theirs in the mirror. Wet, vulnerable and alone, the moment would astonish the bathers every single time.

On rainy afternoons, the clouds outside huddle curiously outside the grilled rectangular window to peer in and get a glimpse in the mirror. Rain splashes and splutters against the rosewood-varnished iron grill, reminders of another morning and the tingling presence of the world outside. Her nails were pistachio green the day Justin’s eyes welled up, ready to leave the porch that Carla was sitting perched on, picking at her chin and scratching her ear. Justin’s blue eyes and Carla’s pistachio green nails. Nothing had seemed more right. Nothing had seemed more wrong.

When the lights went out in the neighbours’ windows, Carla would sit on her porch and stare into the dark, following the gleaming floaters in her eyes. To make this living bearable was not an option. To live actively in truth, that she had to do. And so she continued to sit on the porch and did … nothing much.

Carla sits on the window ledge like a character whose author has been stuck in a stupor, refusing to move. Sitting by the porch in a hotel room up high in the buzzing night of Osaka, on the window ledge of a chaotic chawl in the idol-makers lane in Kumartuli, on the edge of a parapet wall outside the temple in Mahalasa, on the bay window of a silent room, grey and yellow in London. Yellow. Yes, yellow is the colour for this grey she is stuck in. She must have marigolds in her milkshake. October in Bombay resounds with yellow and orange in this the festive time of the year.

Justin, meanwhile, observed the pigeons that fluttered on the parapet of the far-away building, remembering the ear-piercing drums of Mahalasa temple and its light tower. Pigeon pairs are everywhere. Turning, twisting their necks and beaks, trying to reach home – or make one. Their spread-out wings hover endearingly across each other, doing a dance for the oncoming October, and mocking the bath-towel helplessly hanging from the balcony.

‘You must always jump on ideas, flutter around them,’ Aurora’s grandmother would say as she sat weaving the plastic basket for her fish market visits. The pigs by the train station were wet, wet and wasted in the pipeline that burst open last morning.

*

Justin seemed incapable of yelling, but Bombay proved this wrong. Like the clay figurines of Kumartuli, half-baked, half-made and unmade, that held within them all those unchained muffled screams of silent men who make them, Justin found his voice losing its inhibitory knots, getting untangled and loosening up in this city, as if he was finally voicing a letter of gratitude to the world that he was present in. He spoke to as many strangers as he could. He practised speech and its music and listened to the songs in the rhythm of the railway track.

The tracks of the pigs amidst the yellow marigolds transformed into large sandal marks as Aurora now stumbled through the slushy marketplace bypassing the Bombay duck in baskets, the marigolds, and the browning cherries in her hunt for a plastic flower garland that she would tie across her door. That same evening, the pipeline burst and flooded the area and the wet pigs delivered tender pink piglets.

October came and Carla finally got up from the window ledge. Her feet, all of size six, landed unevenly onto the floor with crooked toes and gleamed with a hint of an infant-pink flesh around the soles, just like the hint of grey that was developing around Justin’s irises.

*

The day after the phone-call, Justin and Aurora meet. The Bombay humidity is weighing in heavy on their breathing. Nothing much is said. She pays him. They have some tea. She offers him biscuits but he refuses. Aurora retires for her afternoon nap on the couch. Justin heads back to finish the final two days of painting in the little apartment, now shining like a newly shaven boy ready for the first day of college.