Chapter 7: Farhan Ki Painting (Farhan's Painting)

Farhan Shaikh had not slept properly in eleven days, and the paintings were getting worse.

Not worse in the technical sense — technically, they were fine, the brushwork steady, the composition sound, the colour relationships holding. Worse in the way that matters: they were honest. Too honest. The kind of honest that happens when a painter stops trying to paint what he sees and starts painting what he feels, and what Farhan felt, these days, was a complicated mess of love and jealousy and trust and fear that had no business being on a canvas but kept showing up there anyway, in the particular green he used for landscapes and the particular red he used for nothing but was suddenly using for everything.

The exhibition was in three weeks. Twelve paintings needed. He had nine. Three more. Three more paintings that needed to be the work of a serene, accomplished artist in his sixties, not the semi-frantic output of a man whose girlfriend's ex-husband was sleeping in her son's room and whose girlfriend's ex-lover was texting her every morning at 7:15 and whose ceiling had a crack that was definitely getting longer.

He stood in front of the canvas. The canvas was blank — the terrifying white of a surface that has not yet been committed to, the emptiness that painters either love or fear and that Farhan, at this particular moment in his life, feared.

He'd been painting since he was nineteen. Forty-two years. First in Ireland — where he'd been born and raised, the son of a Marathi father and an Irish mother, the boy who spoke English at school and Marathi at home and learned to paint because it was the one language that didn't require translation. Then in Pune, where he'd come at thirty-five to find his father's family and had stayed because the light was better and the chai was real and a woman named Nandini Deshmukh lived next door and looked at him with the particular expression of a person who had been looking at the wrong things for too long and had finally found something worth seeing.

He loved her. This was not in question. He loved her the way painters love — not constantly, not evenly, not with the reliable temperature of a radiator, but in bursts and depths, in colour and shadow, the kind of love that sees the whole palette and not just the pleasant shades. He loved her stubbornness. He loved her chai. He loved the way she read a book — completely, aggressively, as if the book owed her something and she was collecting. He loved the way she walked — with purpose, always with purpose, even when the purpose was just getting to the kitchen. He loved the small things, the domestic accumulation, the fact that she folded towels in thirds and not halves and that she hummed Lata Mangeshkar while cooking and that her anger, when it came, was precise rather than explosive, a scalpel rather than a bomb.

He did not love, however, the current situation. The situation was this: Chirag Joshi was in the house and showed no signs of leaving. Digvijay Patwardhan was in Kothrud and showed every sign of moving closer. And Farhan was next door — literally next door, one wall away, close enough to hear music through the plaster and far enough to feel like the third option in a choice that should have only two.

"You're spiralling," he told the canvas. He talked to canvases. It was not a sign of madness; it was a sign of a man who lived alone and needed someone to be honest with.

The canvas said nothing. Canvases never did. They just waited.

He picked up a brush. Mixed colour — cadmium yellow, raw umber, a touch of white. The colour of November light in Pune. The colour of the garden wall between his house and Nandini's. The colour of waiting.

*

The problem — the real problem, not the surface problem of jealousy or insecurity or any of the words Nandini had used, correctly, to describe his state — was this: Farhan did not know how to compete.

He had never been a competitive man. In Ireland, he'd been the quiet boy — the one who read while others played football, the one who painted while others fought. In relationships, he'd been the same: quiet, patient, present. His marriage — to Sarah, in Dublin, twenty years ago — had ended not because of competition but because of absence. He'd been too quiet, too patient, too inside his own head. Sarah had wanted a partner who argued and laughed and took up space, and Farhan had wanted a studio with good light and a woman who understood that sometimes a man needed to stare at a wall for forty minutes and it wasn't neglect, it was process.

Nandini understood this. She was the first person who'd understood this. She'd walked into his studio one afternoon — two years ago, before they were together, when they were just neighbours who shared a wall and occasionally a conversation — and she'd seen him staring at a canvas and she'd said, "What do you see?" and he'd said, "I don't know yet" and she'd said, "Good. The people who always know what they see are the ones who aren't looking," and he'd fallen in love with her on the spot, the way you fall into water — suddenly, completely, with the knowledge that you're going to get wet and the inability to do anything about it.

Now he was wet. And there were two other men in the water. And Farhan, who had never learned to swim competitively, was treading in the deep end.

He painted. The yellow became a wall. The umber became shadow. A figure appeared — not planned, because Farhan's best work was never planned, it was discovered, the image emerging from the paint the way a photograph emerges from developer fluid. The figure was a woman. Standing in a garden. Her back to the viewer. Looking at something beyond the frame — something the painter couldn't see and the viewer couldn't see and the woman herself might not be able to see, but looking anyway, with the posture of a person whose looking is the point, not the finding.

It was Nandini. Of course it was Nandini. Every painting he'd done in two years had been Nandini — sometimes obviously, sometimes abstractly, but always her. The curve of her shoulder in a landscape. The particular angle of her chin in a still life. The warmth of her skin in the light he used for sunsets. She was in every painting the way she was in every room: present, necessary, the thing that made the composition work.

He painted for three hours. The studio was cold — November morning, no heater, just the warmth of work and the turpentine and the particular single-mindedness that takes over a painter when the painting is going well. By ten, the figure was done. The garden was done. The wall between the houses — the wall that was both boundary and connection, the wall that separated his life from hers and also joined them — was done.

He stepped back. Looked at it. The painting was good. Actually good, not politely good. The woman in the garden was looking at something the viewer couldn't see, and the mystery of what she was looking at was the painting's power, because the viewer would fill in the answer with their own longing, their own hope, their own version of what they'd look at if they were standing in a garden with their back to the world.

"That's the tenth," he said to the empty studio. "Two more."

*

He went to Nandini's for lunch. Through the back gate, as always. The gate had a particular sound — a metallic scrape that was unique to this gate and no other gate in Sadashiv Peth, and that sound had become, for Farhan, the sound of arriving. Not home, exactly. But the place adjacent to home. The place where home continued.

Nandini was in the kitchen. Chirag was at the table, reading — not the newspaper today but a book, an actual book, which was such a departure from his normal behaviour that Farhan did a double take. The book was A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth, which was approximately fourteen hundred pages long and which Chirag was holding with the slightly overwhelmed expression of a man who has picked up a book for the first time in decades and is discovering that books are longer than he remembered.

"Good book?" Farhan asked, sitting down.

Chirag looked up. The look was — different. The hostility that had characterised their interactions for the first two weeks had softened into something more like wariness, which was an improvement in the same way that a broken arm is an improvement over a broken neck.

"It's very long," Chirag said.

"It is."

"There's a man in it who reminds me of myself. Not the good parts."

"Most good books have a character like that."

Chirag almost smiled. Almost. The ghost of a smile, quickly suppressed, as if smiling at Farhan was a concession he wasn't ready to make. But the ghost was there.

Nandini served lunch — varan bhaat, the comfort meal, the rice and dal that was the foundation of Maharashtrian cuisine and Maharashtrian life. Ghee on top. Lonche on the side. The meal that said: this is home, this is simple, this is enough.

They ate together. The three of them. At the kitchen table. The ex-husband, the current partner, and the woman in the middle. The conversation was about nothing — the weather (November cold, surprising), the cricket (India losing, unsurprising), the new café that had opened on the corner (overpriced, inevitable). It was the most unremarkable conversation Farhan had ever been part of, and it was also, in its unremarkability, the most significant. Because unremarkable meant normal. And normal — between these three people, with this history, in this kitchen — was a kind of miracle.

After lunch, Chirag went to his room. Farhan and Nandini sat in the garden. The tulsi was doing well — the November cold hadn't killed it, which was either resilience or stubbornness, and with tulsi, as with Nandini, the distinction was academic.

"I finished a painting this morning," Farhan said.

"The landscape?"

"No. A new one. A woman in a garden."

"Oh?"

"Looking at something beyond the frame."

"What is she looking at?"

"I don't know. That's the point."

Nandini smiled. The smile was — he catalogued it, the way he catalogued light and shadow and the particular green of Western Ghats monsoon — warm, amused, slightly knowing. The smile of a woman who understands that she's being painted, has been being painted for two years, and has decided to allow it because being seen by someone who really looks is the closest thing to being loved that she's ever experienced.

"You're painting me again."

"I'm always painting you."

"Is that romantic or obsessive?"

"Yes."

She laughed. The laugh was the real one — not the polite laugh, not the book-club laugh, but the laugh that started in her belly and moved upward and changed the shape of her face and made Farhan want to paint it, which was the problem, because everything she did made him want to paint it, and there were only so many canvases in the world.

"Farhan."

"Hmm?"

"I know this has been hard. Chirag, Diggi, all of it. I know you've been patient and I know patience has a cost and I know the cost is higher than you're showing."

"I'm fine."

"You're not fine. You're painting women in gardens at three in the morning. That's not fine. That's displacement."

"It's art."

"Art is displacement with better lighting."

He laughed. She was right — she was always right about the things that mattered, the things that cut through the performance of okayness and found the actual feeling underneath. He was not fine. He was worried and jealous and tired and in love, and the combination was producing paintings that were technically excellent and emotionally devastating, which was good for the exhibition and bad for his blood pressure.

"I spoke to Diggi," he said.

The garden went quiet. Even the tulsi seemed to pause.

"When?"

"Yesterday. He was walking past. I was in the front garden. We — talked."

"What did you talk about?"

"You." He paused. "And not you. We talked about cricket. And painting. He asked about the exhibition. He was... nice."

"Diggi is nice."

"I know. That's the problem. If he was terrible, I could hate him. But he's nice and he's handsome and he has history with you and a shared grief with you and all I have is a studio next door and a ceiling crack and eleven paintings of a woman who may or may not be looking at me."

"She's looking at you."

"You don't know that. You haven't seen the painting."

"I don't need to see the painting. I know what I look at."

The afternoon light was doing the thing — the particular November thing where the sun drops low and the shadows go long and every surface turns golden, and painters move to windows and the rest of the world continues not noticing what painters notice, which is that beauty is everywhere and most of it is temporary and the only way to keep it is to put it on canvas.

"Come to the studio," Farhan said. "I want to show you something."

They went through the gate — the metallic scrape, the sound of arriving — into his studio. The paintings were arranged around the room: nine finished, one just completed, two blank canvases waiting. The exhibition was called "Ghar" — Home — and every painting was a variation on the theme: what does home look like when home is not a place but a person?

He showed her the new one. The woman in the garden. The back turned. The wall between houses. The something beyond the frame.

Nandini looked at it for a long time. The looking was — he watched her looking, and the watching was its own kind of painting, the observation of a woman observing herself through another's eyes.

"It's beautiful," she said.

"You said that about the last one."

"They're all beautiful. Because you see me the way I want to be seen."

"How do you want to be seen?"

"From behind. Looking forward. Not at the camera. Not at the audience. Looking at whatever comes next."

He put his arm around her. The turpentine smell was in the air, and the linseed oil, and the particular dusty warmth of a studio in November. She leaned into him — the lean of a woman who is tired of being everyone's Switzerland and wants, for five minutes, to be just one person's home.

"Two more paintings," he said.

"What will they be?"

"I don't know yet."

"Good. The people who always know what they see are the ones who aren't looking."

She'd remembered. The thing she'd said two years ago, in this studio, the thing that had made him fall in love with her. She'd remembered and she'd given it back, and the giving back was a promise that the looking continued, that the seeing continued, that whatever was beyond the frame — Chirag, Diggi, the past, the future — the looking was the point, and the looking was theirs.