Back home, Ashesh takes these memories to bed and in his restless sleep dreams of an unending black tunnel. Waking up with a heavy head, he goes through his morning routine mechanically, goes for a walk mechanically. When he returns, he mounts a new canvas on the easel, mechanically. Suddenly he is no longer lifeless. In the next ten days he paints two new works. In one a naked man with a face cut out of stone stands on a white polished floor, hands outstretched. From the splayed fingers of one drips a stream of black, from the other a stream of red. The colours collect at his feet in two separate glossy pools. The background is filled with vegetation. The second work is a huge sideways shadow cast by a puny helmeted jawan. His back is to the viewer. He stands guard over spirals of barbed wire that stretch all the way to the horizon.

Ashesh sits very still for a long time after he finishes the second work. Then he lifts the phone, but puts it down again. He has done this a few times recently, lifting the phone, then telling himself not to be a fool and replacing it in its cradle. But finishing the painting has made him euphoric. He wants to be foolish. He lifts the receiver off the hook again and dials Janaki’s number.

22

The front room in the twenty-first-floor flat of Himalaya Apartments is totally altered. Prakash gapes in stupefaction at the walls. The Husains, Tyeb Mehtas, Laxman Shreshthas, K.G. Subramanyams and Bhupen Khakhars have disappeared. Their place has been taken by ceiling-to-floor silk scrolls covered with Sanskrit shlokas. The veranda at the other end is thick with tall potted plants. A two-foot-high platform has been raised against this dense green background. A throne stands at the centre of the platform. It is covered in red velvet, its arms are gilded and its feet carved in the shape of tiger claws. Leaving a respectful space from the platform, soft mattresses with spotless white sheets cover the floor almost up to the entrance. In every corner of the room stand tall, three-legged stools of carved wood on which are placed enormous silver agarbatti holders with many arms. The scent of sandalwood agarbattis wafts in squiggles of wispy smoke and fills the air. A recorded male voice chants mantras in some unseen quarter of the house.

Prakash stands uncertainly at the door. Sumitra Jhunjhunwala emerges from a distant door dressed in a finely spun sky-blue cotton sari embroidered with delicate white tracery. She wears her signature string of large pearls, diamond-studded bangles and huge solitaires in her ears. Her earlobes flash when she turns her head. When she lifts her hands to fold them in humble namaskars of welcome, tiny multicoloured sparks fly off her wrists.