Chapter 15: Nandini — 2003

I met Nandini Wagle on a Tuesday in November, because she moved into the house next door and because her moving van blocked my driveway and because the argument about the driveway was the beginning of everything.

I was forty-three. Roshni was thirteen. I had been divorced for eight years, during which I had lived in three flats, produced four exhibitions of paintings that had been reviewed with the particular generosity that Pune's art world reserved for local artists who were talented but not famous ("Oberoi's work is accomplished, if somewhat provincial" — Pune Mirror, 2001), and had settled into the particular rhythm of a middle-aged divorced man who had made peace with solitude and who regarded it, with the defensive posture of a person who had no choice, as a lifestyle rather than a condition.

The house in Koregaon Park was the first real thing I'd owned. Bought with the proceeds of a painting — a large canvas, the Golden Temple at dawn, the painting I'd been trying to make since I was eighteen and that had, after twenty-five years of failed attempts, finally achieved something close to what I'd been reaching for. Not the thing itself — the light was still uncapturable — but the reaching. The almost-touching. The painting had sold to a collector in Mumbai for a sum that I will not disclose because disclosing the price of art is vulgar and because the sum, while significant enough to buy a small house in Koregaon Park, was not significant enough to make me comfortable discussing money.

The house was small — two bedrooms, a kitchen, a bathroom, a garden that was optimistic in its proportions (the estate agent had called it "intimate," which is the real estate word for "tiny"), and a studio that I had built in the back by converting the garage, because I no longer owned a car and because the garage had north-facing windows and north light was, I had learned, the painter's most reliable collaborator.

Nandini's moving van arrived at seven in the morning. The van was — I use this word carefully — enormous. The kind of van that suggested either a household of abundant possessions or a woman who was unwilling to leave anything behind, and in Nandini's case, it was both. The van blocked my driveway. My driveway was narrow — wide enough for a scooter, which was my only vehicle — and the van's presence converted my narrow driveway from "functional" to "decorative."

I went out to negotiate. The morning was cool — November in Pune, the post-monsoon clarity that made the air feel washed, the particular freshness of a city that had survived the rains and was now enjoying the reprieve. I was wearing what I wore every morning: paint-stained kurta, old chappals, the particular uniform of a man who worked with colours and who had long since stopped caring about the colours he wore.

Nandini was directing the movers. She stood in the driveway — her driveway, which was adjacent to mine, separated by the garden wall that would later become the threshold between our houses and our lives — and she was pointing at boxes with the particular authority of a woman who had organized things for a living and who was not going to stop organizing simply because the things being organized were her own possessions rather than someone else's.

"Your van is blocking my driveway," I said.

She turned. The first thing I noticed was — I am a painter; I notice colour first, form second, everything else third — her hair. Silver. Not grey — grey is the colour of age surrendering to entropy. Silver is the colour of age deciding that entropy can go to hell. Nandini's hair was silver the way the moon is silver: deliberately, luminously, with the particular radiance of a thing that has chosen its colour and is not going to apologize for it.

"Your driveway is narrow," she said. "It was narrow before my van arrived. My van has merely revealed a pre-existing condition."

"The pre-existing condition was manageable before your van made it unmanageable."

"Then we agree that the problem is not my van but the inadequacy of your driveway. I suggest you widen your driveway. Problem solved." She turned back to the movers. "That box — the one marked 'kitchen' — goes in the kitchen. I realize this is an advanced concept, but I have faith in your ability to match labels to rooms."

I should have been offended. I was not offended. I was — and I recognized this with the particular alarm of a man who had sworn off the complications of attraction and who was now being ambushed by them at seven in the morning in a paint-stained kurta — charmed. Not by the rudeness. By the precision of the rudeness. The way she deployed it — not as aggression but as efficiency, the words sharp not because she wanted to cut but because sharp words were faster than polite ones and she had boxes to unpack.

"I'm Farhan," I said. "Your neighbour. Apparently."

"Nandini. Your new neighbour. Unfortunately." She smiled. The smile was — and here I must resist the temptation to compare it to Esha's smile or Elina's smile, because Nandini's smile was not a comparison but a thing in itself — warm. Genuinely warm. The smile of a woman who was rude by default and kind by choice, who used sharpness as armour and warmth as the thing the armour protected.

"Tea?" she offered. "I've found the kettle. I haven't found the cups, but I have a saucepan. Saucepan chai is the best chai. My grandmother swore by it."

"Your grandmother was right."

We drank chai from a saucepan, standing in her half-unpacked kitchen, surrounded by boxes labelled in handwriting that was — I noticed this, because I notice handwriting the way other people notice faces — neat, small, controlled. The handwriting of a woman who organized her life the way she organized her boxes: with labels and systems and the particular discipline of a person who had learned, through experience, that chaos was not a creative force but a destructive one, and that the only way to survive it was to impose order.

I learned, over the following weeks and months, the story that the boxes contained.

Nandini Wagle, née Karve. Fifty-one years old. Born in Kolhapur. Raised in Pune. Married at twenty-three to Sudhir Wagle, a civil engineer who had been — by all accounts, including Nandini's, which were honest to the point of discomfort — "a good man who was bad at being married." Sudhir had died in 1999, of a heart attack, at the age of fifty, on a construction site in Nashik, which was — Nandini said this with the particular flatness of a person who had processed grief so thoroughly that it had become data rather than emotion — "the only place he was truly happy, so at least he died in his office."

One son: Aditya, twenty-five, software engineer, living in Bangalore, calling weekly, visiting annually, the particular arrangement of an Indian son who loved his mother and who expressed that love through distance and phone calls and the annual visit that was simultaneously anticipated and dreaded by both parties.

One career: school principal. Twenty-eight years at the same school — Wisdom International, a mid-range English-medium school in Kothrud that Nandini had joined as a teacher and had risen to principal through the particular combination of competence, patience, and the willingness to deal with parents who believed that their children were geniuses and that any evidence to the contrary was the school's fault.

She had retired. The house in Koregaon Park was the retirement plan — a new house, a new neighbourhood, a new chapter in a life that had been structured around school timetables and parent-teacher meetings and the particular rhythm of an institution and that now, in the absence of the institution, needed a new rhythm.

"I don't know what to do with myself," she told me, a month after moving in, sitting on my studio floor — she had started visiting the studio, initially to complain about the turpentine smell ("Your studio smells like a hospital for paintbrushes") and then to watch me paint, and then to stay, the visits becoming routine with the particular inevitability of two people who were both alone and both unwilling to admit that they wanted not to be. "I've spent twenty-eight years knowing exactly what to do every minute. Now I have minutes and no instructions. It's terrifying."

"Paint," I said.

"I can't paint."

"Everyone can paint. Painting is not a skill. It's a permission. You give yourself permission to put colour on a surface and see what happens."

"What if what happens is terrible?"

"Then you've made a terrible painting. Which is better than making no painting."

She picked up a brush. I gave her a canvas — a small one, the kind I used for studies, the kind that cost nothing and therefore carried no pressure. She looked at the canvas with the expression of a woman who had spent twenty-eight years telling children what to do and who was now being told to do something and finding the reversal disorienting.

She painted. The painting was — objectively — not good. She painted a flower. The flower looked like a flower the way that a cloud sometimes looks like a rabbit: if you squinted, if you were generous, if you were willing to meet the image halfway. The petals were lopsided. The stem was crooked. The colour was — and this surprised me — bold. Not timid. Not the pale, hesitant colours of a beginner who was afraid of making mistakes. Nandini had used red. A deep, full-throated red. The red of a woman who had been told to put colour on a surface and who had decided, on her first attempt, that the colour would be the loudest one available.

"It's terrible," she said, studying it.

"The flower is terrible. The colour is magnificent."

"You're being kind."

"I'm being accurate. The composition is wrong, the proportions are wrong, and the technique is nonexistent. But the colour — the colour tells me everything about you. You chose red. Not blue, not green, not the safe colours. Red. The colour of courage and blood and things that refuse to be ignored."

She looked at me. The look was — and I was forty-three, and I had been looked at by women before, and I knew the difference between a look and a Look — a Look. Capital L. The kind that said: I see you seeing me, and what I see is someone who sees me accurately, and being seen accurately is the most intimate thing that one person can do to another.

"Can I come back tomorrow?" she said.

"The studio is always open."

"I meant: can I come back to you."

"The studio is always open."

She came back. Every day. For the next eighteen years and counting. Not to the studio — to me. And I to her. Through the garden gate, across the three metres that separated our houses, through the particular architecture that we would build together: close enough to love, far enough for solitude, the wall low enough to talk over and high enough to maintain the fiction of separate lives.

The fiction was — we both knew — a fiction. But it was our fiction. And the choosing of it — the deliberate, conscious choosing of a way to love that was not marriage but was not less than marriage, that was two houses and one garden and a gate that was never locked — was the most honest thing either of us had ever done in a relationship.

We chose each other. Every day. Not because a certificate required it. Not because a ceremony had sanctified it. But because the choosing was the thing. The daily, deliberate, unconstrained choosing. The love that existed not because it had to but because it wanted to.

Nandini painting in my studio. The red flower on the wall — terrible, magnificent, the first of hundreds. The dogs that would come later — Choti first, then Sheroo and Bholu, the family that we built not from obligation but from the particular joy of two people who had been alone and who had found, in each other, not the answer but the better question.

The better question was not: "Will this last?" The better question was: "Is this worth choosing today?"

The answer, every day, was yes.