Blind Faith - Sagarika Ghose

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painted the Sistine Chapel with Jesus’ shadow falling over the dome like a raincloud. He created Mount Kailash reflected in Lake Manasarovar like an upside-down pyramid in a pebbled sky. He painted the qawwals of Nizamuddin’s shrine in Delhi with whirling sufis reflected in their eyes. The Kashi Vishvanath temple at Benares with a demon-faced priest shrieking in a typhoon of incense. He even painted the church St. Martin-in-the-Fields in black and white strokes with only the plasterwork in colour.

      Last year, Anand had gone to the Eagle And Flag, then for a walk by the river, fallen into it, and drowned. The police report said there was a massive amount of alcohol in his blood. Alcohol-induced suicide.

      Mithu said it was just like him to go off and commit suicide when the daughter was still unmarried. He had become so English in his ways, so English and disconnected. Not tied up like Indians were, tied by this life and the next, tied up in an elemental, fire-and-water sort of way.

      Father – efficiently incinerated in a crematorium. Nothing whatsoever left of him anywhere in the world. How foolish were those who believed in ghosts and spirits. Papa was gone, vaporized into the odour of oil-paint-and-turpentine, no other shred, no remnant of him, anywhere at all.

      Even greater than her sorrow was Mia’s puzzlement at his desertion. If he had died of illness or accident he would have simply and gracefully transmuted into an ancestor whom she would have missed and mourned for. But to throw himself into a drunken death by water – just as they were getting to be such good friends and setting up their debate along such promising lines, just as their conversation was beginning – was so unexpected, so shockingly uncharacteristic, that she couldn’t but see it as a terrible rejection of herself.

      He had often said that she had been his favourite painting. But without him, she was only half-finished, the brush strokes dry but incomplete…

      The undimmed focus on the good, the trekker’s upturned face towards the sun of new delights – all of that was gone forever. Poor old gentle Pop. Hope he wasn’t too disappointed if heaven turned out to be full of Marxists.

      Now the oil-painting man had appeared. He had walked out of the painting and into her life and transformed Hyde Park corner into a festival.

      ‘Your father did a terrible thing,’ grumbled Mithu clattering the teacups into the sink. ‘But there’s no point missing him all the time. You’ll wander around all your life, trying to find a father here, trying to find a father there and never being able to find a husband. That’s what will happen to you.’

      Mia stared apologetically at her mother. She had never been a companion to her. She, with her gloomy silences, could never be a companion to a childlike virago like Mithu, who needed pampering and cosy moments. Anand had been the unifier of mother and daughter. He had been mother to them both. He had spread his apron and let them pull in different directions.

      Anand’s death had had a very different effect on Mithu. Mithu, after a few days of robust weeping, had rapidly gone global. She became re-sexualized. She cast off her dowdy, professor’s-wife clothes and mutated into a sari-clad Boy George with plucked eyebrows and powdered cheeks. She became lively and democratic in her friendships and dumbed down from novels to glossy magazines in relief that she no longer had to please Anand by pretending to be highbrow. She sprinkled gold dust on her forehead and streaked her hair with Natural Auburn 5.1. She painted her fingernails a rich red and dangled gypsy earrings from her ears.

      Mithu’s survival skills were admirable, thought Mia. Lost in the Amazon rain forest she would speedily contract a marriage with the king of apes so he would take her into his protection. Abandoned in the Sahara she would jump on the back of the passing captain of the Bedouin and take over the best tent. Mithu’s need for marriage was equivalent to the immigrant’s need for an air ticket. Marry with steely determination and give birth to a range of new passports.

      ‘Don’t worry about me, Ma,’ Mia climbed the wooden steps to her room. ‘You deserve all the happiness in the world. I’ll meet someone, there’s no hurry. You go ahead. Get married. Go to America. I’ll stay here with SkyVision and move back to Putney.’

      Since this morning, between the time I left for work and came back, I’ve made an extraordinary discovery. A false discovery perhaps, but for me, a discovery nonetheless. What would Rosenthal and Silver say? They would say that the man was nothing but a delusion, a mirage caused by the drunkenness of grief.

      ‘No hurry?’ shouted Mithu. ‘What do you mean, no hurry? Of course, there’s a hurry. You might get prolapse of the rectum! Mejo Mashi had it and nobody would stay with her because of the smell. Only her husband cared for her. Until his dying day. Even though they were staying in a leaking place overlooking the basti because they had no money left. Oh god,’ Mithu shuddered at the memory. ‘Thank god, I never have to go back to that horrible country.’

      ‘No point thinking of rectums and all, Ma, and you don’t ever have to go back,’ Mia called down from her room. ‘You’re on your way to America.’

      ‘Only if you help me, Goldie!’ Mithu called up the stairs. ‘I can’t get married before you. I can’t. First you. Then me. If you don’t, I won’t. You have my life in your hands. Remember that. You must get married. Married! Married! Married!’

      The silence of death was the most annoying thing of all. The hushed wipe-out, the impossibility of further contact, the irritatingly vacant space. Quiet runways stretching towards other quiet runways. Everything as it was, yet everything in mourning. Why had he not stormed into death more grandly? Drowning was such a weak surrender, such a slothful fall. Do not go gentle into that good night, Papa, Rage, rage against the dying of the light…

      The streets, the billboards, the trees would remain, but she would be gone one day too.

      Gone where?

      Perhaps to some Hollywood-created studio where there were layers of shining clouds or an oily pit crawling with spindly arms.

      Rain whispered in the cherry tree outside. In her room – where Mithu had often burst in smelling of chicken essence demanding explanations about men and music; where Anand had knocked softly when she had a fever and laid his palm on her hot forehead – was the painting that contained him. She kicked off her shoes, sat cross-legged on her bed and peered at it on the wall. Yes, the face in Anand’s painting was exactly like that of the man at the Purification Rally. She could see no difference.

      She had seen him every day for the last seven years. She had watched him looming above her Raggedy Anne. She had studied him in the evenings, glowing in the light of her bedside lamp. Her father’s gift to her on her twenty-first birthday had been his painting of the Kumbh Mela, the largest religious festival in the world.

      ‘What an experience, Maya,’ Anand had exulted. ‘How can I describe it so you will understand? Imagine a huge Hindu Woodstock … a spiritual Glastonbury… crowds of people! Thousands! Hundred thousands! The water with the sun overhead, mist along the banks, sadhus and nuns, tourists, yoga teachers, a giant celebration of being a nobody.’

      ‘A nobody?’ she had asked.

      ‘Sure, a nobody. That’s what we are. Non-entities next to a river that is millions of years old. One of India’s greatest contributions to world civilizations is the idea of the naked body. The naked body not as a pornographic product, but as a civilizational ideal, the most pristine surrender to being a nobody, a non-individual, nothing but a technological member of the Milky Way.’

      Anand had bought her a dog-eared copy of GS Ghurye’s Indian Sadhus written half a century ago. The sadhus and their ascetic reformist spirit was unique to India, Mia read. But while some are beautiful lotuses, the vast majority have become unhealthy scum. Only when the water begins to flow again and the people are awakened to life, then, and only then, will the

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