Artist, Undone

by V. Sanjay Kumar

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

I can see where you are going. Up shit creek...with a paddle.' He was right. That is where I was going. It was the kind of thing that my analyst had always warned me against: 'You are at an inflexion point in a mood to do the irrational and the irreverent.' He forgot irreversible. Harsh Sinha - 'Fat F**ked and Forty' - is so moved by a painting bearing this name and a compelling likeness to him that he spends a large chunk of his life's savings on it. Announcing a year-long sabbatical from his advertising job in Mumbai he returns to Chennai to his wife and daughter determined to spend quality time with them. Sadly, his wife Gayathri no longer wants him; she is more interested in the artist next door. The artist, Newton Kumaraswamy is an inveterate womanizer and a famous thief - his every work an ode to that acknowledged master Francis Newton Souza. With no job to turn to and no family to lean on Harsh returns to Mumbai to let himself freefall further into the seductive world of contemporary Indian art and artists... Sharp, rough, and written with biting candour, Artist, Undone is a beguiling narrative of one man?s understanding of the creation, the commerce and the critiquing of contemporary art. It is also a montage of lives changed ? mauled, redefined and occasionally redeemed ? by it.

Release date: August 7, 2012

Publisher: Hachette India

Print pages: 230

Sample

This picture tells a story.

My story.

It was on the front page of the morning paper and a bleary me put on my graded focals and peered hard at it. Then I cut it out and put it in my shirt pocket. At sunset I fixed myself a stiff drink and pulled out the sweat-stained cutting once more. I stared it down. Another gulp of whisky and I was sure.

It was me sitting amongst the flora.

Take a look yourself – legs pressed tightly together, the clenched fist, the folds in the midriff, the noble forehead. Not to miss the dimming bulb behind my head, either.

You might see an ageing fruitcake but I said, ‘What a bloody likeness.’

I read some more of the news report. It was a painting coming up for auction, a feature lot in an art sale to be held in December.

I had to buy it.

Why?

Why would an art-illiterate like me run after this?

Simple.

I didn’t want the world to see my tits.



The auction house was courteous when I called. They had a few questions and I gave them a nice reference and soon I was registered as a bidder. They sent me a glossy catalogue. There, in a beautifully printed fold-out, I saw the picture clearer than ever. When I read the title I smiled.

Fat, Fucked and Forty2000, Acrylic on canvas pasted on board30 × 71 in | 76.2 × 180.3 cmSigned and dated in English (reverse)

The painter was some guy called Nataraj Sharma. Male; born 1958. Forty-two years old when he painted it, probably fat, and probably fucked.

But that fellow in the picture was not him.

It was me.



I took the cutting to my office and stuck it on my crowded pin-board. Roongta, the agency accountant and resident Marwari, came in and first off set his eyes on it. He has the sharp eyes of an auditor and never misses a thing. He looked at me quizzically. ‘Nice picture. Photoshop? You have done cut and paste? What have you called it?’

‘Fat, Fucked and Forty,’ I said.

He thought, looked at me and thought again. And then he whispered in my ear with a grin: ‘Chaalis, Charbi aur Choothiya?’

I laughed. ‘Good translation. Actually, it’s a painting in an auction. I am going to bid for it.’

He looked puzzled. ‘You are bidding in an auction for a painting of a topless man?’

I nodded.

‘Serious? Wow.’ He looked worried. Then smiled as he came up with another one-liner: ‘I can see where you are going. Up shit creek… with a paddle.’

Well said. That is where I was going.

I bought the work.

In December 2005, I logged onto Saffronart’s Winter Online Auction of Indian Contemporary Art and with a few furious clicks of the mouse, in all of six minutes, I beat off three other bidders. Then I sat in my sweat, legs pressed together, one fist clenched, and looked up slowly.

When the blinking screen came to a rest, it showed Rs 27 plus lakhs.

Sold to Anonymous 135.

Me.



For a thinking, middle-class, art-less, muddled-up advertising professional like me it was an arm and a leg to pay for a picture. It was the kind of thing that my analyst had always warned me against: ‘You are at an inflexion point, in a mood to do the irrational and the irreverent.’

He forgot irreversible.

I got up from my desk with a printout of the auction result in my hand, went up to my boss and asked for a year’s sabbatical.

‘Sabba – what?’ he screamed. ‘Are you drunk again? Are you sick?’

I ignored his histrionics. ‘I need a gap year.’

‘Gap year? What the hell is that?’

He was feigning ignorance but I played along.

‘It means I take a whole year off and you take me back when I return.’

He took a deep breath and counted till his BP settled.

‘What do you think we are running out here?’ he whispered.

‘A tight ship, boss,’ I said. ‘And I need to go ashore for a while.’

I smiled at him. I had nothing more to say. I patted him on the shoulder and trooped out.

Before he could stop sputtering I had boarded a flight home.

The rest of my life is the story I have to tell.

My name is Harsh Sinha. I am a foul-mouthed Bihari. And this is the story of a few fucked-up men.



It was a Monday, the day after our fifteenth wedding anniversary. I had been home in Chennai for the weekend. For the last eight years, I had caught the first flight to Mumbai every Monday morning. Mumbai was my place of work; it was where my corporate atma resided. Chennai was my time with the family that had – eight years ago – refused to accompany me.

It had been a stand-off without winners. I could not see a career in marketing outside Mumbai and my wife and daughter could not see themselves living in a poky apartment in a suburb like Mulund while I did the long commute to the hundred-square-feet office in Express Towers that the agency had given me to come up with some smarts.

This Monday was special.

It was meant to be the last of this eight-year weekly commute. I had decided to chuck my job and take a sabbatical. My analyst thought it was a great idea.

My wife thought I needed another analyst.

‘You are forty-plus, Harsh, and you want a gap year? Why don’t you grow up first?’ Gayathri has a sharp mind and a sharper tongue. ‘Maybe no one will want you back once you have plugged your gap. Have you thought about that?’

I had done this gruelling, weekly intercity commute for eight years only so that I could build us a nice little nest egg – a good middle-class anda – that we could sit tight on and hatch when the need arose; a nest egg, whose size, unfortunately, kept growing with our expectations. But I must have been quite down and out, because the last few months in Mumbai had brought me to the edge of an abyss that I was finding increasingly attractive.

For the first time in my life, I had felt reckless.

I broke the news gently to Gayathri. I had bought a painting, I told her, a symbolic one. I showed her the printout and told her the title. And I told her I had already asked my boss for a sabbatical.

It was an inflexion point all right.

You could have cut the air between us with a knife and drawn blood.

Instead of the joyous and celebratory weekend I had anticipated, it had been a grim and silent one. I had expected Gayathri to respond warmly to my announcement. The prospect of my staying home in Chennai should have evoked joy, or at least relief. But she was strangely quiet. I should have known something was amiss but I was too tired to spark a discussion.

So there I was, early Monday morning, with the sun emerging behind our beachside home near the Coromandel Artists’ Village. I had to head back one last time to Mumbai to serve my notice period.

I waited for the customary peck on my cheek.

But something else happened.

I stood at the door, holding my bag, the sun streaming in behind me.

My wife stood with one hand shading her eyes, the other holding out my ticket. A flicker of something passed across her face but her voice, when she spoke, was low and clear.

She held out her hand, palm facing me, holding me off.

‘Harsh, don’t come back. Ever.’

I dropped my bag.

After fifteen years of a peaceful, settled, one-beautiful-daughter marriage, Sow (bhagyawati) Gayathri nee Srinivasan was asking me, Chi (ranjeev) Harsh Sinha, to walk out?

To stay out and, kind of, get lost?

The timing could not have been more off – at the very moment that I was remedying an eight-year weekend marriage with the prospect of a no-travel, no-office, home-stay, my wife was asking me to go, get the hell out, scat.

I could barely respond. Something at the back of my fuddled brain was telling me, ‘It’s her house, always was.’

To her credit she gave me a few minutes.

I spoke in a daze: ‘Have you misunderstood? I just told you I will stay here and not go back. Ever.’

She shook her head. No tears, no emotion.

I made as if to speak and she cut me off: ‘You don’t get it, do you? You were like a guest in my home for fifteen years. Now you have to leave.’

I spluttered: ‘Exactly. That’s what I am saying. I am stopping this going away every week routine. I will…’

Another shake of the head. Where did that determination come from?

She spoke up low and clear:

‘You were a guest in my home,’ she repeated. ‘Even when you were here.’



The ride to the airport was long and strange. There was no going back. That was the thought that kept hammering at me. Home, wife, daughter – gone.

At the terminal I headed for the washroom. I stood in front of the mirror for a long while. About me, men squeezed in and out, washing hands, combing hair, spitting sideways, jostling against me. I stood and stared at myself. I kept looking for a sign, for something that would explain what had happened. It was the same guy I knew who stared back. It was so bloody sudden. Yet there was no going back, I knew that much about Gayathri. She would have planned this meticulously – even the suddenness.

The loo attendant walked in and waited for me to move. When I didn’t, he swished his mop around my feet and splashed foam on my shoes.

I was past caring.

How could something like this happen to the guy in the mirror? A successful, well-balanced, wholesome Provider and Family Man like him does not get tossed out by a placid, down-to-earth, Homemaker Wife.

Not in the movies, not in anything.

Then why me?

I swore long and hard.

I had no idea why this had happened.

I hadn’t seen it coming.

And I realized I didn’t know fuck about my wife Gayathri Srinivasan.



I heard my name being called out through a fog. A shrill voice was asking Harsh Sinha to immediately report to the gates. Final boarding call, it shrieked again. I willed myself to drag my feet towards the security hold. By the time I got there they had offloaded my bags.

‘Sorry, sir, but…’ started the airline official, holding a squawking handset.

‘That’s okay,’ I said. ‘I fell asleep in the lounge. Do you have a flight to Bangalore?’

It was midnight when I rang the doorbell at my parents’ place in Indiranagar. I had been regretting the spur-of-the-moment decision to head there all the way from the airport. My mother answered the door on the second ring. She rubbed her eyes. No questions. She looked at me like mothers do and let me in wordlessly. I knew then that she knew. Gayathri must have called ahead. Prim, proper, convent school Gayathri – of the flock of the Good Shepherd.

I spent a couple of days with my parents, living their life.

We discussed nothing, we hardly spoke. No questions were asked and nobody got blamed. My mother kept shaking her head, disbelief writ large on her face. My father kept his silence. He was a garrulous soul and this was completely unlike him. We all simmered in our own space.

Strangely, it was what I needed – a quiet communion with anger and hurt.

As I made to leave a few days later, my father took me aside. ‘If there is anything…?’ he began, and stopped. He looked at me like fathers do.

‘Yes,’ I told him, placing my hand on his shoulder. ‘Don’t die on me for a while.’

That got him. He laughed. I could hear him laughing all the way out of the driveway.



All I did for the next few days was try to figure out how I had missed so much. After so many years together how had I not figured Gayathri out? What was it in me that had caused this? What had I lacked?

In the slums next to our house in Chennai, drunks regularly beat up their wives. They beat them in their shelters; they drag them out and beat them on the roads; they wrestle with them and beat them in the markets. Despite all this, theirs is still a Hindu Undivided (brawling-drunk) Family.

Or take the artist down the road from us. His affairs and flings are forgiven. Repeatedly. There is war and bloodshed at every discovery, pleadings in the aftermath and then a passionate peace.

Then there is the well-known businessman who comes on weekends to a posh villa nearby to indulge his affairs. He heads home to his family early morning every Monday, waving cheerily at me as I head back to Mumbai.

Fuck.

I had always thought Gayathri and I were above all this, above these soap operas. We were so sorted out. So very correct in our ways that we had earned the right to cluck our disapproval and wish mankind well.

And now, this.

If you don’t know why, you cannot rest.



Back in Mumbai, I lost interest in a lot of things. I didn’t sleep well.

I had my friends – let’s call them buddies – all male, all married, typical fellows. I couldn’t meet them, not till I had repaired my ego and thought up stock answers to their questions. The fuckers would come at me, I knew that. ‘More than meets the eye,’ would be their consensus. ‘This had to happen, man. How long can a fellow leave his wife for five days a week in Chennai and come away to Mumbai? A nut-case, or what? Hasn’t he seen what happens to lonely women these days? Hasn’t he watched all the serials, the movies?’ I would need strength and fiction to face that gang.

I knew no women I could turn to.

I didn’t know how to turn to a woman for anything.

Yup. Harsh Sinha – good-looking, well-educated, articulate, regular Joe and premier arranged-marriage-votary – had never wooed, never flirted. Never learnt the give and take, the sensitive yes and no, the important maybes, the gestures, the unspoken thoughts, the ups and downs that make for companionship with women. At every eye contact that had happened, I had looked down, or looked away. I had never stared at a woman hard enough to know what lay beyond. I never had a sister or a cousin. I’d studied in an all-male boarding school and bonded well with my mates.

Women?

I behaved with them like any middle-class, morally confused, arms-length choothiya. I was the world’s best brother; maybe not even that.

I was digging a hole with thoughts like these and feeling small as an ant. I needed to seek refuge somewhere. And there are people in Mumbai just for this scenario. They are called analysts.

Analysts and I go back a long way.

People like me are easy analyst fodder.

We succumb sooner or later.

Eight years ago, when I had first started my weekly work trips to Mumbai, I’d felt this huge, yawning gap in the evenings. I was tired of booze and getting too fond of male bonding and television. Something was missing and I didn’t know what. I felt uneasy and didn’t know why.

Three years into my Chennai–Mumbai shuttle I started paying weekly money for a yap.

There have been two analysts in my life. I did not play around. They had both eventually shown me the door. The first did so in a moment of pique, which I thought was unprofessional. They know how dependent one can become on them, and then to cut one off on a personal issue?

The second I loved to hate – which is why I went to him. But then I got curious about him and it was curtains. This time it was his secretary who showed me the door.



Let me show you a fucking door.

There was this wonderful reproduction my first analyst had on his reception wall. It had a peephole on the left and what one saw through the peephole on the right. Between them was this strange and mysterious door. I discovered later that it was a work called The Freud Cycle; the face belonged to Sigmund Freud and the door led to Freud’s study. The great man had died well before I was born but I often imagined myself going through that door for a heart-to-heart with him.

In Mumbai, admissions like ‘I am seeing an analyst’ are still uncommon. Only a few people like me make it to an analyst’s couch. We are the shitless minority. A guy who goes to a psycho is considered a paagal.

Why?

Because he goes.

And if you are stupid enough to disclose this fact you are a certified loon. A loose. A nutter.

People are always curious when I tell them. They want to know everything. ‘How does this analyst thing work? Is there really a couch you sit on? Tell us all,’ they demand.

Okay, let me tell you.

Psychos are all kindly people. It goes with the territory. They learn very quickly that their sharp incisive minds have to be camouflaged.

This is their camouflage checklist:



Wear loose clothes that hang on you. Try a comfortable tweed jacket and round-neck tees, the kind you see in Woody Allen films.



Adopt an easy air with a shuffling gait, a slightly slouched posture and a soft drone that is interspersed with a hmm. The deeper the hmm, the better.



If you have a furrowed brow and your smile brings out your wrinkles you can do without the above.



Hair is important. There should be a shock of it on your head, lightly brushed. If bald, try a beard. Flecks of grey are compulsory.



If a woman (and there are few), cultivate a deep voice and the warmth of a comforter. Strictly no touching.



And fuck your eye prescription. Fuck your 20/20 vision. You should all graduate summa cum spectacles. The thicker the lens the better. It lends an air of calm to your gaze.

This is how it is. Trust me, I know. I’ve been through more than one so I can talk.

And talk is what I did.

Twice a week, I would rest my sweet ass on their Rexine couches and sweat into my underpants and babble like a brook while they sat passive as stones.

Mumbai is full of people like me – people who need analysts. Just look around you. There are many I would like to send to one. Yet there are very few analysts around. And they are all anonymous little moles whom you never otherwise see or hear. How do you find them? That’s the difficult part. They do not advertise and you cannot go around asking people, ‘Erm…can you suggest a good analyst? Have you been seeing one?’

I had scoured the long list at the entrance of many a hospital. Many heart people, many gastro fellows, strong renal teams and huge gynae armies – but no psycho anything. I tried the yellow pages; I searched on the internet. Finally, I asked other doctors. Voila. All at once I had a list.

Now what? I went through it alphabetically. I climbed many stairs. All of them were on the first or second floors of old buildings with sweeping wooden stairs covered in red matting. One would wheeze all the way up and stumble on the matting all the way down. None of them had signboards, so I would use the lift just to ask the liftman for directions.

‘Woh dimag ka doctor?’ the fellow would ask, his senses suddenly alert. ‘Second floor, go left. There will be a small nameplate with a bell below, a bell with a speaker.. . .