Prologue: Rang aur Ristey

The morning light in my studio has a particular quality that I've spent forty years trying to capture on canvas and have never quite managed.

It comes through the French windows — the ones that open onto the back garden where Sheroo and Bholu, my two oversized Labradors, are currently destroying what remains of the marigolds — and it hits the east wall at an angle that turns the white plaster into something warmer. Not gold, not amber, not the turmeric-yellow of the marigolds themselves. Something between all of these. A colour that exists only in this room, only at this hour, only when the Pune sun is still low enough to be generous rather than punishing.

I've been painting this light for decades. I will probably paint it until I die. It is the one subject that never bores me, because it is never the same twice, and because the act of trying to pin it down is — I have come to understand at sixty-one — not about capturing the light but about the attempt itself. The reaching. The almost-touching. Like most of the important things in my life, the value is in the pursuit.

Choti — the third dog, the small one, the dignified Pomeranian who produced the two Labrador-shaped disasters through a relationship that I still don't fully understand and the vet has declined to explain — trotted between my legs and took her morning constitutional around the garden's perimeter. She maintained a careful distance from her offspring, who were now rolling in the mud near the guava tree with the particular enthusiasm of creatures who have no concept of consequence.

I set out my paints. Checked my brushes — all clean, all ready, the sable tips aligned like a row of soldiers. This was the ritual. The ritual was important. Nandini said I should stretch before painting — she was right about most things, Nandini, which was simultaneously her best and most annoying quality — so I did. One stretch. Perfunctory but sufficient. My back wasn't what it used to be, but then, nothing was what it used to be. I was sixty-one. I had a minor paunch, a full head of hair that was more grey than black, and a back that lodged formal complaints when I sat too long at the easel. These were the negotiations of age, and I was losing them gracefully.

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 now — I'd forgotten it, as I always forgot it, because the space between intending to drink chai and actually drinking chai was filled with mixing colours and adjusting brushes and 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.

A new canvas. Blank. White. The most terrifying and exciting object in the world. So many possibilities in it. So many directions it could go. Like a life, before the decisions start narrowing the options.

I unscrewed the cap on a new tube of cadmium yellow. Broke the seal. The paint emerged — thick, vivid, the concentrated essence of every marigold that Sheroo and Bholu had ever destroyed. I loaded the brush.

The phone rang.

I looked at the caller ID. Shobha. My sister. I put the brush down, screwed the cap back on the cadmium yellow, and answered, because when your elder sister calls, you answer. This is not a choice. This is genetics.

"Farhan, it's Shobha. Your sister."

"I know who you are, Shobha. Kya hua? Amma-Bauji theek hain?"

"Why do you always ask that? They're fine. Bauji is doing his morning puja and Amma is arguing with the sabziwala about the price of bhindi. They're perfectly fine."

"Then what is it?"

"It's not what. It's who."

I closed my eyes. I knew what was coming. I knew it the way you know the monsoon is coming — not from the weather report but from the particular heaviness in the air, the pressure that builds before the downpour.

"Madan," I said.

"Madan." Of course. Wasn't it always Madan? My younger brother, the family's recurring natural disaster, the man who could charm the gold off a temple dome and then lose it in a card game before the priests noticed. "He's gone missing. Well, not completely missing. There have been sightings."

"Sightings? He's not a leopard, Shobha."

"He might as well be, the way he operates. Firoz bhaiya spotted him. In Goa."

"Goa is a big state. Any particular part?"

"Anjuna. Some beach shack. He was — Firoz's words — 'completely gone.' Drunk. Possibly worse."

"Possibly worse" was Shobha's way of saying "definitely worse" without committing to a statement that would require action on her part. Shobha was a master of strategic ambiguity. She could convey devastating news while maintaining plausible deniability about having conveyed it.

"And you want me to go get him," I said.

"I'm not saying that."

"You're calling me at eight in the morning during my painting holiday to tell me our brother has been spotted drunk in Goa, and you're not saying I should go get him?"

"I'm informing you. What you do with the information is your business."

I looked at the canvas. Blank. White. Full of possibilities. I looked at the tube of cadmium yellow, re-capped, the seal broken but the paint unused. I looked at the French windows, where Sheroo had pressed his mud-streaked face against the glass and was staring at me with the hopeful expression of a dog who believed that all phone calls eventually resulted in biscuits.

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

"Don't think too long. Firoz said he looked bad. Worse than usual."

She hung up. Shobha did not believe in goodbyes. She believed in delivering information and withdrawing, like a courier who dropped a package on your doorstep and ran before you could refuse delivery.

I stood in my studio. The morning light — that particular, unrepeatable light — had shifted while I was on the phone. It was higher now, sharper, the generous warmth replaced by the more businesslike illumination of a Pune morning that had decided the day had officially begun and the poetry was over.

Madan. My brother. The charming disaster. The man who had been breaking things — hearts, promises, furniture, our mother's composure — since he was old enough to reach the things worth breaking. The man I had spent my entire adult life trying not to become and simultaneously trying to save.

Nandini appeared at the garden gate. She'd returned from her walk — her kurta slightly damp with morning dew, her silver hair pinned back, her face carrying the particular glow of a woman who had spent an hour walking briskly through Koregaon Park and had returned with the serenity that exercise provided and that I could never achieve through any method except painting.

"You look like someone's died," she said.

"Madan's in Goa."

"Ah." She came into the studio, picked up the cold chai, looked at it with the resignation of a woman who had made chai for a painter many times and had accepted that the chai would always be drunk cold or not at all. "How bad?"

"Shobha-bad. Which means actually-bad but described in a way that allows Shobha to claim she never said it was bad."

"Are you going?"

"I don't know."

She put the chai down. Looked at me. Nandini's look was — I had learned this over the years of living next door to her, then being friends with her, then being in love with her — not a single expression but a layered thing, like a painting with underpainting visible through the surface: concern at the top, affection beneath it, and underneath everything, the bedrock of a woman who had survived her own losses and knew that the people we love are also the people who can hurt us most.

"Go," she said. "He's your brother."

"He's a disaster."

"He's your brother who is a disaster. The two things are not mutually exclusive."

She kissed my cheek — a brief press of lips, the smell of her moisturiser and the morning air and the faintest trace of jasmine from the park — and went next door. To her house. The house that was three metres from mine, separated by a garden wall that was low enough to talk over and high enough to maintain the fiction of separate lives, which was, we had both agreed, the ideal architecture for a relationship between two people who loved each other and also loved their solitude.

I looked at the canvas. Still blank. Still full of possibilities. But the possibilities had shifted. They were no longer about light and colour and the shape of a Pune morning. They were about Madan in a beach shack in Goa, Shobha's strategic phone call, and the particular gravity of family obligation that could reach across decades and hundreds of kilometres and pull you away from everything you'd chosen toward everything you'd tried to leave behind.

I picked up the phone. Called Shobha back.

"I'll go," I said.

"Good. Take Balli with you. You'll need someone sensible."

"Balli is many things. Sensible is not one of them."

"He's more sensible than Madan. That's a low bar, but it's a bar."

She hung up again. I put the phone down, looked at the canvas one more time, and covered it with a cloth. The painting would wait. Madan would not.