Painter - An Excerpt

She took off her top with a kind of methodical flourish. A straightforward gesture. They were in a small room in the older part of the new section of the city. There were skyscrapers and slums and the liberating anonymity which she acknowledged when she took of her top and slumped down beside him, a trickle of sweat on her glistening breast. The bra was small and tight. Her hair sat lightly on her small head, and she wasn’t the kind to take her faith in god seriously. I think I believe, she had said, but I don’t see what difference it makes. It didn’t. But that little sense of divine mattered. It could be spoken about occasionally, but she was clearly not in that kind of a mood. The fan made that thin noise when it is clean and at full speed. Her belly had the lightest layer of fat, which rolled self-consciously.

She sipped her whiskey, clearly not interested in it. This was a new habit. He never drank. Just wondered whether the tight strap digging into her flesh hurt. He bent down and tried to push his finger under it. When the wind didn’t carry dust, usually after the rains, it became difficult to comprehend the city. Suddenly there would open a glade humid with anticipation, for what no one knew. Here was a generation not given much to thinking. If he did ever reflect, after coming here, it was upon the odd patterns the skyscrapers in the distance made, rising up from the slums just beneath. An exponential rise towards the sea. Tonight, the wind carried the dust, and construction forks inched awkwardly in the distance.

Her mouth was wet, and he didn’t like the taste of whiskey. She curled up under him, smaller and prettier, as he tried to find her. The city had this industrial sound. A continuous drone. Day and night it played in the ears, when louder sounds left. This was identity. In the absence of history, identity had to be found in these elements. Who am I, you may ask. You are a person living in a city where there is this sound and it will never go. It was simple and signified an end. But beyond it would be newer cities, which would come up, always stranger than our dreams. In these new cities, you would live, like you live now, and feel anguish and elation and all those nominal things you feel now. You would change a little. Perhaps accommodate a little.

The seasons now took their time. The summer had gone, leaving behind a slave to rule. Winter was a dream, someone else’s pain. There remained a few drops of rain from the monsoon which wracked the city the previous year. Where he was born, it would rain through the day, and sometimes the week and month. It would rain through the night and at dawn umbrellas would carry them to makeshift schools and blackboard values. In line they would trudge, towards an uncertain modernity. It was quick, childhood and petty dilemmas of education and work, and nowhere did he need to ask questions. Now there was this void, and he marched on without armor.

Floodlights lit construction sites. The one closest was a new builder, who promised residents the largest man-made lake in the city. A large area was being dug up for it. Sometimes at night if you looked out of the little balcony, and your eyes roved beyond the hum of machinery and jammed roads, they would hover over a black expanse, lit in patches, a sudden gorge in the face of the city. She resisted slightly, signaling him to shift his weight. He leaned back, finding the taste of whiskey again.

The room was bare, the window to one side, at which she reflected upon her uneventful journeys. There was a kitchen behind, hardly used. The impersonal kept alive the sense of journey, the taste of unmet desires. She probably would make it slightly more comfortable, but only slightly. She separated her yearnings for the past with a pragmatic logic for the future. Or at least, thought she did. Her old home next to the rail line, one of those faded, wide windowed buildings with many colored lights inside and the sound of laughter in the evenings drowned by that of passing engines, was in an older, stagnant city. There was little there, in a sense. When the engines would go away, the sound of laughter would return, as if a background constant. Now, their bodies convulsed on the bare floor, not yet dawn, for a few moments without the need for any meaning.

They waited for the wind to come, every night like this one, the smells of whiskey and sweat and the comfortable arrangement of lust. They wished, without saying, that at one point before dawn, their bodies slightly away from each other, there would wash over them, a wet monsoon wind, and they would be free once more, from the grotesque anguish of the city.