The coffee tasted good. Roy liked his coffee that way – strong and sugary. Somehow the new age outlets never seemed to make it as well as the good old ‘Darshinis’ which one could find almost everywhere in Karnataka. On a typical day, the type of people who would come to a Darshini was very predictable. Elderly office-goers and students of a more economical variety would come after a hard day’s work and order nothing but the usual cuppa. They would discuss anything from politics to college antics to troublesome wives amongst themselves and down their anxiety and refresh themselves.
Roy would often be part of this. As soon as a person entered, he could tell whether his day was good or bad, approximately what class he came from and what sort of work he did. No one could beat Roy at this. That was probably why his sketches and paintings were so famous. The piece of canvas would contain not just a person but also everything that went with him. His paintings depicted life from the eyes of the subject.
But today, things were just not going right. He had been sitting there at his usual corner table since nearly an hour and he was plain bored. Not a single face had interested him. He was getting old and he had not painted his perfect piece yet. Time was running out and Bangalore suddenly seemed to lack good faces. Gone were the days when every single face had a story to tell. All Roy had to do was observe, pick and start playing with the colours. In the recent past, he did not seem to find much variation in one person’s aura from the other’s. Every face seemed to mingle with the multitude. Suddenly he was struck by a thought that made him cringe. Had he, Roy, lost the ability to See? He remembered how he used to tell his mate Vicky condescendingly that every face had a story to tell, it was up to the artist to bring it out with the clarity of colour and the rationale of the brush. He looked sadly around at the many people cribbing in the usual manner about bad roads and poor infrastructure.
Lonely is the man who has lost his friend and lonelier still is the man who has lost his calling. Roy dragged himself towards Madhavan Park where the spirited youth play and fight and fight and play more purposefully than anyone else, hoping to feel better. Somewhere to his left, a car screeched to a halt and the door flew open. There were loud good-byes screamed out randomly and as suddenly as it had stopped, the doors banged shut and the car shot off like a rocket trying to land on Mars. A young girl of around twenty had got off the car. He looked at her blankly and suddenly it hit him. He could not read a story into her face either. The plain eyes seemed tired and the nose was quite pointy. She smiled slightly at Roy when she noticed the stare. But there was no other reaction. Neither that of self-consciousness nor that of invitation. It was just an absent minded smile. She was just about to walk off when Roy spoke up.
“Do you erm.. live her?”
“Just a block away,” she answered promptly.
Roy licked his dry lips. “I know this would sound strange but actually, I’m an artist. I paint people and their lives. If you could please sit patiently for an hour…” He was irritated with himself for behaving like an amateur. And why had he asked her when there was nothing he could see in her face? Had his talent just dried up?
“Look I’m no model but yeah… if you insist.” “I’ll be paid right?” she added as an afterthought.
He was sitting precariously on a small chair with one leg resting on the couch and the other hidden underneath. Paints, palettes and canvas were strewn all over. Yamini, as the girl had later introduced herself, was fast asleep on a nearby sofa. He had never drawn a sleeping subject before. But now he felt it was better she did not see him struggle to bring meaning to her existence. If there is anything artists hate, it is lack of inspiration and Roy was trying his best to get inspired. She was a plain girl in every sense of the term. Yet there was a self-confidant streak in her. She had explained away the accent with a “oh god, you must be wondering… I work at a call center.” In his mind he had immediately made the connection to the recent murder of a call center employee by the cab driver. But as soon as he brought up the subject of safety, she had reacted indifferently, “you’re here for a painting, right?”
He began as he had begun every single painting of his. A swish here, a swish there and Yamini’s ‘plain’ face was imprinted in light watery colours. He could not resist adding a number of other faces from memory who seemed to have no specific purpose in life. The roads of Bangalore with speeding taxi-cabs were set as the backdrop. Slowly, as his painting progressed, things were becoming clearer and clearer. Bangalore was literally crawling with call centre employees. Roy, who had never given much thought to the phenomenon till now, pondered over what had become of his beloved city. Once known for simple folk with great minds, now young minds were not even being allowed to develop. With a sudden fury, he began to add deathly looking youth devoid of energy. The sap of life streamed out of them and collected in little shimmering pools. Yes, Bangalore’s most posh and attractive buildings. But then his canvas, for the first time, seemed too small for the world it had to depict. There was so much more to this.
A tap was dripping water with musical regularity. A dog was moaning in the distance. Street kids were playing with cheerful little shouts and a lot of laughter. Roy registered none of this. He was transported to another world. A world where the colonizers shipped Indians in large numbers to places where cheap labour was required. A world where the work was done by the Indians and shipped to ‘developed’ countries. Had the world really changed? Roy suddenly felt like a child newly informed about some natural phenomenon that he had failed to notice till then. With all the zeal of an inspired artist, he sat about adjusting a new canvas onto his easel. The cultures diverged, met at the west, rose and the flames consumed the east, all in an angry array of colours. The cycle had to repeat and the new centers of colonization – the call centers shimmered with the pride of dominance while the lifeless youth of a nation beamed with the uninformed pride of reflected glory.
Yamini, just awakened from the glorious slumber that a night shift had deprived her of, gaped at the painting in dismay. Her hall was a mess of spilt colour, water brushes and palettes. But she recovered quickly enough to enquire if it was abstract art.
“Abstract? It’s the new world order and yet not new after all.” Roy’s excitement was palpable. “Don’t you see, it is a pattern that has to be gleaned from the cyclic movement of world affairs. We must save ourselves before we get intellectually enslaved by the big brothers.” What scared Roy most was the fact that he seemed to be excited by the idea. An artist loves his creation like a father and this was Roy’s best creation. Yes, he had finally made it.
A distraught Yamini had called security to get him out of her home. Roy just could not understand it. He had tried explaining it to the security guard but to no avail. But he had to tell everyone. The man in a black jacket trying to cross the highway, the young woman at the fancy store, the bespectacled lady at the bakery, all of them had either ignored him or told him that he did not know what he was talking about. Vicky too had just smiled compassionately at him and said “it’ll sell macha, people buy this kind of thing.”
The coffee was tasteless. Or rather Roy was too numbed to relish the coffee at the Darshini with the innocence of a mere coffee addict on the look out for faces whose stories he could steal and camouflage as paintings. He was now burdened with the great truth of the times and additionally with the pain of not being accepted. He looked at the usual crowd streaming in and wondered why he was not in a bar trying to drown in his misery. Misery? Why should he feel miserable? His fault lay in the fact that he had seen beyond his times. Thought beyond his times. Expressed beyond his times. Artists, unfortunately were forever condemned to be confined bodily to their times. Roy would cope. There was after all, coffee and the money that the ‘best’ painting would bring.
