She took her group of youngsters to one of his paintings and started talking to them about technique and subject. She hadn’t been much older than them when they’d first met.
‘Professor Khayyam…is it okay if we wave to those girls?’ one of her students asked, her eyes riveted on the young prostitutes across the street. It was a daring act for the over-protected girl. She was giving the gift of acknowledgement to a fallen woman, and it would make her feel good about herself. It was rather clever of him to use the neighborhood as backdrop. He owed his mystique in a large part to it, after all.
‘How old do you think those girls might be?’ Khayyam asked, as if they’d spoken only yesterday. He answered in the same vein.
‘Teenagers mostly.’
‘They look older.’
‘Because they’ve seen too much.’
‘Haven’t we all?’
After a pause, she added, ‘I took your old job at the University.’
‘You took much more than that.’
‘Gave back quite a bit too.’
They watched in silence as one of the prostitutes disappeared through a doorway with a middle aged man, who wore his guilt lightly, his desperation openly.
‘What’s his story, do you think?’
‘The same as everyone else’s, I suppose.’ Saqib contemplated saying something cutting about the past. Instead, he said, ‘My mother used to say men who come here are seeking what they’ve lost to their women.’
‘I’m not sure I understand.’
‘Their mothers emasculate them and their wives demonize them.’
She laughed, but his smile faltered as the familiar, faint murmur, the buzz that traveled with him everywhere, rose in pitch and volume – became audible. It was the echo of a whisper he’d first heard when he was five, and it had been echoing in his ears ever since.
‘His mother was a prostitute, you know. All of his paintings depict this area and these women.’
‘Seriously? How sad.’
‘Hasn’t he been in South America since, like, forever?’
‘Is she still alive? The mother, I mean?’
‘I don’t know. Why’s that important?’
‘Well…he’s so well-known and respected; I guess it would’ve made her happy.’
Youth was so romantic. Everything was a tragedy. All whores were victims, and all bastards made good. But every time Saqib heard the whispers, he heard the silence too, where the unasked, all important question resounded. Silence that was as loud to him as the voluble branding he’d received all his life. Who was his father? Or was that important, because his mother was a whore?
‘That’s a nice look for the man of the hour.’ Khayyam whispered, looking at him. Saqib made an effort to smile and said, ‘Let me show you something.’
He led her towards the back of the studio.
‘Look at you, all famous and rich!’
‘Almost famous…and not at all rich.’
Making a mocking expression of disbelief, she linked her arm through his, enjoying the envy of the other women at her familiarity with him. Then she caught sight of her portrait, and gasped.
‘Is that me?’ Abandoning him, she went to take a closer look.
Saqib watched his work with forced detachment. He’d put his dreams to sleep on canvas after canvas, crystallized in a vice of color and form. Some had emerged as twisted nightmares, others as singed vestiges of shattered hopes.
This painting was both.
Like the woman, it had exacted much from him. He’d brushed and stroked in a frenzy of ecstasy or despair, till she emerged out of its blankness in the arms of another man, a faceless lover. But those almond-shaped eyes looked towards Saqib, forever following him.
‘Well, this is a surprise.’ Khayyam’s voice was tinged with irony, ‘I’m not sure if I should thank you for…what was it you said? Putting me on display?’
Saqib realized that he was voyeur and conspirator, sinner and judge, plunderer and savior.
Still looking at her portrait, she said, ‘I might as well. So, thank you, Saqib.’
‘I think it’s one of my best.’
Most of all, perhaps, he was seeker and agnostic. Soon, she was thronged by the socialites, and everyone had something to say about her bold decision of posing nude.
Saqib wandered back to the window, once his escape into other sounds from the ones that came from his mother’s room. The low, soft speech that she only ever used with those drifting men, the tinkling laughter, or those other disturbing noises that drowned in the colorful violence of sights, smells and sounds the window offered. His intimacy with the brutality and the beauty, the crassness and the charm of this small sliver of humanity, condemned him to replicate it; or perhaps, inspired him to apotheosize it.
He saw a boy, barely ten, watching a table of feasting men with an unwavering gaze. The boy shifted between two pillars outside the awning of the ramshackle restaurant. His clothes were torn at places, stained, dirty, and despite the cold, he didn’t wear anything warm. Saqib didn’t have to look to know that the boy wore no shoes either. The boy swallowed as his mouth watered. One of the men at the table, sporting one of the lushest mustaches he’d seen in a while, gold chains and rings glinting in the light of naked bulbs, noticed the boy. The man muttered to his companions. They laughed. With his eyes still on the boy, the man picked up a chop, took quick bites to leave as little meat as possible on the bone, and then flung it across. The boy darted forward. A stray cat too, sprang at the discarded bone with a yowl. The men laughed when they saw the boy wrestle over the bone with the cat.
Scratched and triumphant, the boy gnawed at the bone hungrily. He didn’t hear the laughter of those men. He didn’t see the glances of pity. Nothing existed but the scraps won in a battle he’d have forgotten by morning because it wasn’t unfamiliar or remarkable. A cat today, a boy tomorrow, maybe a shadow in the thick of night…every day was a different battle, and who knew how many scars he’d have until finally, he’d be stripped of anything remotely childlike long before he ceased to be a child.
People began to leave in twos and threes – some with his paintings. But even as something inside him swelled with satisfaction at the recognition, he wanted to snatch the canvases back. This was like giving bits of himself to strangers. This was a violation.
By the time he’d seen the last of the people out, only Khayyam and some of her students were left. She was standing before one of the nudes he’d done of an ageing prostitute, who’d been kind to him growing up. He’d captured her like she was, hanging flesh, wrinkles, misery and all. But he’d also managed to transfuse some measure of that indefatigable, fierce spirit that hadn’t cowed before Time or Life.
