Chapter 16: Balli ka Raaz — Present Day

We painted on the beach.

Madan and I, side by side on the rocks at Shanti Shanti, the morning sun low and generous, the Arabian Sea doing its morning performance — the particular display of light on water that the sea produced every day and that no human audience could diminish, because the sea performed for itself and we were merely witnesses.

I had brought supplies from the car — a habit, the painter's equivalent of a doctor carrying a stethoscope: you never knew when you'd need to diagnose a moment in colour. Two canvases, a portable palette, brushes, tubes of paint that had been living in the boot of my car since the last plein air session in Koregaon Park. I set up Madan's canvas beside mine and gave him the basic instruction that I had given Nandini eighteen years ago and that I believed was the only painting instruction anyone needed: "Put colour on the surface. See what happens."

"What if what happens is terrible?"

"Then we'll have matching terrible paintings. I've seen your work. I'm not worried about the competition."

Madan laughed — the real laugh, the belly one — and picked up a brush with the particular enthusiasm of a person who had found, late in life, the thing that made the noise quieter, and who was not going to waste a single morning that could be spent doing it.

He painted the sea. The sea he painted was — as I'd noted the day before — the wrong colour. It was a blue that did not exist in nature, a blue that belonged in a children's book rather than on a seascape, the blue of a person who painted not what he saw but what he imagined, which was — I was beginning to understand — not a failure of technique but a different kind of seeing. Madan saw the world the way he lived in it: brighter, louder, more saturated than reality. His blue was not wrong. It was aspirational.

"Your blue," I said.

"What about my blue?"

"It's — " I paused. Reconsidered. "It's yours. Keep it."

"You were going to say it's wrong."

"I was going to say it's not the sea's blue. But it might be your blue. And your blue is more interesting than the sea's."

He looked at me. The look was — for Madan, whose looks were usually designed to charm or deflect — unguarded. The look of a younger brother who had spent sixty years being assessed by an older brother and who had, for the first time, received an assessment that was not correction but recognition.

"Bhai," he said. "That might be the nicest thing you've ever said to me."

"Don't get used to it. Your perspective is still completely wrong. The horizon is not where you've put it."

"The horizon is wherever I say it is. I'm the painter."

"You're a man with a brush. There's a difference."

We painted. The morning passed. Shantilal brought chai at ten — the real chai, ginger and tulsi, in steel glasses that were warm against the palms and that left the particular ring of condensation on the rock that marked our territory: two brothers, two canvases, two rings of chai on stone.

Balli joined us at eleven. He had been on the phone — the morning call with Paramjeet that was, he explained, non-negotiable: "If I don't call by ten, she calls the police. If I don't call by eleven, she calls my mother. My mother is worse than the police."

He sat on a rock between our easels and watched us paint with the particular patience of a non-painter observing painters — the patience of a person who did not understand the activity but who understood the people and who therefore understood enough.

"How are you feeling?" I asked. The question was loaded — it carried the weight of the cancer diagnosis, the hormone therapy, the hot flashes, the prostate's well-mannered assault on my best friend's body — and Balli received it with the particular grace of a man who understood what was being asked and who chose to answer the surface question rather than the deep one.

"Hot. The hot flashes are — you know what they're like? They're like someone has turned on a heater inside your body and forgotten where the switch is. Paramjeet says I'm finally experiencing what she experienced for eight years during menopause, and that it serves me right for every time I said 'just drink cold water.'"

"Does cold water help?"

"Cold water helps the way a bucket helps a flood. Technically relevant. Practically useless."

We sat. The three of us — the painter, the patient, the disaster — on rocks by the Arabian Sea, at a beach shack called Shanti Shanti, in a state that had once been a four-day road trip in a borrowed Ambassador and was now a ten-hour drive in a car that had air conditioning and working brakes.

"I need to tell you something," Balli said.

"You already told me. Cancer. Prostate. Well-mannered. Hot flashes."

"Not that. Something else." He adjusted his turban — the turban he still wore, forty years after I had removed mine, the turban that he had maintained through every crisis and every decade with the particular fidelity of a man for whom faith was not a choice but a constitution. "Paramjeet and I are — we're not — " He stopped. Started again. The starting and stopping was so unlike Balli — Balli who spoke in complete sentences, Balli who had opinions about lane discipline and parantha priority — that the stammer itself was the message, before the words arrived.

"We're separating," he said. "Not divorcing. Separating. She's moving to Melbourne. To be with Ranjit and his wife. For the grandchild — Simran's baby, the one due in July. She wants to be there. Not for a visit. To live."

The information arrived the way Balli's cancer diagnosis had arrived — as a stone in still water, the splash and then the ripples. But this stone was heavier. The cancer had been a medical fact, processable through numbers and probabilities. This was an emotional fact, and emotional facts were not processable — they were survivable, but survival was not the same as processing.

"Since when?" I said.

"Since the diagnosis. The cancer — it didn't cause it. It revealed it. The way — you know how when you clean a painting, you remove the varnish and you see what's underneath, and sometimes what's underneath is not what you expected?" He looked at the sea. The real sea, not Madan's aspirational blue. "The cancer made us have the conversation that we'd been avoiding for — ten years? Fifteen? The conversation about what we actually wanted. Not what we were supposed to want. Not what Sikh couples who've been married for thirty-five years are expected to want. What we actually wanted."

"And Paramjeet wants Melbourne."

"Paramjeet wants her children. Her grandchildren. The life that happens when you stop being a wife and start being a grandmother. She wants to be there for the milestones — the first words, the first steps, the school plays, all of it. And she can't do that from Amritsar."

"And you?"

"I want Amritsar. I want the shop. I want the gurdwara on Tuesday mornings. I want — " He paused. The pause was the longest I'd ever heard from Balli, a man who processed emotion in motion and who was now sitting still on a rock in Goa with the sea at his feet and his best friend beside him and the particular stillness of a person who was about to say something that he had been carrying alone for too long. "I want to be where I've always been. I want to die where I was born. Not because I'm dying — the doctors say I have years — but because when the time comes, I want it to come in a place that knows me."

"Balli."

"I know. I know how it sounds. But Farhan — I never left. You left. Madan left. Everyone left Amritsar, for good reasons, because the city broke and the breaking drove people out. But I stayed. And the staying was not inertia. It was a choice. The same choice, every day, for sixty years. The choice to be here. In this place. With this faith. In this turban."

I looked at his turban. The particular way he tied it — the precision, the folds, the discipline that his father had instilled and that he had maintained through every decade: the seventies, when turbans were fashionable; the eighties, when turbans were targets; the nineties, when turbans were political; the two thousands, when turbans were — in the West at least — misidentified; the twenty-twenties, when turbans were, finally, simply turbans again.

"She's not angry," Balli said. "We're not angry at each other. This is not a divorce. This is — what do they call it? — an evolution. We evolved in different directions. She evolved toward the children. I evolved toward the place. And the distance between the children and the place is too large for one marriage to span."

"You'll miss her."

"I'll miss her every day. I've already started missing her. Missing is — it's a practice. Like painting. You get better at it. Or you get used to it. I'm not sure there's a difference."

Madan had stopped painting. He was listening — Madan, who never listened, who deflected everything with charm and jokes and the particular armour of a man who treated other people's emotions as weather to be endured rather than experiences to be shared. Madan was listening with the quiet attention of a person who recognized the emotion being described because he had lived it: the missing, the separation, the particular loneliness of a man who loved a woman who was elsewhere.

"Geeta," Madan said. "I miss Geeta like that. Every day. The missing is the first thing in the morning and the last thing at night. Like prayers. Except prayers are supposed to make you feel better and the missing doesn't."

"It doesn't," Balli agreed. "But it keeps the person alive. In you. The missing is — it's a form of loving. You miss because you loved. The missing is the love continuing after the person has left."

The three of us sat on rocks by the sea. Three men, sixty and sixty-one, carrying three different kinds of loss: Balli's negotiated separation, Madan's abandonment, my ancient guilt. Three different shapes of the same thing: the particular loneliness of men who had lived long enough to understand that love and loss were not opposites but partners, two dancers in the same dance, inseparable, the one making the other possible.

"Come to Pune," I said. To both of them. "Both of you. Balli — when Paramjeet goes to Melbourne. Madan — now. Come to Pune. I have a house with a spare room and a studio and three dogs and a woman next door who makes rajma that is better than Amma's, which I will deny saying under oath."

"You're inviting your alcoholic brother and your cancer-patient best friend to move in," Madan said. "That's either generosity or insanity."

"It's family. The distinction is largely theoretical."

Balli smiled. The smile was — like everything about Balli — steady. Not the dramatic smile of a man whose problems had been solved. The measured smile of a man who had been offered something good and who was allowing himself, with the particular caution of a person who had learned that good things could be trusted but should not be taken for granted, to accept it.

"I'll think about it," Balli said.

"That's a yes."

"That's a 'I'll think about it,' which — "

"Which in the Oberoi family means yes but I need to pretend I have agency," Madan finished. "I know. I said the same thing yesterday. We're predictable, bhai. All three of us."

Shantilal brought more chai. We drank it on the rocks, three old friends, the sea doing its performance, the sun climbing, the morning turning from generous to businesslike, and the particular peace of three men who had laid down the heavy things they were carrying and who were sitting, for this one moment, in the lightness.