Sharada carries him to the bedroom. Shekhar paces the floor outside, livid and confused.

21

Ashesh lifts Artist 5 off the easel. He has five oils and last year’s watercolours with five months to go for the show. Now he is going to concentrate on black. He must chase it, consume it, fill his head with it. Subjects will follow. But that’s not how it is. Black is chasing him and consuming him. He must find a way to confront and command it. He must prepare himself to take the kind of risks he has not taken for a long time.

Ashesh leaves the house. It is not his time for a walk. The traffic must be crawling nose to tail on the main road. But he wants to walk. He feels the need for physical movement. He wants to tire himself out. Fatigue will drain away yesterday’s stale thoughts from his mind. He needs an uninhabited mental space in which the black seed of that elusive image can grow.

Ashesh tramps down lanes and streets from Gamdevi to Opera House. Returning from Opera House along Hughes Road, he notices a simple name plate amongst the dozens nailed to the front of a building on the corner. It says Dr P. Janorkar. He was the giver of the good news that Ashesh’s reports were absolutely clear. He had nothing to worry about. His dancing hand had been what he termed ‘a minor episode’. He had shrugged and admitted that doctors did not necessarily know the cause of every passing event in the human body. After which he had turned to art, confessing he was a small-time collector. Ashesh had visited him again one day to give him one of his small pen-andink drawings.

Ashesh crosses the road from this warren of doctors and enters Sukh Sagar for a plate of idlis. There is food at home, but he would rather have this than eat alone. For a moment Ashesh feels sorry for himself. He is alone, by choice of course, but still alone. So is Anima. More than Ashesh because it wasn’t always so. Feroze too is alone. But he never looks it. Haridas too, never. Does he? Do people look at him and think, here’s a man who is alone? Perhaps not. But he is, and there are times when he feels it.

Back home after his marathon walk, Ashesh’s body feels light, his eyes heavy. Perhaps he can nap. Just as he is falling asleep, two lines from an essay that Mr Pisolkar had once read out in class fade up in his empty mind like lights on a stage. The essay was called ‘Meditation on Black’. The lines he remembers went: ‘The silence of black is the silence of death. Red is the denial of black. Red is life.’

Red is raucous. It tears through the silence of black. You don’t exist, red screams. Yet black exists, unmoved.