Chapter 20: Subah ka Rang — Present Day

The morning light came back.

It came the way it always came — through the French windows, hitting the east wall at the angle that turned the white plaster into the colour that was not gold, not amber, not turmeric-yellow, but something between all of these. The colour that existed only in this room, only at this hour, only when the Pune sun was still low enough to be generous rather than punishing.

I uncovered the canvas. The one I'd been working on before Shobha's call, before Goa, before the road trip and the beach and the brother and the diagnosis and the old love coming home. The canvas with its single brushstroke — the cadmium yellow that had been interrupted and that had waited, patient as canvas always was, for the painter to return.

The studio smelled of turpentine and linseed oil and the faintest trace of the chai that Nandini had brought over an hour ago, before she'd left for her morning walk. The chai was cold — I'd forgotten it, as I always forgot it, because the space between intending to drink chai and actually drinking chai was filled with the same things it had always been filled with: mixing colours, adjusting brushes, staring at the canvas with the particular intensity of a man who was about to begin something and wanted to savour the moment before the first brushstroke committed him to a direction.

But today the savoring was different. Today the canvas was not just a canvas. It was a resumption. The painting I had been making before the world interrupted was the painting I was returning to after the interruption, and the returning was — I understood this now, with the particular clarity that sixty-one years of trying and failing and trying again had given me — the point. The painting was not about the morning light. It was about the return to the morning light. The coming-back. The choosing to pick up the brush again after the interruption, however long, however disruptive, however much the interruption had changed the painter.

I loaded the brush. Cadmium yellow. The colour of marigolds that Sheroo and Bholu had destroyed. The colour of temple domes. The colour of the beginning — not the dramatic beginning that stories required, but the quiet beginning that mornings provided: the light arriving, the brush meeting the canvas, the painter meeting the painting.

Sheroo pressed his face against the French windows. Mud-streaked, as always. The hopeful expression, as always. The belief that all activities eventually resulted in biscuits, as always. Behind him, Bholu was rolling in the garden with the particular enthusiasm of a creature who had mastered the art of physical joy. Choti observed from the doorstep, maintaining her dignity and her distance, the Pomeranian who ruled by restraint.

I painted.

Not the Golden Temple at dawn — that painting, the one I'd been chasing since I was eighteen, the painting of the light that was not a colour but an experience, was finished. Hanging in a collector's house in Mumbai. Gone. The reaching had produced a result, and the result had been sold, and the selling was — I had made peace with this — not a betrayal of the reaching but a completion of it. The painting had found its home. The reaching continued, but the reaching was now about other things.

I painted the morning light. This morning's light. The particular, unrepeatable, never-quite-the-same light that came through the French windows of a studio in Koregaon Park on a Thursday in March, when the Pune sun was generous and the dogs were destroying the garden and the chai was getting cold and the world was — despite everything, despite the cancer and the alcoholism and the divorce and the violence and the turban in the drawer and the letters in the tin box and the forty years of reaching — the world was beautiful.

The brush moved. The paint went down. The colour was not timid — Professor Joshi's voice, forty years gone, still in my ear: active colour, Oberoi, active colour. The yellow was yellow. The white was white. The space between them was the space where the painting happened — the negotiation between what was there and what I saw, between the light's reality and my interpretation of it, between the world and the painter's response to the world.

Madan appeared at the studio door. He was carrying two cups of chai — proper chai, the kind that Nandini had taught him to make, saucepan method, grandmother-approved. He was wearing clean clothes — mine, slightly too large, the kurta hanging on his thinner frame like a sail on a mast that had lost some of its height. He was sober. Three weeks sober, which was — I had learned not to count, because counting was a form of hope and hope was a form of setting up the next disappointment — three weeks sober.

"Chai," he said. "Don't forget to drink it this time."

"I always forget."

"I know. That's why I'm delivering it in person. Hand-to-mouth delivery. The only system that works with painters."

He sat on the studio floor — the spot that Nandini had claimed eighteen years ago and that had become, through the particular accumulation of daily visits, a designated sitting spot, worn slightly smoother than the surrounding floor by the weight of a woman who came every day and a brother who had started coming every morning.

"Your light is good today," he said, looking at the canvas.

"My light is always good. It's the same light."

"It's never the same light. You told me that. In Goa. You said: the sea's colour is different every day and the painter's job is to notice the difference."

"I said your sea was the wrong colour."

"You said my blue was mine. That it was more interesting than the sea's. I remember. I remember everything you say about painting. I don't remember anything else — I forget appointments, I forget names, I forget where I put my shoes. But the painting things, I remember."

"That's because the painting things are the things that matter."

"Maybe. Or maybe it's because you're my brother and the things you say have a particular frequency that my brain is tuned to, the way a radio is tuned to a station. Everything else is static. Your voice comes through clear."

I painted. Madan drank his chai and watched. The watching was — I had come to understand this over the three weeks of his stay — therapeutic. Not for him, though it might have been for him too. For me. Having someone watch me paint — not a student, not a critic, not a buyer, but a person who watched because watching was how they understood and because understanding was how they loved — having that witness was a thing I hadn't known I needed until it was provided.

"Balli called," Madan said. "This morning. He says the shop is fine. Paramjeet leaves for Melbourne next month. He sounded — " He searched for the word with the particular effort of a man who had spent his life using words casually and who was now, in sobriety, learning to use them precisely. "He sounded like a house that someone was moving out of. Still standing. Still functional. But you could hear the emptiness starting."

"I'll call him."

"Call him tonight. He's at the gurdwara in the morning. Tuesday. The Tuesday morning thing."

The Tuesday morning thing. Balli at the Harmandir Sahib. The routine that had started when we were seventeen and that Balli had maintained, through every decade, through every crisis, through the operation and the violence and the recovery and the cancer and the wife moving to Melbourne. Every Tuesday. The golden dome. The Amrit Sarovar's still water. The light that I had spent my life trying to paint and that Balli experienced not through paint but through prayer, the two of us reaching for the same thing through different media.

Nandini returned from her walk. I heard her at the garden gate — the particular sound of the gate that I had learned to identify the way a musician identifies a note: the creak, the click, the footsteps on the path. She came to the studio. She did not come in — she stood at the door, the way she always stood, giving me the space of the studio while being present at its threshold.

"Roshni called," she said. "She's bringing Kabir again next month. And Elina."

"Elina."

"Elina wants to meet Kabir. Roshni arranged it. A family dinner. At our house." She paused. The pause contained the particular calculation of a woman who was about to say something that required diplomatic precision. "Esha arrives next week."

"I know."

"So. A family dinner. With your daughter, your daughter's boyfriend, your ex-wife, your first love, your alcoholic brother, your cancer-patient best friend, three dogs, and me." She smiled. The smile was — Nandini's smile, the warm one, the one that was a decision, the one that chose joy. "That's not a dinner party. That's a census."

"It's a family."

"It's your family. A family that you have somehow assembled from the wreckage of forty years of not telling anyone the truth and that has, despite the not-telling, come together in this house, in this garden, around this table." She came into the studio. Stood behind me. Put her hands on my shoulders — the touch warm, the particular warmth of a woman who had walked briskly through Koregaon Park and whose body ran hot and whose hands carried the temperature of her particular metabolism. "You're painting the morning light."

"I'm always painting the morning light."

"And it's always different."

"And I'm always reaching."

"The reaching is the thing," she said. "The reaching is the painting."

She was right. Nandini was always right about the things that mattered, which was simultaneously her best and most annoying quality.

I painted. The morning continued. The chai got cold — both cups, mine and the one Madan had delivered, because the space between intending to drink chai and actually drinking chai was a space that I had occupied for forty years and would occupy until I died, the particular painter's affliction of being so absorbed in the work that the world's offerings — chai, food, conversation, the voices of the people who loved you — arrived and waited and cooled and were consumed eventually, late, but consumed.

The canvas filled. The light was — this morning's light, this morning's particular, unrepeatable version. Not the Golden Temple's light. Not the Amritsar morning's light. Not the light of eighteen or twenty-one or forty-three. This morning's light. The light of sixty-one. The light of a man who had loved and lost and loved again and lost again and loved still, the losing and the loving inseparable, the one making the other possible.

The painting was good. Not finished — paintings were never finished, they were abandoned at the point of maximum acceptable imperfection — but good. The yellow was active. The white was alive. The space between them held the particular energy of a morning that had been observed by a painter who had been observing mornings for forty years and who had finally — not captured the light, because the light could not be captured — but had come close enough to the capturing that the closeness was its own achievement.

Professor Joshi's voice: Paint what you actually see.

What I actually saw: the morning. The light. The colour that had no name. The studio that smelled of turpentine and cold chai and the faint trace of Nandini's moisturiser. The dogs in the garden. The brother on the floor. The woman at the door.

The family that was arriving — Roshni and Kabir and Elina and Esha and Balli — converging on this house, this garden, this table, with the particular gravity of people who had been scattered by history and choice and the particular trajectories of lives lived separately and who were now, through the strange mathematics of time and forgiveness and the stubborn, unreasonable persistence of love, coming together.

Not perfectly. Nothing about this was perfect. The brother was an alcoholic. The best friend had cancer. The first love was a complication. The ex-wife was a reminder. The daughter was fierce and the boyfriend was new and the dogs were destroying the marigolds and the chai was cold and the painting was unfinished and the morning light was already changing, shifting from generous to businesslike, the poetry ending, the day beginning.

But the reaching. The reaching was the thing. The almost-touching. The brush meeting the canvas. The hand meeting the hand. The gate, never locked, between two houses, three metres, and the daily, deliberate, unconstrained choosing.

I put the brush down. Looked at the painting. It was — not the thing. The thing could not be painted. But it was close. It was the closest I had come. And closeness, I had learned, was not a failure of reaching but the reaching itself.

"It's good," Madan said, from the floor.

"It's close," I said.

"Close is good. Close is — close is everything, bhai. Close is the whole painting."

I picked up the cold chai. Drank it. It was — as cold chai always was — not what it had been when it was warm but still recognizably chai, still carrying the flavour of ginger and tulsi and the particular love of the woman who had made it, the love persistent through the cooling, the love not diminished by the temperature, the love — like all the love in this story, in this house, in this life — surviving the distance between the intention and the arrival.

I drank. The chai was cold and the chai was good and the morning was the morning and the painting was close and the people I loved were coming and the people I loved were here and the light through the French windows was the light that I had spent my life trying to paint and that I would spend the rest of my life trying to paint and that I would never paint and that I would never stop reaching for.

The reaching was the thing.

The reaching was the painting.

The reaching was the love.