Work Text:
Kasauli’s mornings are bright and fragrant, following on the heels of golden-orange sunrises that Sid would paint if the colours were in the mood to cooperate. Instead, he spends the quiet early morning hours with cups of tea in his tiny balcony, watching the hills behind their wisps of clouds.
At the workshop, he tries to focus on landscapes rather than faces and figures, not ready to sketch experiences he hasn’t categorised yet. They make their way on to his canvases anyway: Tara’s luxurious hair hidden behind the swirl of a wave in the ocean, Sameer’s beautiful lips, curved into a smile, barely hidden beneath the glow of a crescent moon in the night sky. He uses charcoal almost all the time now, unwilling to trust the colours to guide him. Their time will come again, perhaps.
(If anything is blatantly absent in his work, it’s the one person he cannot bear to think about right then. Akash will not appear, not even in fragments of himself; the memory of him, of his words, drifts invisibly behind blank white expanses of sky, lurks beneath the cobbled surface of a street.)
In the evenings, he goes on walks, long, aimless, as though wearing out his boots were an imperative. He begins to smoke, as much for warmth as to give his empty hands something to do. People huddle on wooden benches outside makeshift tea-shops, tourists and locals alike, sharing heat and company and gossip. He pulls his woollen cap down over his ears, accepts a light from a man sitting next to him.
‘Dilli se ho kya?’
Sid pretends not to hear, or not to understand. He doesn’t need to make small talk, doesn’t need to look again at the way the man’s cigarette is held between soft, full lips. The lit match fizzles out, obscuring the man’s curly hair, darkness slipping between them, gathering over the town like a cloak. Sid gets to his feet, drains the last of his scalding tea, ignoring the burn, sets the tumbler down and proceeds up the hill.
Later that night, he sketches that mouth in broad, black strokes over an entire page of his A4-sized sketchbook, the filter of the cigarette between the cupid’s bow of the lips, thin, spidery lines of wintered dryness ornamenting the skin. He thinks briefly of Tara’s mouth, shiny with the earthy brown colour of her lipstick, of a cigarette held between her fingers, bringing it slowly, contemplatively, to her mouth. Thinks of the pad of a thumb against her lips, smearing the colour, slipping into her mouth, and wonders if the thumb could be his.
--
Some mornings, it drizzles. Ramprasad, the boy who brings up the tea every morning, seems barely fifteen. Even on rainy mornings, his chatter doesn’t cease at all. Sid finds it oddly comforting, not the boy’s words themselves, but the whole routine of it, of steaming tea being poured into the old-world white china cup, austerely sitting in its matching, undecorated saucer. Ramprasad talks rapidly, words spilling over themselves as though they’d die if they were left unspoken a moment longer.
That night he thinks of dying words, of things left unspoken. His bit of charcoal sweeps over the paper of his sketchbook, too desultory to mean anything. He drops the charcoal and watches it nestle into the crease between the pages, wiping his smudged fingers on his jeans.
--
‘Sid,’ Sameer’s voice sounds terribly relieved. ‘Achcha hua tune phone kar liya, yaar. I was getting worried.’
‘I’m okay,’ he says, tucking the receiver between his ear and shoulder. ‘Tu kaisa hai?’
‘Good, Sid, I’m good. How’s Kasauli?’
Conversation with Sameer has never been difficult—except for that one drunken night when they were both freshers at college, which they seem to have tacitly agreed never to mention—and Sid eases into it with relief, talking about nothing and everything, eliciting a promise from a reluctant Sameer to stalk Tara’s building and ensure that she’s all right. Neither of them mentions Akash.
‘Draw me something, okay?’ Sameer says, half-sleepy, half-amused, just before he hangs up. ‘I want proof that you’re actually working out there.’
--
He draws Sameer a picture of rain. It’s washing against a glass window that’s closed; Tara always does say that everything he draws has something in it that’s shut off, closed. Through the glass, shapes are visible outside: a blurred figure, genderless in its obscurity, bent over the weight of something large on its back; the fuzzy outlines of the branches of a tree as they get drenched in the rain. He uses pencils this time; charcoal is too soft, too imprecise, to capture the small, sharp imprints of raindrops against the glass. Almost as an afterthought, he draws the rain-smeared outline of another person on the street, this time with a hint of red in the umbrella over her—perhaps his—head.
It’s not much, really, just a small dash of colour on the otherwise grey and white canvas, propped up on his easel in the middle of his room, facing the balcony. Later, he might even take it down to the artists’ common studio, show it to his assigned mentor, get some feedback, maybe add more shades of grey and white.
--
Drawing for Tara is less difficult than drawing for Sameer; there’s no pressure, no expectations from her, no obligation at all to even see her again. It’s liberating, the idea of going back to Bombay, knocking on her door, sitting at her table, watching the way her hair falls in waves around her face, the way she wears her glamour so unselfconsciously, unaware of how beautiful she is.
He draws her a picture of rain washing against a window that’s closed. Through the glass, shapes are visible in the room inside: the dark outline of a desk; a figure sitting in front of it, forehead resting in one hand; the pale yellow glow from a lamp on the desk, casting a circle of light around it; a flowerpot on the windowsill, leaves like feathers brushing against the glass of the window, as if reaching for the rain on the other side. The point of view of someone from the outside, looking in.
The last painting he does before leaving Kasauli, when Bombay’s already crowding his mind, is a portrait of Ramprasad smiling cheekily as he perches on the windowsill of his room, his face bright with energy and laughter. Behind him, rain drizzles gently against the window, the cool, transparent glass keeping the cold wind out.
~end