Each element, from the flaming halo down to the carved base, served as a clue.
“The bodhisattva’s hand, for instance, is fixed in abhaya mudra, a gesture of fearlessness. And this,” he pointed to the fingers, which—I hadn’t noticed—were webbed, “is not an amphibian motif, but an indication, some say, of supernatural power. If you look carefully at his turban, you’ll see it contains a small figurine… of Garuda, a mythical bird-like creature, carrying a naga.”
“Why is that?” asked Adheer.
The speaker shrugged. “The motif is most likely related to a Greek myth… the abduction of Ganymede by Zeus in the form of an eagle. It appears widely in ancient south Asian art, but in this context its significance remains a mystery.”
I remember, at the end of the talk, I waited while the hall emptied, flooded with stark-white tube light. The speaker glanced around the room and I wondered whether he saw me—slouching in the corner in my faded jeans and t-shirt. He stashed away his papers in an old-fashioned briefcase, and joined a professor waiting by the door. They headed out. I caught snatches of conversation. Laughter. Someone flicked the lights off and once again the room sank back into watery darkness.
Later, I saw a poster pinned on the college notice board announcing—like a prophet of the past—the event I’d accidentally attended. Organized by the Department of History. A talk by art historian Doctor Nicholas Petrou.
While Nicholas was an art historian, Lenny was the artist.
Or so I like to believe, even if it probably isn’t a label he’d have claimed for himself. In our hometown, as in hundreds of small towns in India in the late 1980s, there was little room for the imaginative and abstract. The elusive and intangible. Our options indelectably confined to medicine, engineering, or government service—safe, sturdy careers, long, narrow ladders leading to a future ostensibly improved. A quest always for security, hardly for meaning—or what the Greeks called eudaimonia, a human flourishing—and, especially within the puritanical Christian circles our families moved in, rarely for enjoyment. Lenny wasn’t devoted to an artistic profession, but I remember how effortlessly creativity alighted on him, the startling deftness of his hands. He’d sketch portraits of strangers while sitting at roadside teashops, on scraps of paper and napkins. A quick, light touch, each one taking him less than a minute. Or fold paper into birds, which he’d place along his window sill, longing for the sky. Strum the guitar, casual and easy, singing low and tuneful.
A month ago, I was at the National Portrait Gallery in London, for a retrospective on Lucian Freud. The man who only painted portraits. Room after room of faces, distraught, humiliated, indifferent, tenderly in love. A lifetime spent in attempting to capture all of humanity—its myths and frailties—with unrelenting intensity. I followed the eyes, and the eyes followed me. Paintings are always once removed, but not on this occasion. Each canvas raw and visceral. Turned to skin, loose, marked and scarred.
The people he painted, he took their soul.
There’s a sketch Lenny sent me before he died that looks as though it could have been drawn by Lucian Freud. That’s why I like to believe he’s an artist, and that if he’d lived longer, perhaps he’d have come to realize it too.
Instead, he was enrolled, through his parents’ persistent coercion, in a science degree—zoology? biology?—in a college in our hometown. Except, I never saw him attend class, or complete assignments, or venture near an academic building of any sort. He did what all parents found impossibly infuriating—he drifted.
I knew Lenny all my life. We grew up in the same neighborhood, although he was older and we became friends much later, when I was fourteen. Unexpectedly, at the side of a basketball court. One of those dilapidated public sports grounds where youngsters congregated in the evening for lack of anything else to do. Mostly, I hovered around the edges, invisible, pretending to follow the match, watching the big boys play, the ones who jumped like they had wings on their feet.
One day, Lenny showed up and declared it the silliest game he’d ever seen.
“Is this what you do?” he asked. “Sit around watching these guys fight over an orange ball?”
“Sometimes.”
“Do you play?”
I thought it pointless to lie. “No.”
He lit a cigarette, and threw his head back. His face pieced together by an irreverent sculptor—an uneven nose, slanting eyes, a rough chin, and sharp plane cheeks. He smelled of smoke and pine forests, of something wild and unexplored.
He said nothing until he’d finished the cigarette, until he threw it to the ground and it flickered and died, burning itself out.
“Come.”
And I followed.
Before Lenny, I was unattuned to much else apart from my parents’ precise clockwork regime. Weekdays stretched taut between school and homework, punctuated by weekend visits to my grandparents, and church service on Sunday. When I was with him, though, time dissolved into insignificance. It lost its grasp, and loosened, unfurling endlessly as the sea. He’d rent VHS tapes from a movie parlor in town, and watch one after another—it didn’t occur to him to stop if it was late, or dawn. Or he’d walk, for hours, winding his way to unfamiliar neighborhoods on the other side of town. Often, he’d ride his old motorbike out into the countryside, beyond the furthest suburban sprinkle. He ate when he was hungry, slept whenever he happened to be tired, awoke at odd hours between early afternoon and evening. He was out of time. Removed from it like a modern-day Tithonus, existing at the quiet limit of the world.
I’d hurry over to Lenny’s room after school, or on weekend afternoons. It was a basement level space, down a narrow flight of steps accessible only from the outside of the house. Dimly-lit, oddly shaped, with jutting walls and sudden corners, and quite bare apart from a single bed, a writing table, and cupboard. In the corner stood a wooden shelf sinking under the weight of books, some so old they’d turned brittle, riddled by silverfish. They once belonged to a tenant upstairs, an elderly Bengali gentleman who died on a cold winter’s night, leaving Lenny’s family in the awkward position of having to pack up his belongings and giving them away to charity—for he had no family, here or elsewhere, that they knew of. Lenny persuaded his parents to let him keep the library—an eclectic collection, ranging from the obscure (The Collected Letters of Henry J Wintercastle) to the mildly collectable (an 1895 edition of A Tale of Two Cities). I remember how they lay thick and heavy in my hands, slightly musty, the smell that makes me think of Lenny when I walk into a secondhand bookshop.
In the afternoons, we’d go for walks in the pine forest behind his house, and smoke cheap cigarettes, seated on mossy rocks or, if it was a dry month, lying on the ground.
In between the roots of trees, the spines of the earth. Everything suddenly inverted, an upturned silence, grass behind my neck, a tilted view of patchy sky through crazy tangle of twigs and needle-leaves. We’d talk, or rather he’d talk and I’d listen. His voice murmuring like a stream. A book he’d read. This movie he’d seen, about a man wrongly sent to prison. A line he liked. You know what the Mexicans say about the Pacific? They say it has no memory. A poem by Auden. His favorite. All we are not stares back at what we are. Or we’d be quiet. And if we were quiet and unmoving long enough, the forest would flourish over us. They would return, like slivers of sky, a pair of long-tailed blue jays. Elsewhere, a cluster of playful sparrows ventured closer. The clouds seemed to stop and linger. I’d feel heavier and lighter, quieted by the fall of pine needles, feeling their smooth silkiness under my hands. The prickle of tiny black ants clambering over my fingers. For them, I was tree root and stone. Here and there, the sudden fickle flit of yellow butterflies.