the mountain and the murderess

amita basu

In the foreground sits the woman, facing us, her back leaning on the granite countertop. In the background her husband emerges from the bathroom, mobile phone clutched in hand, eyes shining, telling his wife’s back that it was his boss who called. The woman’s arm is on the countertop. Out of her husband’s view, behind cover of the knife-box, her fingers play with the steak knife.
          The woman’s face is blank canvas. I’ve painted her arm resting on the counter. But her hand is a blank too. I don’t know how angry to make her face, how tense to make her hand. How does a woman look when she’s contemplating murdering her cheating husband? Unheld, the steak-knife hovers over the granite. I dab on yellow-gray acrylic paint: the glint, through the frosted kitchen window, of the street light on the stainless-steel blade. I back across my bedroom to take perspective of Painting #1.
          Sweat streams down my brow. It’s the hottest July on record. The monsoon is in a years-long deficit; the hydroelectric plants are struggling; the electricity was gone again all last night, no air-conditioning, just the ceiling fan jogging sluggishly on the backup generator. I tossed in bed like an egg boiling in a super-slow cooker. In my bedroom-cum-studio I turn to Painting #2.
          This painting is composited from several photos I took in Kanchenjunga in 2019. It memorialises the mountains’ tranquillity—in theory. In practice, snow, ice, lake, and sky—it’s all blue and white, lyrical in life, kitschy on canvas. I dab blue flecks on the white ice, white flecks on the blue sky. Now it looks even more like a Liberty-print tablecloth.
          In my twenties I used to work on one painting at a time. When that got stuck, I’d stop working. Now I work on two paintings, so if I’m stuck on one I’ll still be working—in theory. In practice, I’ve been escaping from one painting to the other, from both into sleepless nights, one blank day stretching into another, a stretching cat, that cat in the Matrix, that déjà vu, the days of my life one blank Möbius strip. From between my two works-in-progress the wall calendar grins at me. This will be the twelfth consecutive day I fail to draw a red X through the day. 2022 has been a white desert, sprouting only the odd clump of red-Xed scrub, red hope flowering beautiful and terrible.
          Ping! Sushil texts good morning. He had a good night, he says. Me too, he hopes. “ . . . really looking forward to you moving in, Pragya. Let me know when?”
          Putting my phone back out of sight in the cupboard, I glance at the two or three pieces, lying between newspapers, that I’ve managed to finish this year. Even these scanty outpourings aren’t good enough to frame. Should it be this hard? I’m crucifying myself for my art. But I haven’t Christ’s love of life; I might never have any message worth conveying. Maybe a ho-hum life with Sushil is all I deserve. I fling down my palate.
          I go run my 10k. I used to run around the lake. Now I run round and round the flat complex. Grandmas push prams. Housewives power-walk in pairs. They, too, must’ve had ambitions once. They, too, seem content, now. Today I see a new face. A twelve-year-old is jogging, sweat-drenched, stumbling, lips clamped. Is he anorexic or just training? Should I speak to him? None of the other grownups pays this child, running like a grownup, joylessly, any heed. I run on.
          I did tell Sushil I’d move in with him. But I just said that hoping the threat of change would jolt me awake, that the terror of a ho-hum life would blossom red on my canvas and murder my calendar red. Back upstairs, I recheck my phone. Sushil hasn’t sent a follow-up. He’s used to waiting. He’s a nice guy, viz, he’s got only niceness to recommend him. I study his WhatsApp profile photo: moon-round face, skin chickenpox-pitted, wispy fringe ringing his scalp, though he’s my age, thirty-five. I yawn and step into the bath and only stop yawning when the cold water hits my neck.
          Running late, I stuff my lunchbox into my backpack. Even when I’m stuck on a painting, or especially when I’m stuck, I can’t tear myself away. Ma’s sitting in the kitchen, eyes shut, one nostril pinched shut, exhaling like a hyperventilating bellows. She refuses nasal drops for her allergic rhinitis. ‘God knows what long-term side-effects . . .’ Instead she does pranayama, every day from 8:40-9:10am, to condition her airways. No timepiece in sight, but Ma’s got a Swiss watch in her head. “Bye, Ma.”
          Ma cocks one eye open. “Looks like rain. Got your raincoat?”
          “Always,” I mutter. The monsoon is half over but I’ve not needed my raincoat once this year, never taken it out of my backpack. Still Ma asks about it every morning.
          I look into Pa’s bedroom. He’s combing through his dusty bookshelves. “Bye, Pa.”
          Pa looks up and readjusts his PM-95 mask. We’ve all got our vaccines, all three doses. But Pa’s mask habit predates Covid: he’s got the dusty-ouchies, too.
          “Careful crossing the road!” says Pa, his voice mask-muffled. “Traffic is so crazy, these days anyone could just hit you and leave you lying there and run away.”
          “Alright,” I say.
          My ballet flats half-on, their heels folded under mine, I shut the front door and hasten downstairs. Sometimes my parents remember more warnings to call out the door after me.
          I wait for an auto-rickshaw. Sweat prickles my neck under my blazer, which Jesus College requires female faculty, but not male, to wear. The city has dug up the road again to lay water pipes. An Indian road once wounded never heals. From the scars badly bandaged, the tires of cement-mixer trucks conjure dust clouds. I fumble at my mask, checking for seal, preemptively clearing my throat. From the electric pole above my head severed wires dangle, reaching out to caress me as I perch between an open drain and a mound of cow dung. The cow dung is olive green but smells of rotten pumpkin. There’s no grass for cows anymore; the city is all concrete and piles of plastic-bagged rubbish. How, I wonder, stink-stupefied, does a plastic diet make rotten-pumpkin-smelling poop? The electric pole down the road is an even denser forest of wires. Today it’s hosting a forest fire. One clump of wires is short circuiting, the spark on its crown fire working then abating.
          Nobody blinks an eye. Everybody’s rushing by.
          Sushil wanted one of my paintings. Maybe someday, I said. I didn’t want him showing it off to his friends, whom I’ve mostly managed to avoid meeting. I picture my third-grade Kanchenjunga on Sushil’s walls amongst other tame landscapes and text-based pop art. His tastes are innocuous, like the cosy mystery he wrote. He asked me what I thought of his book. Quite nice, I said. I mean it’s not like he’s ever writing another. Ostrich published Pleasant Holiday five years ago: a two-book deal, and the second book was due four years ago.
          Who am I to criticise? Innocuous stuff sells (Pleasant Holiday always excepted). People come home exhausted. They want to rest their eyes on something nice. Like my Kanchenjunga, or the portraits I did in my teens, pretty and toothless, like DeviantArt pieces de-Mangafied. Who would want my murderess on their wall? There’s trouble enough in life; you don’t want trouble in your art. Maybe I should just sign my Kanchenjunga and present it to Sushil. Surely thirty-five is old enough to accept one’s limits. As for my murderess, I’ll paint over her with a blue river. Landscapes: that’s the way. My solo show at Gallery Ské went fine. They invited me to do a second. That was three years ago. Maybe it’s time to resign myself to painting pastel panoramas and chuckle with Sushil over our youthful ambitions and our gently expanding waistlines.
          I awaken from my rumination, coughing into my mask, dust in my throat, to a white-headed woman bent double. My toes recoil from the hundred prickly fingertips of the street-sweeper’s broom. Would van Gogh ruminate so after a fallow fortnight at the easel? No. He’d be striding about, translucent eyes interrogating strangers’ faces, pinched cheeks flush with life. Maybe that’s what I need: being forced among women brandishing brooms, boys pushing thelas vending wilting spinach and sprouting potatoes.
          Van Gogh—that’s who would want a murderess on his wall. He would never sign my Liberty-print Hallmark mountainscape. He’d burn it for heat.
          I watch the ghost of Van Gogh jogging downstreet, easel strapped to prematurely hunched back. A spark from the short-circuiting electric pole pounces on his neck. He jumps, startled, fox-like. He glares up. But his eyes only burn the brighter with life. He jogs on, around the corner, out of view. I turn to face, in the glass wall of Apollo Pharmacy across the street, my own face, well-fed and stupid.
          Got your raincoat? says Ma. Beware of cars! says Pa. It’s alright for Ma and Pa to swaddle themselves. They chose this life. I need to be jolted awake. Threatening to move in with Sushil clearly wasn’t enough. 
          I focus on images of Sushil last weekend, in his dim, cool, stuffy Indiranagar bungalow. He sprawled on the sofa, laughing too loudly at my favourite stand-up comics on Prime, retelling his own handful of exciting experiences, strangely dull and few for a journalist. He’s a tech and finance journalist, mostly armchair. I sat in the rocking chair ten feet away. When I happened finally to mention the stink from his clogged sink, he shouted at his maid like the Terminator on ‘roids. He was nothing like I’d seen him before. Actually, that bit must’ve just been a hallucination. Can a powerful stink in a stuffy house act as a psychedelic? Sushil doesn’t have a temper.
          In the unwalled darshini café across the street, a tall customer hovers at the counter. His long fingers are wrapped around a tiny steel coffee cup. Long hair, mostly white, though he’s only thirty-seven. Narrow waist and broad shoulders, like Shiva of the man-bunned dreadlocks and ten-pack abs. But how do I know how old he is?
          I get into an auto-rickshaw. Wonder what Jokhim’s doing these days. Jokhim wasn’t attractive at all, not really, not like Shiva, destruction’s blue hipster god. Jokhim was prematurely grayed, yet another Bangalore software engineer. Jokhim’s every speech was a paean to cryptocurrency. I struggled to stay awake. Not that I’m a catch, either. I’ve got a personality roughly the size and shape of a monkfish’s face. But when I met Jokhim three years ago, I was coming off a string of men who couldn’t get it up, keep it up. I couldn’t keep my hands off Jokhim the stallion. I even tried BDSM, just because he was into it. 
          Of course I didn’t like Jokhim. How can you like someone who pulls you out of your self-declared one-sided marriage to art? Of course I couldn’t leave Jokhim. He was the kind of muse artists run after: love, hate, all that good stuff.
          Then I met Sushil. I jumped ship. Sushil’s kept me away from Jokhim. That’s about all I’ve got out of him in two years. The auto-rickshaw jerks into a pothole, out again, and swerves around a half-levelled speed bump. I poke my head out and peer back at the darshini. Friction: maybe that’s all it is, this tingling in my groin.
          You learn to live without things. In my ten-year stint as a vegan I forgot what meat tasted like. Now I’ve forgotten how to want good sex, have become again—so I’ve been thinking—safely asexual, my libido killed. But what if this is what’s been missing? I haven’t made one good painting since 2020.
          My finger hovers over Sushil’s bland, bespectacled photo. I picture my Liberty-print Kanchenjunga hanging over Sushil’s television. My girlfriend, ladies and gentleman! And me beside him, my smile insipid, my conscience at peace, my paintbrush forever scratching the surface.
          “I’ll let you know,” I text Sushil. 
          I hunt up Jokhim’s number. “Morning, Jokhim. How’ve you been?”
          What am I doing? Life is complicated enough and, never mind ethics, I’ve got too much dignity to cheat. Also too little time.
          I disembark. Fifty rupees, auto-rickshaws charge for a paltry 2.5 kilometres, and sixty on the way back— it’s harder to get fares back from the interior, they claim. The war in Ukraine is ravaging my wallet. I sprint down the main road’s gaping, see-sawing paving stones, over the rushing drain, to make the biometric sign-in at 0859, to avoid losing a half-day’s pay. For Jesus College is a corporate company disguised as an educational institute.

“So, reality monitoring,” I lecture, staring at Kuvaasi, “is tracking whether you saw something in real life, or imagined it, or dreamt it.” Did Sushil really hurl abuses at his poor old maid last weekend, or did I hallucinate it? “Self-explanatory, right? Keeping track of what’s real.” 
          My eyes bore into Kuvaasi’s skull. Twisted around in her perforated-metal chair, Kuvaasi’s babbling at the student behind her. Her crow’s voice floats nine rows to me at the front of the lecture hall. Other students suspend their own quieter conversations and gaze at me doe-eyed. Kuvaasi chatters on. 
          “Whereas source monitoring,” I resume, and so does the general chatter, “is about tracking where, specifically, you encountered something. For instance, who said ‘Eat, Play, Laugh’? Was it Hitler”—I display the Führer’s picture under the quote on my PowerPoint presentation—“or someone slightly less flabby?”
          Two front-benchers giggle and lean forward to hear me over the racket. Kuvaasi is only the worst of a bad lot. My ears radiate heat. I count to ten and focus my Cognitive Psychology lecture on five or six front-benchers. The rest of my class I leave to hum along to their earphones, duckface for group selfies, give each other talk therapy, or smash their MacBook Air keyboards playing Minecraft. Every year, Jesus College admits bigger classes, raises tuition, and squeezes more peripherals out of students via field-trip fees, uniform fees, and charity bake sales. These second-year undergraduates are a class of ‘86.
          I’ve requested them, once or twice, to be quiet. I didn’t sign up to teach kindergarteners. Here I stand, teaching. There they sit, twenty-year-olds. My fury rises; I choke it; I lecture on. To appease my fury, in the back of my mind I prepare another tough question paper: seas of righteous red ink, half the class failed again. Yes, there’s shame in malice aforethought. But that’s nothing like the shame in a public outburst of fury—face blazing and spurting like a rotten tomato, shouting and stammering, fists clenched, fingernails excavating my own flesh and, for weeks afterwards, creeping around shame-faced, years of self-straitjacketing undone in one instant, all the world licensed to snicker at the raving madwoman.
          I introduce the demonstration I spent lunch hour yesterday creating. I guide the front-benchers through examples to distinguish reality monitoring from source monitoring. I’ve thrown in references to that Korean crap and TikTok turd-fest the Gen-Zers are mad on. The front-benchers follow along with my examples, giggling, clutching their desks’ edge, struggling to hear me even with my hip-mounted microphone. I wonder if they, too, are waiting to get away from this place where learning comes to curl up and die.
          I wipe the sweat off my brow. I’m on my fifth coffee, still exhausted. The syllabus stretches before us endlessly. Quantity over quality is Jesus’s motto in every domain. In these chairs I sat, myself, what feels like yesterday, struggling to hear, waiting to get away. How did I end up back here? I glance at Kuvaasi. Her toad’s eyes are occasionally turned ahead towards her laptop, where she’s playing a movie. Her hog’s figure is squeezed into a kurta two sizes too small. Again I count to ten.
          In my teens I had a temper like if Ivan the Fourth begat a child on Mel Gibson. I’d spend hours incandescent, smashing things, telling friends and family where to go. My mind would hover over my body, exiled, petrified, watching my body raging. Afterwards, I’d creep around, wishing myself dead, other people’s forgiveness, unasked, sticking frog-like in my throat. I felt like Oedipus, aware of my fate—a friendless wasteland—but marching open-eyed towards it. Worst of all, with my conscience a constant screaming wound, I couldn’t paint. So I strangled my rage. I tossed my rage comatose into the dungeon. Now the idea of a confrontation makes my back slouch, shoulders slump, eyes glaze. Now life doesn’t get in the way. Now I’m free to paint. Paint what, exactly?
          I halt mid-sentence. I walk around my table. I stand at the edge of my dais. Silence falls like an eclipse. Eventually, the hapless boy sitting behind Kuvaasi, on whom Kuvaasi is currently bestowing certain favours— so the rumours go around the staffroom—nudges her. She turns face forward, mutes her movie, and doffs her earphones.
          My heart pounds in my ears deafening me, pounds behind my eyes blackening my vision. My fists clench at my sides.
          “Get out,” I say. “Put your mobile phone and laptop on my table, and get out.”
          Kuvaasi sits staring. Is everyone else’s heart also pounding inside my skull? Surely one heart cannot generate so much bass. Kuvaasi sits staring for a bit. Then she gets up, dumps her electronics on my table, and saunters door-wards, flat feet slapping. My blood is still boiling, choking my voice. This can’t be so easy.
          “I’m cancelling your attendance,” I say. My voice doesn’t sound choking. It sounds sharp as a steak knife.            “Technically, you’ve been absent in my class all semester. No more attendance for sitting there sprawling, honking like a goose.”
          “But, ma’am,” she begins. Now I’ve got her. Marks and attendance, notes and coins: this is the only currency Jesus students recognise. I stride to the door and slam it in her face.
          I remount my dais. I stare down the class. Laptops have been lidded, mobile phones pocketed, earphones dropped on desktops coiled like snakes. How wide can you open your eyes before your eyelids birth your eyeballs? My shoulders aren’t slumped. They’re pulled back. I should seize this opportunity to rebuke the whole class. But everyone is sitting face forward now. The sludge in my veins has turned to liquid meth. I could teach for days, and they’d listen. I save my rebuke for a rainy day.
          Why have I hesitated to exert my authority? I’m allowed. My colleagues have even been encouraging me to, telling me my laxity spoils the students for their classes.
          We breeze through the rest of the hour. Everyone’s asking questions, answering questions, especially the back-benchers. The students’ eyes hang on mine. They speak now only to me, voices high with appeal, low with deference. Heat, what heat? I stride down the aisles, gliding on air, seven feet tall.
          I’ve been waiting for the long frothing tail of shame after a rage-tsunami. I think of those power-hungry capitalist bastards I used to despise, those power-game-playing control-freak bitches. I realise my shame isn’t coming. Here, I have power. Here, I had the right to rage. I grin at my class, wondering how the hell it’s taken me thirty-five years to realise exerting your authority is a stronger stimulant than cocaine.
          After class, en route to my cabin, I hear a raised voice, something between a laryngitic lark and a cuckolded cockatoo. “All that, I accept,” it shrills, “but how dare she cancel my attendance? Nowhere does the Student Handbook say she can do that. I checked!” 
          The second bell rings. Kuvaasi emerges from Santhosh’s cabin, smiling with all her teeth. Good afternoon, ma’am, she says. I stare through her.
          I sit in my cabin, waiting for Santhosh to come convey Kuvaasi’s message. Santosh is the second-years’ class teacher, the mediator between them and other faculty. His cabin’s always swamped with students, mostly female, leaning over his desk, squeezing their assets together—so the rumours go. I breeze through my assignment corrections, still riding my tidal wave of rage, my lunch forgotten. Passing each other on postprandial bathroom trips, Santhosh and I exchange good afternoons. 
          “Hot day, Dr. Ghosh,” he says. I nod and stop. But he only smiles with all his teeth, then excuses himself, pleading assignment corrections.
          In the bathroom mirror I picture the meeting we’ll eventually have. Totally informal, buried in a labyrinthine conversation—full of confiding updates about his family, and friendly inquiries about mine—will be a request, so ciphered you’d have to know Morse to decode it, to maybe possibly reconsider cancelling students’ attendance, which might be tricky, rule-wise, as long as they’re physically present, for you know how kids are these days, and their parents, too.
          Santhosh has no authority over me. I’ll choose not to know Morse. I picture him squirming, circumlocuting, baulking at the fence like a horse never ready.
          Rotund little Santhosh, in a department dominated by female faculty, female students, has become a woman. But Santhosh is just one ring-master in India’s million-circus of civility. Here, in the chasm between the saccharine majority and the cutthroat gangsters, you can count on one hand the people who handle confrontation Germanly. No wonder the world’s most populous nation has produced so few Nobel laureates, Olympians, Oscar winners. Our niceness helps us survive this vast sardine-can. But it strangles progress.
          I finish correcting assignments. The heat seeps back into me. My energy leaks down through my toes. I’m tired from skipping lunch. But now my appetite has gone. I lay my head down to nap.
          Ping! “I’m fine, Pragya,” Jokhim texts, “and how are you? Good to hear from you.”
          I put my phone away and shut my eyes. But it’s useless now.

Sweat glues my shirt to my back as I trudge towards the auto-rickshaw stand. I’ve draped my blazer over my head against the sun still blazing at 4pm. These days, even a cart-pushing vegetable vendor accepts GooglePay, even for ten rupees’ worth of potatoes. But this driver has gray hair and unfocussed eyes. So I ask him whether he accepts GooglePay. No, he says, but waves me into his auto.
          “Then, d’you have change for Rs.100?” Still standing outside, I clear my throat. My voice is already sleep-thick, my body ready to stretch out. Please God, just let there be electricity back home.
          He nods. He asks for Rs.70. I tell him I always pay sixty. He jerks his head at the backseat. We set off. I like elderly drivers: they drive slower. Maybe it’s because they can’t see the road too well. Maybe it’s because they’ve seen too much.
          In the rearview mirror the driver’s skin is grayish under his grizzled beard, his watery eyes restless. He looks like he lives on tea and cigarettes. His khaki uniform is splotched gray-brown. He scratches his chin with an inch-long pinky fingernail. I’ve watched movies. I know what one long fingernail means. Is it snuff or something stronger that he scoops into his nostrils? I wonder what he wanted to be when he was a toddler, before he learned that tadpoles become frogs and the sons of auto-drivers become auto-drivers.
          It’s mid-monsoon but Hullimavu Lake’s 120 acres are still grassland, interspersed with shallows, few and far between and covered with water-hyacinth weed. The wind blows towards us over the expanse, barely cooled, picking up the stinks of dead fish and sewage from the condo complexes springing all around. Across the road stand tiny houses, painted in neon colours, surmounted by royal-blue water tanks. These modest dwellings have been here since the days when Hullimavu was an actual lake that used to draw grebes and swans, hikers and birders. Just ten years ago this place was miles beyond Bangalore’s outskirts. I used to run here, dodging neon-sneakered feet and lycra-wrapped butts. Now the lake is dead and this neighbourhood is mid-city and I look away.
          “If you don’t have change, sir,” I say as we pass the shops, “we can get it here.”
          I call everyone ‘sir.’ Politeness is like the sun: powerful and free. They don’t always call you ‘madam’ in return, but that’s not rudeness: it’s ignorance of the pragmatics of English. Or maybe it’s sullenness. For it’s mostly outsiders who’re living in these condo-complexes, mostly locals who’re driving autos and buses and living in these bright tiny jigsaw-piece-shaped dwellings.
          “I’ve got change,” the auto-driver mutters.
          I stop him at the head of the private lane leading to the flat complex. I never make autos drive all the way up to the gate. Bed, here I come! No, the floor will be much cooler. Cool white tiles. Half-asleep, I produce my hundred. The driver produces a twenty. Slicking a sweat ribbon off my temple, I hold out my hand for twenty more, thank you goodnight. He pats his breast pocket perfunctorily.
          “Sir, you said you had change.” I’m speaking Hindi, though I’m only fluent in English. His Hindi is broken, too. He shrugs, holds out his twenty, and beckons for my hundred.
          Is he dishonest or just atrocious at arithmetic? “I’m paying sixty, not eighty. Please give me twenty more.” Senile, maybe.
          Suddenly he shouts, “How can I give if I don’t have?” 
          I step back, startled. I remind myself that, for many people, shouting is normal communication. I find a fifty in my wallet. Fifty is closer than eighty is to the fare we agreed on, the standard fare. I’ll give him the other ten tomorrow. The same drivers haunt the auto-stand every afternoon.
          He glares as if I’ve blasphemed Brahma. “You cheating!” he cries. “You pay full money.”
          “I’m trying to pay full money,” I enunciate. “I told you we could stop for change.”
          “What stop for change? Where we will stop?” His gray eyes blaze. His arms flail like a scarecrow’s in his khaki sleeves as he points here and there.
          “At any of the shops.” I long to thrust the fifty at him and walk away. “If you’d stopped anyw—”
          “What shops? What shops will give change? Nobody give change.” He jerks his hand, fingers taut, signifying ‘nothing doing.’
          I raise my voice, just enough to get his attention before he shouts himself into a frenzy. “What’re you saying? I get change from shops all the time.” So do auto-drivers; I see them all the time. “You didn’t even check if you—” 
          “What check?” he shouts. “You suppose to pay. You pay!” He snatches at my hundred. I step back. I tuck the note into my wallet. He pounds his fists on his thighs. “You pay! I bring you all the way here!”
          A speck of his spit lands on my cheek. My forefinger goes to it. The ember of spit ignites the straw-pile.             Mightily I shout, my weak voice instantly cracking, “What ‘all the way’? It’s 2.5 kilometres. If I’d booked an auto via Uber, it would’ve cost just thirty-three, thirty-five rupees. I wanted to GooglePay you, everyone accepts online payment now, but you don’t. Fine. I asked you beforehand if you had change for a hundred, and you said yes. Fine. I said we could stop for change, and you said no need. Fine! Now you want me to pay eighty when we agreed on sixty? You take this”—I hold out the fifty—“or you get nothing!”
          He recoils. “You crazy,” he mutters. “Crazy lady.”
          My neck tenses, the muscles rigor-mortising into a titanium trap trying to crack my spine. My fists clench and my knuckles anticipate, with a jolt of joy, slamming into his hollow cheek. You thought the Cog Psych class this morning drained my rage? That’s not how rage works. Class only shook my rage awake and gave it a warm-up. Now my rage is ready for its afternoon 10k, itching to make up for years comatose in the dungeon. I’ll lay this scarecrow’s rickety arse out flat. But I’ve bottled my rage. I haven’t punched him. I find myself striding away homewards. Over my rage-filled body my mind hovers, exiled and petrified.
          “You’re mad!” the driver calls after me.
          I stare ahead. My nostrils flare. Is it biologically possible to breathe fire? He follows me, his engine croaking, rage radiating from me in an orange-yellow halo surely visible.
          “You’re mad!” he shouts. His front wheel grazes my trouser leg. My feet itch to break into a sprint and my fists tense to whip around and punch through his windshield. This is my neighbourhood.
          I stride through the gate. Both security guards step out of their booth. The dhobi pauses and stares, his washed-and-ironed-and-folded clothes piled on one shoulder. The gardener, who’s been pulling his hose along, showering the anthuriums, stops and stares, inundating the aparajita creepers that cover with shy blue-purple flowers the compound wall. I twist my scowl into a Buddha smile and stride on, staring straight ahead.
          The guards stop the auto-driver. Safe, now! If he’d been civil, I might’ve borrowed ten rupees from the guards to pay him what we’d agreed on. He stands outside the gate, shouting. Let him. Calling people mad is the only relief for people like that: a carnival relief. I take the steps three at a time. Rage is definitely stronger than coffee. I wonder if it’s stronger than meth.
          Left, right, I stride. Flash, flash, two lightning-bolts slice through my brain.
          Left. I’ve got three options for Painting #1. Go witness a murder. Or paint my murderess only in profile, blank-faced. Or shut my eyes, imagine myself murdering someone, freeze frame, open my eyes, and go paint my own face from the mirror. 
          I’m taking the third option. I can think of one or two someones I’d like to picture murdering in ultra-high-def.
          Right. Painting #2 needs a focus. Something to unify that mess of blues and whites, rocks and clouds. Suddenly I see the painting has no sun. I picture the sun where it should be: off-centre, a blinding hole in the sky, partly occluded by an eagle silhouetted black. Around the nucleus of sky and eagle, Painting #2 begins taking form at last.
          Left, right, vivid as the afterimage of an eclipse, my two paintings flash before me: finished, hanging up, gallery visitors standing with tilted necks and slack knees.
          And I haven’t killed my libido. And I haven’t killed my rage. And I shan’t.
          My parents are lounging over their late lunch, watching the news. I hurry by, mumbling greetings. In my bedroom I sprawl under the AC. The Arctic-down blanket of the day’s heat lifts from me. I picture the donkey driver, standing there, making a scene. The guards might ring us to complain. My parents would be telling me news stories about murderous auto-drivers till 2043.
          I replenish my wallet and skip downstairs. The driver stands outside the gate, arms akimbo. The guards watch as I hand over sixty rupees without a word or look. 
          I climb back. There’s still a spring in my step. My rage has vapourised my exhaustion and, once again, the shame isn’t coming, there’s no reaction of exhaustion coming. Today I won’t need a nap.

In the shower, the cold water chills my spine. He could’ve hurt me. So close outside my gate, in broad daylight —but what had he to lose? Frail is an auto-rickshaw, but frailer is human flesh. It’s with a smile too wide that I greet, every weekend, the thirty-year-old who rolls her wheelchair under the plumeria, the sixty-year-old with half her face scarred from ancient burns who watches over her twin granddaughters in the sandbox. They grew up behind these gates too. It took one second to cripple them.
          What then, I wonder, standing wet-skinned, wet-haired in the AC’s blast, should I have done? Overpaid the auto-driver? But he was in the wrong. I stand enjoying the cold until it becomes painful. I draw the memory of the cold around me, like an ice-cloak against tomorrow’s heat. If only you could store up heat and cold as you store body fat and pain.
          In my bedroom-cum-studio, gold in the afternoon, I add the sun and eagle to Painting #2. Finally I feel as I felt at Kanchenjunga when I’d got away, that one afternoon, during our trip there. As always, Ma and Pa had taken a chauffeured car all the way, instructing the driver to drive slowly and stop occasionally for a view. That holiday was a string of teas, layered mufflers, and visits from acquaintances bringing boxes of sweets. Alone at last that afternoon, I walked uphill. I wandered, photographing the Himalayas, straying to the edge of the dirt-road. Sudden wings flapped in my face. I flailed and stumbled and almost fell down the chasm. As the eagle flew away from me, black against the sun, I felt it at last, the thing that everyone wants to feel on a holiday, though no sane person would seek it: almost dead, alive.
          I add finishing touches to Painting #2. The texturing is as good as I can make it. But the shadows aren’t quite right. Mentally I list the skills I must practise in my next painting, the exercises I must do. I could spend sixty years improving my technique, doing landscapes, each incrementally better. Surely that’s worthwhile.
          Why, after all, did I relegate my Kanchenjunga to second-class status? The hierarchy of genres is dead. The Impressionists were iconoclasts, they blasted those icons, but they painted mostly sun and flowers, straw hats and waterfronts. As for the artist feeding cannibalistically on himself, digesting agony into art—surely that’s only a myth. Would it be so terrible if a good landscape is all I ever learned to paint?
          Fact: I could’ve got hurt today. Fact: my life was shit when I was a slave to my passions. Also fact: I painted my best pieces while lusting after Jokhim, while hating Jokhim for tearing me out of myself. 
          I face Painting #1. It’s clear as daylight now that I haven’t the life experience to paint it.
          Snarling voices startle the sleepy afternoon. I open the window. Beyond the flat complex stand rows of tiny whitewashed rooms rented out to labourers. Somewhere in there a couple is shouting. A man emerges, pulling his shirt on, violently shaking his head, striding towards the water tanker that he drives around town all day, delivering potable water from the borewell that’s owned by the man who also owns these rooms. For the city is growing like a million teenage boys. The municipality can’t keep up. Half the city’s water comes now from commercial borewells. The woman the water-tanker driver was arguing with is still shouting, hidden from view. The man leaps out his driver’s seat and runs back inside, shouting too.
          Why is he half-dressed? Were they fucking or trying to sleep? In these tin-roofed, tiny-windowed rooms, the heat must be terrible. Nowhere to cool off. No room of one’s own to retreat to. I picture my auto-driver going home to a room like this. Has he found somewhere to cool off with a pinch of snuff, or is he taking our fight out on his wife? A woman even grayer and frailer than him.
          I put the last brushstroke on #2 and lean it against the wall to dry. I’m fiddling, putting off facing #1. That woman out there who’s shouting herself hoarse—she would know exactly how my murderess should look. But she’s got neither the time to paint, nor the technique I’ve laboured on all my life. If that woman had the riches of my life plus the riches of her own, she’d be a Picasso. 
          I’ve stared at #1 so long I can no longer see it clearly, to decide anything. Need a break.
          In the drawing room, in yet another brand-new outfit on NDTV, Modi is making yet another speech. Pa shouts at the television, his diatribe peppered with ‘goat’ and ‘donkey,’ his dark face livid with rage, his aquiline nose scrunched up ugly with impotent rage. Modi has been P.M. eight years now but Pa, a hereditary communist, still can’t believe it.
          “Just look at him!” Pa turns on Ma as if she were responsible for what’s on television, for what’s happening to the country whose independence their parents fought for.
          Ma looks up from today’s Sudoku. “I’m looking. But what can I do?”
          Pa’s only been waiting for this invitation to spread out his invective’s main course. “ . . . all thanks to the poor, ignorant millions,” he concludes, “who voted a second time for this wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing!”
          “Everyone is ignorant,” says Ma. “Only you are a genius.” Ma hates Modi too, but Pa makes himself more proximally problematic.
          Pa twists his face into a crooked smile. On his iPad he reads out an admiring comment, from a professor of politics in Toledo, on Pa’s latest article in The Wire, his beloved independent journal. He reads with relish, glancing at Ma, who’s busy with her Sudoku. The next comment on Pa’s article is somewhat critical. Reading it aloud, Pa halts midway and clears his throat. “Anyway! Clearly there’re brainwashed fundamentalists everywhere. I’m going to temple.”
          ‘Temple’ is what Pa, a hereditary atheist, calls the bathroom, specifically #2. I picture him hunched over his iPad, nodding along at The Wire, sniggering at the Facebook statuses of former friends who’ve betrayed their country to jump on the Modi bandwagon.
          The television turned down, Ma’s alone with her Sudoku. She glances up. I sit down beside her on the divan. We chat about our day. I tell Ma nothing ever happens to me.
          Today’s Sudoku is moderately difficult: three stars out of five. On the coffee table, where Ma rests her legs, sits a paper-clipped pile of Sudokus, 3”X3”, snipped from many editions of The Hindu. Every day, in between watching the news and reading it, Ma revisits old Sudokus and fills in the occasional digit. I watch her studying today’s puzzle. Her pen rests on the square she wants to solve, leaves that square blank, and moves on to another. A black dot marks her failure. The pile of puzzles, each partly filled in with ink—red, black, and blue—grows thick.
          Does Ma ever feel the urge to tear up her pile of Sudokus never finished? I rise and stroke her gray hair. I go stand outside the closed bathroom door. Pa’s chuckling inside. Does he ever realise his private rants are useless? I stroke the door’s butter-yellow paint, which is bubbling over the swelling, shrinking plywood. I picture Pa, self-absorbed, righteous in his rages, his heart aching for his collapsing country, all his rants doing not a whit to hold it up. Tears rise up my throat.
          I confront Painting #1. Never, God grant: never do my parents weary of their lives. They pulled themselves up by their bootstraps. And how dare I hanker to be great when I haven’t even become competent Look at the reflection in this lake! It’s about as transparent as FTX’s bookkeeping. I take #1 off the easel, prepare to take it off the stretchers to turn it over, to use the back for another landscape. Something Ma could hang in the drawing room, between my seascape and my cactus-eye-view of the Thar. 
          My knees wobble. I’m sprawling on the floor.
          God bless the dutiful! I am not one of them. All I’ve got is this tiny chance at greatness.
          I snatch up my phone. I text Jokhim: “I’m fine, thanks. I’ve missed you.” 
          I text Sushil: “I’ll move in this weekend.” I edit ‘this weekend’ to ‘very soon.’ I survey the edited words. Excitement still tingles me, but excitement now protracted over many days of back-and-forths, plannings and deferrings; many little jolts, to get me through many days, which would’ve been otherwise sterile, blocked at my easel, mentally unbearably constipated. 
          Sushil’s a big boy. He can stand it. I’ve stood much worse from people, terrified of letting out one angry word lest I let out a tsunami.
          Jokhim doesn’t need to know about Sushil. Sushil’s just another chap who’s slack in the sack, whose worm won’t wriggle. And Sushil doesn’t need to know about Jokhim. All this while, Sushil’s been assuring me his E.D. has nothing to do with me. I’ve been assuring him it doesn’t bother me. Of course it bothers me. And maybe he’s lying too; maybe it’s got everything to do with me. I’m fit, but my breasts sag about halfway down the highway to hell. Of course we’ve been lying to each other. At my maiden exhibition, he gushed over my landscapes, which in fact were barely passable.
          I picture my life with Sushil. Maybe moving in with him will be the jolt I need to graduate from lush landscapes to prurient portraits, to finally feel up to a second show at Gallery Ské. When that novelty wears off, maybe then I’ll tell him yes, I do mind his flagging flagpole, let’s go see the doctor. Maybe then I’ll see him rage. Maybe his rage will inspire another breakthrough in my art. Lift your lips, puppy-dog! Show us those white fangs. You did shout at your lazy old, poor old maid. Why have I been trying to convince myself that was a hallucination?
          I put #1 back on the easel. I picture sneaking out to see Jokhim. As for not having time to cheat, it’s not like my time now is producing great results. If I spent more time living, I’d have less time at my canvas, but maybe that time would be more fruitful. I stare at #1, wondering how the hell it’s taken me thirty-five years to figure this out.
          I study Jokhim’s new profile photo. A paunch! This is new. Revulsion chills me, the revulsion you feel when there’s no affection to blur your vision. Well, maybe he’s got a year or two left before the flaccid affliction finds him too. Maybe I’ll finally manage to persuade him to try something without a safeword. I’m only a tourist in BDSM land. Jokhim, a respectful resident, practises a pansy-like particularity about rules. But I can be very persuasive.
          I picture Sushil finding out about Jokhim. My heart races. But they’re two educated chaps, Indian chaps. They’ll merely murmur apologies to each other, and shake hands, and walk off, leaving me alone. For I’m no Helen. Over me there’ll be no fighting.
          Well, then: Sushil must never find out about Jokhim. When my conscience bellows, this time I’ll know where to redirect that energy. Of course, Sushil’s no auto-driver and Jokhim’s no Kuvaasi; I’ll need to be on my watch. Tomorrow I’ll resume running out in the real world, around the lake. It makes me angry to see the lake dead. But my anger will only make me run faster, weave more deftly around potholes and rubbish-piles. 
          Ping! “Good to hear you’re fine! I’ve missed you, too. Shall we catch up sometime?”
          I drink in the words. I silence my phone and toss it in the cupboard. I’ll reply to Jokhim next time my focus flags. I look at #1. I look into the mirror. There’s Kuvaasi with her goggling eyes, sitting there sprawling, honking like a goose, flattering herself that she’s getting away with murder. My fist clenches my palette knife. The knife’s handle is too slender: my hand twists to clutch it. The knuckles bulge. My fingers squeeze. The veins start forth from my skin till I can’t tell what’s vein, what’s ligament, what’s wrist bone. And now, at last, I’ve got the woman’s hand. And her face? I look up at my face in the mirror. My medium-brown face is livid, my well-proportioned nose scrunched up ugly with impotent rage. My heart pounds behind my temples but my vision isn’t blackened, my shoulders aren’t slumped. My back is turned to my husband, but every ounce of me follows his movements as the cheating bastard emerges from the bathroom, babbling. My body lounging against the countertop in the shadows tightens for my spring.