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Stories

Stories

Portrait of an Artist

Portrait of an Artist

THE HOUSE WAS in a lane in a middle-middle-class area that curved at a right angle at one end and, at the other, led to the main road. During the Durga Puja, the balconies of the neighbouring houses would be lit with green and blue neon lights, and families would walk towards the end of the lane that curved to the right, and join the crowd that was either coming from or walking towards the goddess. Bank clerks, schoolteachers, small-business men, with their wives and children, the boys in shorts and the girls in frocks, looking like the pictures of children on the covers of exercise books, formed that tireless crowd. On the other side of the lane, after one had crossed the main road, one came to a lake with spacious adjoining walks where couples strolled in the evening and children, accompanied by maidservants, came to play. Binoy and I would walk past the lake in the afternoon, when women washed saris or scoured utensils with ash on its steps, and the heat had just ebbed into a cloudy, dream-like vacancy.

It was in my uncle’s house that, during one of my visits, I met my cousin’s English tutor, whom they never referred to by name but called “mastermoshai.” He was once a manager in an English firm, but had apparently left it after his wife and children had died in a motor accident. After that, he had roamed the streets of Calcutta for a year, seldom returning home, and only lately had he reached, once more, a kind of settled state. He now lived in his house with his servant, Ganesh, and gave English tuition for a small fee to children like my cousins. How he had materialised into my cousins’ lives I never really found out, but I gathered that he had been recommended to them by a relative on their mother’s side.