had touched until it hurt while I began figuring out ways to break the news to my dad that I no longer had a job.
He was sitting there in the front row when I graduated. That’s when he really got into power dressing – wearing red and looking like Santa. It also gave him a certain amount of status in the community to say that his daughter was a lawyer and he would often get out the graduation photo and tears would form in his eyes.
That’s why I couldn’t tell them when I went back downstairs. He munched through his rotis asking if I had had a good day, not really stopping to listen for an answer but telling us about some rude passenger who had refused to pay full fare and how he ‘bullocked’ him and how he was tired of the ‘riff-raffies’ on his bus. Mum had put Raj’s CV safely to one side and kept looking over at it and touching her heart as if to tell me that it would break it if I went back on my word. I couldn’t eat anything so told them that I had had something after work, had had a long day and needed to go to bed.
Unable to sleep, I had lots of questions with no answers and an aching feeling of emptiness and solitude, compounded by the fact that I wanted to scream and scream out loud and not stop. But I couldn’t. The day had begun with the Guru’s hands touching me, his fingers circling my lips, and ended with me covering my mouth, making some pathetic, muffled sounds under the duvet so that nobody could hear.
That weekend I didn’t get out of bed. I was running a temperature and was in a state of complete delusion. I could hear my mum faintly in the background, pottering about, bringing food to me, mumbling something about not taking an umbrella, but I slept through it in a blissful state of illusion, imagining that I was married to Jean Michel, that everything had been a nightmare. It was only my dad’s voice that managed to penetrate through my dreamlike state.
‘You’ll be late, Nina. Don’t want to get the sack, get up, you’re better now, no?’
Waking up that morning, when every part of me wanted to remain in a heap, was hell.
‘You’ll be late, Nina,’ my dad shouted again, and then I heard him say to my mum, ‘When I was her age I had to get up at five o’clock every day, even when I was sick. And I was married.’ He said it like marriage had been a double punishment but my mum wasn’t listening. Her mind was still on her future son-in-law.
Dad married Mum under a fog of controversy. It was controversial in the sense that he felt he had been duped. The story goes that he had a chesty cough and went to a chemist, well not really a chemist as you would expect but a shop somewhere in Uganda and that this beautiful woman served him. He was, at the time, searching for a wife and was utterly taken with her. He made a few enquiries as to her eligibility but it turned out that she was already married to the man who owned the chemist’s. In true Indian style, not letting an opportunity go, the woman said she had a sister who lived with her parents in India who would be perfect for my father.
My dad, impetuous as ever, agreed to marry the sister without checking out the goods – if she was anything like her sister she would be snapped up pretty soon. When he saw my mother on the wedding day he tried to hide his disappointment but then I think he really grew to love her. That’s what arranged marriages were like; you learned to fall in love. ‘I was the fooled,’ he joked in front of her. ‘See, Nina, you’re lucky, you can meet these boys and see if you likes them: me, I had no choice.’ And despite the fact that he said he had no choice, they were really compatible and I could never imagine one without the other. It was hardly fireworks between them – more like a Catherine wheel which failed to ignite in the rain but then unexpectedly fizzed about a bit – but it worked for them.
I could barely open my eyes as they felt so sore. I dragged myself up, managed to have a shower, put on my suit and made out as if I was going to work, creeping down the stairs so they wouldn’t have to see me. Just before getting to the front door, I shouted, ‘Bye, Ma. Bye, Dad.’
‘You’ll be home early this evening, nah, beta? I’ve told Raj’s mother to get him to call you at seven-thirty,’ my mum said, pouncing on me from nowhere. ‘Oh, what’s happened to the eyes?’
‘Allergy,’ I replied. ‘Anyway, I’ll try not to be too late,’ I continued, thinking of all the places I could go to kill eight hours.
She handed me an umbrella and saw me out.
My head was throbbing and my body ached. I went to a café and sat there drinking endless cups of coffee, trying to make some kind of a decision as to what to do. What was going to happen to me without Jean – he was there to cushion all the blows. What was I going to do about work? Thank God my dad had drilled it into my head about being careful with money in an attempt to prepare me for ‘the days of the flooding'. Most of what I had earned was put aside. He was right: life was all about trying to make yourself as secure as possible so nobody could come along with any surprises. After hours of sitting there and thinking, I decided to drag myself to the Tate.
For a Monday morning it was busy, with people flocking to see the wardrobe stuffed with worldly possessions. Thankfully there was a Matisse exhibition on. I always liked Matisse. He also studied law and his father was furious when he said he wanted to give it up to paint. He was a great painter and didn’t begin to paint until after recovering from an illness. They say it was providence that sent him that illness to set him on a different path, that only looking back do we know exactly why things have happened.
It had been almost ten years since I’d picked up a paintbrush. I could have continued to paint as a ‘hobby’ after I began my law degree but it was always all or nothing with me. Even when I was angry or sad and had a desperate urge to splatter the emotion across a blank canvas, I resisted and picked up my books and studied instead. Studied and did what everyone else wanted me to do, and became who others wanted me to be.
The rooms where Matisse’s pictures were displayed were not as busy as downstairs. But as soon as I walked in I could feel the warmth. His pictures gave me energy, their raw emotions expressed with an explosion of pure, intense colours. There was no option but to stare at the paintings, to feel them: violets to stir feelings placed next to sunny, optimistic yellows, vibrant oranges against laconic blues and sober greens floating among a sea of passionate cerulean red. When I stared into Matisse’s colours I could see other colours that weren’t really there; realities that were invented; somewhere I could escape.
Matisse’s paintings carried me into his world without me even realising, making me forget who or where I was. He painted windows that let you fly in and out; bold strips of colour like the green that ran along his wife’s nose and made you feel you could balance on it, look at her every feature and see what he saw; hues of reality next to splashes of imagination. I wandered around for hours, drawn into his world, lost in the depths of his colour, soaking up every ray, searching for the shadows that he had skilfully eliminated. In every painting, I found peace.
I went to have lunch in the cafeteria and found that my thoughts had become calmer, and because I didn’t want to think any more deeply I concentrated on the noise that the cutlery and crockery were making, watching the tourists, many of whom had pulled out their guidebooks to see which exhibitions they would visit next.
Before leaving the Tate I visited the shop and picked up a book on Matisse. I randomly flicked through the pages and stopped at one of his quotes:
‘In art, truth and reality begin when one no longer understands what one is doing or what one knows, and when there remains an energy that is all the stronger for being constrained, controlled and compressed.’
I put the book back. It wasn’t a sign – dead people were unable to speak.
With a few more hours to kill before going back home, I decided to take a walk
