“God knows who he thinks he is,” Runu mausi jerked her nose towards Mr. Goswami, whom everybody called Master Ji. There was nothing in the art teacher’s demeanor to justify the epithet, though. Not to me that is. The term held the suggestion of a bony male frame, sartorially inelegant. Yet there was nothing inelegant about Mr. Goswami, as he resembled an Italian Lorenzo pipe, dark, brooding and sophisticated in a 3-piece tailored suit.
Customarily, he had cornered the conversation at Mr. Bhattacharya’s post-Durga Puja party. And customarily, he had listeners giving ear with partial enthusiasm.
“This was soon after I had finished my art course from Sorbonne.” Some of us stifled our yawns. The preface too was customary. Prudence, the district magistrate’s English wife, had stretched her eyes till her artificial eyelashes touched the edge of her eyebrows. Seeing me regard her thus she winked. Her husband, Sandeep, had turned his back towards the company. He was collecting his drink – ostensibly? – at the bar set up rather ostentatiously in one corner of the sprawling terrace. I looked up. The clear, spangled sky distended before my eyes, a billowing sari in zari-work.
Although we were in the midst of April, there was a nip in the air. Leaning out from the terraced roof of the Bhattacharyas both Runu mausi and I pulled our sari pallus closer. . The low-peaked bejeweled Mussoorie hills winked back at me.
“She said she was in love with me… she was lovely…” Now everybody craned their necks to look at the speaker. Including the disinterested congregation of listeners. Self-aggrandizement was another of Master Ji’s forte. Maybe not too much out of place in this instance, though, as he did cut a wide swathe amongst the ladies.
“Who did?” the voice was that of Shankar Menon’s, the Shantiniketan artist who headed the art department at The Doon School.
“The girl… my student I was referring to, Chameli.”
“Chameli? Sounds more like a housemaid than a painter.”
“Oh no, she looked rather hip, wore jeans with exotic tops and smoked heavily.” The sarcasm went unnoticed (I suppose) and the crowd pressed closer. “She was also taking classes in water colors.”
“Not Madhubani?” The voice was Runu mausi’s.
Everybody was familiar with Master Ji’s bold Madhubani-style paintings on Durga executed on hand-made paper treated with cow dung. He’d told us that he imported the paper from a remote region in the interiors of Bihar. Several artists, even students at art colleges, had approached him but Master Ji had, so far, guarded his knowledge like a child guards a much-loved toy. Many of his masterpieces adorned Runu mausi’s café-cum-art gallery, a unique diner concept catering to the town’s well-heeled.
“No, not Madhubani,” Master Ji replied staring at a point above Runu mausi’s head.
By now, several late-comers to the party had joined us. Everybody begged him to tell the story from the beginning. Master Ji, tipping his pipe on an ashtray in a well-recognized gesture of self-importance, cleared his throat.
“There was this girl I was teaching when I was a junior assistant professor at the Government Art College.” He began leaning forward in his chair.
“Was she young and pretty?” All heads turned towards Udayan Gautama, son of the poet Vanshaj Gautama and a dabbler in poetry. Udayan’s glad eye was a byword in the upper echelons of our small town society.
“You bet, she was. There were lots of boys after her, but she said she was in love with me.” Udayan’s eyes had narrowed in disbelief. So had, I suspect, everybody else’s. Master Ji was dapper enough but no Adonis, surely.
“I had taken this batch of students to view the cave paintings in Ajanta.” His eyes shone at the recollection.
“Those caves are something, aren’t they?” Sandeep’s voice cut in from the bar. “And did you take a stroll around the garden?”
“Oh yes, that’s when the entire incident took place.”
Now everybody leaned forward, including the arthritic Professor Shivraj Tarafdar who’d retired from Cambridge and built a cottage next to the Bhattacharyas.
“I hadn’t been expecting it. Her slipper having cracked she was hobbling behind the others who had gone far ahead of us.” Then, after a pause, “I had had to stay behind to help her along.”
“And that’s when she sprung it at you, is that right?” Shankar Menon’s voice was tinged with amusement and incredulity.
“Well, not really. First we talked of this and that. She told me about her parents who lived in Nasik. I learnt she had a brother and twin sister.”
Master Ji wasn’t a man for ironies.
“I told her not to be silly and concentrate on her studies. I also let her know that I was a much married man with two children whom I had no intention of leaving. We walked on for a bit and talked of this and that. By the time we returned to college the stupid affair was forgotten,” he beamed at his audience.
“Of course,” he continued, “there was some awkwardness which both of us tried very hard to ignore and nearly succeeded.” Looking at him it was easy to see that he wasn’t uncomfortable in the least; rather, he seemed to be enjoying himself.
“What happened then?” Professor Tarafdar asked.
“She finished college and went back to Nasik. I heard she was teaching art at a local college there. And then…” He paused, scratching his beard. “And then she died. Of pneumonia.” The silence hung heavy, an unwanted pendant suspended in air.
“But, there’s more.”The crowd dispersing at the periphery began to re-congregate.
“Ten years later I ran into her twin, Shiuli. Actually it was she who ran into me.””Shiuli? Another flower?” Professor Tarafdar’s cynicism was urgently shouted down.
“Do you mean Shiuli Chatterji, the artist?” the diminutive professor carried on, unperturbed. “I think she has an opening in Triveni in Delhi sometime next week. Did she also become your student, or what?”
“Oh no. The thing is… heck; I’ll begin from the beginning. You see, I suddenly received a letter out of the blue saying that Chameli wanted to meet me.”
“But I thought you said Chameli was dead?” Professor Tarafdar was beginning to sound uncharacteristically impatient.
“I wish you’d allow me to tell the story my way.” Master Ji’s voice had spiked just a microtone higher. ”Oh, okay.”
“As I was saying, I received this letter, couriered to me as it were. It was my wife who’d received it. Opening it on my instruction she it handed over to me.”
“And what did the letter say?” Shankar Menon sounded half-amused and half-curious.
“That Chameli was coming down to Baroda and that she wanted to meet me.”
Our narrator crossed and re-crossed his legs. “I met her at the station.” He took a deep breath. “The twin, I mean.”
“And I bet she was a spitting image of Chameli,” Shankar Menon sounded a little less amused this time.
“You bet she was. Well, anyway, I took her to see my art department. By then I had also won my second national award.” Many of us stifled yawns for the second time that evening.
“And when did you discover she was the twin?” Professor Menon asked.
“She told me so herself. I wouldn’t have guessed otherwise. They were so similar. Toutes pareils. And like her twin, she wanted me to give her some tips on my Madhubani style.”“And of course, you declined.” Both Mr. Bhattacharya and Shankar Menon chorused like schoolboys.
“Yes, I did,” continued our narrator, ignoring their pooled sarcasm
“Well, anyway,” he resumed, “I took her to see the Baroda Museum and Picture Gallery and the Pratap Vilas Palace. It was on the day she was leaving that she told me about Chameli’s death. She told me she was her twin. I never heard from her again.”
A tame end to a rather tepid story, said Runu mausi to me in private, later. I couldn’t agree more, I replied. Being tired I was loath to pursue the subject.
A week later I accompanied Runu mausi to Delhi. She had to buy ‘raw material’, as she put it, for her café-cum-art gallery. Our first stop was to be the Triveni Art Gallery not far from the Bengali Market. The suggestion had been mine actually; I loved its little café with its steaming parathas and fresh yoghurt.
It was Runu mausi who spotted the announcement. It said, “Shiuli Nathan’s Madhubani paintings on display.”
The painting at the entrance looked vaguely familiar. As always, it was Runu mausi who hit the bull’s eye. “Doesn’t it look like one of Master Ji’s works?” It did, certainly. The large paintings featuring the goddess Durga, especially. I turned over the brochure. There was a brief biography, neatly calligraphed. It listed her exhibitions in India and abroad. There was only one sentence about her teacher; it read: The artist had learnt from her deceased twin sister.
