A little story i thought of today. please tell me if you like/hate it!
The Paintings
Since the time I was born, I’ve always been a city kind of person. I appreciate the quiet and serenity and beauty of the countryside, of course, but I can’t get to sleep without the buzz of traffic on the road outside the house and the sound of street vendors cursing each other in three dialects on the pavement just across. So when our parents inherited a rundown house in the countryside near our father’s ancestral home, my sister and I just knew that the trip to see the house firsthand would turn out bad.
The house was a creaky old behemoth, half-sunk in waist-high grass, forty minutes away from the nearest ATM machine and twenty minutes from an actual asphalt road. We had to hire the jeep outright for everyday, with a driver who looked younger than me but was probably twenty-three or something. My father’s people had their own almost ruined mansion about five kilometers away. When we went to see them, an incredibly aged lady told my mother that our house used to be the guest-house for visitors and unwanted relatives back in the days when our common ancestor was a well-respected zamindar in those parts. My sister and I choked on our sweet tea when we were warned to keep a light burning in at least one room throughout the night, carry little silver amulets to ward off snakes in the grass, and keep our voices down if we ever discussed dead people, in case they heard us and came back in the night to trade their souls for ours and re-enter the world of the living.
In this new age of technology, of course no-one in the real world would take such warnings seriously. We didn’t laugh, because the lady was our great-grand-aunt five times removed or something equally ridiculous, and without question she had held our great-grandfather in her arms when he was born and slapped him into crying for the first time. So we lowered our heads like good girls should, and by the time we returned to that tumbledown old house we were too tired and too bewildered by these people of ours to remember to laugh about their silly superstitions.
We were there for the winter holidays, which was a good idea because the house had no fans and our lights at night we got from candles and an emergency light that my father had bought for the trip. It was like camping, and as we shivered pleasurably in the chilly evenings, the house seemed to creak and shiver too, in companionable silence. It was like a living person, this house, with its front resembling a face – the bigger upstairs windows for eyes, the verandah on the second floor like a nose, and the front door like a mouth set slightly askew on the jaw, which was the portico running all around the ground floor. One of the best things about this house, apart from the French windows, was the paintings. There were paintings of former family members, reproductions of famous European and Indian painters, scenery, landscapes, ships on the seas, sketches of Calcutta when the British were still here, pictures of an unknown British family, either grouped together or individually, watercolors of horses, dogs, trees, courtesans, temples under the moon, housing any one of thirty three thousand gods and goddesses of the Hindu pantheon of divinity, even paintings of the ancestral village nearby as it must have been before, at the time of the Raj, and that one faded canvas that was not a painting but a photograph, of the entire family, children, servants, dogs and all, snapped on a day when the patriarch chose to take the central seat with the tricolor flag on his knees, dated 16th August 1947………………..
A funny thing about these paintings was that often we would find the same face in two different canvases. My sister and I would spend hours searching within the frames, shouting gleefully to each other when a fisherman in his boat on the Ganga at sunset turned out to have the same features as the rich nobleman in a Mughal style painting. A mother holding her child in an Italian Renaissance print would have the same exact features and expression as the goddess in the painting of the temple below the moon. The clothes would change, the style of painting, even the medium used could be different, but we thought for a while that a single painter had created all these canvases, using the same models for different purposes at different times and in different settings, like a director giving the same cast of actors different parts in different plays. We later found out that this could not have been true, because our father said that some of the paintings must have been done at least a century apart, and in very different circumstances. So we thought we must have imagined it, especially when we couldn’t find the similar-looking figures when we searched for them again. The paintings looked the same, and no-one could have moved them, because we were the only people in the house, and yet we simply could not see those haunting similarities when we looked for them again. So we dropped the game for a while and went out to help Baba crop the grass to keep away the snakes, or Ma to can yet more pickles, and by the time we came back to the house we had forgotten all about the faces in the paintings, and by then it was too dark to see anyway.
The longer we stayed in this house, the better we liked it. Baba was curiously contented, although he had been raised in the city too, and I thought I knew how he felt. The entire atmosphere, the way we were living, the things we were doing and seeing each day, like grass stretching on for miles and miles, blending with the croplands in the shimmering distance, the sun taking forever and half to set over the massive distance of the plains, the echoing, echoing calls of the village boys calling the cows home, the birds sitting near at hand and not flying away in startled fear like they do in the city, the daily visits to the old house nearby, where the people lived life slower and better, I think, than we had ever lived – everything seemed like déjà vu, but of something that was happening for the first time. In the city I never had time to think like this, but now I found myself lying in the grass, far from and yet in view of our house, wondering if perhaps humans have genetically passed on memory banks, recollections of living like this on the vast plains, near rivers, watching sunsets uninterrupted by concrete towers. These race memories would only surface when we see the things our ancestors saw for the first time, ignited by centuries, perhaps millennia, of a people breathing with and into the land, bringing a feeling of sudden exultation and terrible sadness at the same time, joy and sorrow for things that were and could and will be. Perhaps this could even explain why in the paintings the faces seemed the same, because the painters drew their race memories into their art.
My mother and my sister, I knew, did not feel the same. This experience was new and exciting for both of them, and the paintings kept my sister curious and slightly wound-up for hours on end, but they didn’t have the same sense of coming home to a long-forgotten but beloved place like my father and I. We never talked about it directly, but there were nuances in the things we said, a certain way of breathing in deeply and strongly, a sleepy content at each sunrise that reassured both of us that the other was feeling the same, and so we felt safe in this new contentedness.
But we saw signs of restlessness in my sister and tried to draw her in. Our mother noticed nothing wrong, she said it was just homesickness, but I knew, and I think our father knew, that my sister felt threatened and lonely in this house, and so every day she spoke a little more, a little louder, of the reasons to go back home. We paid her complaining no attention, spoke comforting but meaningless words, and then she would hunch her shoulders in rejection and go into the house to brood over the paintings, gaining no satisfaction, because of course the figures were never where she saw them last………..
One day, I was lying under a desiccated banyan, teasing a goat tethered nearby with my admittedly bad whistling, when my sister arrived panting with a piece of paper flapping in her hand. Breathless, she flung herself down, catching her breath with great whoops while I lay with my eyes half-closed in my new-found somnolence. Then she sat up and delivered the great news.
“Didi, I found out where the figures go.”
“You did? Really?”, I said, sitting up abruptly.
“They don’t vanish like we thought. And they are the same figures, except they move around the paintings at night”, she said.
“Are you sure?”, I said, trying not to smile.
“Yes, almost. I’ve made a list, you see. You’ve seen me watching the paintings, surely? I was so frustrated, but then I started writing down where I saw the same figure in succession. And I did it for the fisherman first, then for the goddess, then the English sportsman and his yellow dog, and some others too-“
I cut her off.
“Did you tell anyone else?”
“Of course not,” she said. “Ma and Baba wouldn’t believe me, and the crazy women back at the old house would, all too readily. I don’t know which would be worse.”
I pretended to think for a while.
“I’ll tell you what we can do,” I said, and she brightened perceptibly. “We’ll stay awake tonight and try to catch these figures in the act of moving painting, so to speak. Let’s see if we can prove it. We’ll note down their positions tonight, and then we’ll be able to tell when they go.”
She agreed eagerly. We went back to the house, and as we climbed the stairs, I looked at the paintings on the landing more keenly than I had for a long time. As we neared the top of the stairs, I was looking straight into the eyes of the tightlipped Bengali matron’s portrait, and perhaps it was my imagination, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that she was looking back at me. As we turned at the banister, I felt her eyes on my skull, and looking back, I thought that the slant of her gaze had changed direction and was focusing straight on me instead of looking ahead and to the right as she was before. I thought with a shiver of apprehension that she would be looking at me as I climbed the stairs, that her eyes would rise as I went higher, that long after I had turned the corner she would be staring at the top of the above-stairs landing where she had last seen me, watching for my return, even listening for my footsteps to come back down those stairs………….
I shook myself and turned back defiantly to face the portrait. Beside me, my sister paused too, but I barely noticed, because the painting’s eyes seemed to glow a dull red now. Just a trick of the light, I said to myself as we continued upstairs, aware of my sister looking at me oddly, aware, too, that the sun was setting on the wrong side of the house for the light to reflect on that particular painting at any point……………
That night, we both sat up in bed. For obvious reasons, our parents knew nothing of our plans. We went over the list of figures and positions as of that evening in hushed concentration, brows furrowed in determination and impending terror. Soon, we would take a torchlight, creep downstairs, and look for our figures again, but in different paintings. Somewhere on that landing, I had turned into a believer, but one desperate to prove herself wrong. So I clutched at my shawl and tiptoed down ahead of my sister, feeling the way with my bare feet on the cold stone floors before reaching the landing and switching on the torch.
By mutual accord, we moved together and silently, checking the paintings as we had marked them earlier. Fifteen minutes later, we stood together at the base of the stairs, both looking foolish. All the figures were where they were supposed to be. Only we were out of our places, out of our warm beds so close to midnight, looking for ghosts like two silly girls. Without speaking, we went up the stairs shamefacedly. At the top of the stairs, I released my pent-up breath, and at the moment I switched off the torchlight I heard a faint creak downstairs. My sister whipped her head around, and then stared at me in the dim moonlight.
“Did you hear that?” she whispered, her voice throbbing with fear. “Did you hear that?”
I shook my head, no, but she had already turned away, her cold fingers clutching my wrist like a vise. She started back down the stairs.
I wanted to call to her, don’t. From where I was standing, I could see the woman’s eyes again, and they were focused straight ahead of her. Yet had I not seen them looking straight at me standing where I was now earlier today? Had I not seen them glow red where there was no light? Had I not been afraid for myself and my sister then?
I half-whispered, half-shrieked down the stairs, “Come back!”
My sister did not look at me, but ahead of her. She straightened her shoulders and turned the corner of the landing, a small, brave figure standing there in the eye line of a thousand malevolent ghost paintings. I felt my heart contract and squeezed my eyes shut. When I opened them again, she was gone.
I leant over the railing, not daring to go down, hovering with my light switched on to show her the way for as far as possible. She crossed the room below and disappeared out of my sight. I sank down in the corner of the railings, shivering, and my light still on to give me courage. I waited for her, able to see nothing, hear nothing. I twisted around and kept watch on the landing for her return, my hand unsteady. Then all of a sudden, the eyes of the Bengali woman switched suddenly, swiftly, straight up in my direction, through the wooden railings to where I was sitting, and at that exact same second I heard a soft gasp down below and my brain blacked out.
When I came to, it was dark and late and still. My heart was thumping madly, like I had just been running, and my torch was still lit. Shakily, I stood and made my way back to my bed. I did not go downstairs to look for my sister, nor look over at her bed to see if she was there. I dived straight under my covers like a coward, choosing not to realize the horror of what had happened that night. I went straight into a dreamless sleep as though my life depended on it, and beside me, my torch shone on.
In the morning, my mother shook me awake. Had I seen my sister, she asked, her voice laced with irritation and something more, and turned away before I finished saying no.
Below stairs at breakfast, my father told me to go out to the fields and look for her, and I went and stood under the banyan a while, trying to think where she could be now.
By the time I got back, my mother had dropped all pretense of irritation and was frantically scouring the house and questioning the servants, trying to find my sister. My father was sitting on the balcony, holding the paper, but his eyes were not moving and his hands were shaking. Does he know what I think he must know, I wondered, but before I could ask him, our great-grand-aunt was there in front of me, out of her own home for the first time in twenty years or more, looking blindly straight into and through me while she listened to my mother’s panic-stricken speculations about rogue cow herders and kidnappers and lonely fields in the winter.
Standing there in the sunlight with the open fields around us, my brain began to work again. Pieces began to fall together, pieces of different pictures that now formed a single empty picture, a picture of an old woman warning the newcomers not to speak of the dead at night, to let a light burn to keep the dead from returning to trade souls, a picture of a place so permeated with memories of the past, so soaked with recollections, not of a race of humans, but of the dead, that even the living started to drown in the quiet peace of the afterlife, a picture of my sister refusing to drown in that quiet peace, questioning, searching --- and then?
I went inside, blanking out everything around me. My mother tried to reach out to me, but I sidestepped and began looking at the paintings again, dreading to see what I must find, among figures of peasants and kings, dancers, tigers, ports, temples, forest, brides in palanquins, and – there. A slender girl, sitting cross-legged at the periphery of a village scene, not watching the dancers in the circle, face half-turned away, questioning, searching, dissatisfied, and trapped even, looking at the horizon beyond both of us. My sister’s face, immortalized in a painting older than my great-grandfather, looked out at me as for the second time I blanked out completely and fainted dead away. As my vision blurred, over the ringing in my ears I heard an unfamiliar sound, like that of a new cow herder’s cry, and briefly I thought of the figure in the painting before this, a sallow looking youth with a bell in his hand, like cow herders of his time, now striding through the fields just an echo away………………
As I’ve said before, I’ve always been a city person. The fast pace leaves you no time to breathe, let alone think too much. The urban muddle can drown out your loss, smooth out your grief. It can blank out your memory and belittle your fear. In a place where you cannot see the sky for the concrete, there is no time to think of ghosts or of guilt. In the city, where it is never quiet, you are safe.
tell me what you think!!
much love,
trisha
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