EXCERPT. The beginning of absence

I first saw Nicholas in a room that reminded me of an aquarium.

The lights dimmed, a projector flickering like an old movie reel. Sunshine seeping through the curtains into green semi-darkness. The air cold and muted; somewhere the hum of an air-conditioner serving as the underlying rhythm of breath and life.

A talk was underway.

‘What are the possible consequences?’ asked the speaker. ‘If Alexander had succeeded? If he had swept unchallenged across the Indian subcontinent in the fourth century BC? Huge social and political ramifications, to be sure. But I’d say the most spectacular influence would lie elsewhere . . .’

I was struck by the shape of him. The shapes of him. A figure carved in light, growing as he walked nearer, diminishing when he edged away.

He smiled. ‘In art.’

I attended the talk by slim coincidence. It was one of those drifting days on campus, the afternoon mirroring the sky — vast and empty. I’d left my roommate Kalsang, standing by the window, smoking a joint. Like the trees outside, he too was all twigs and arms and branches. A long-limbed Tibetan with a slow languorous voice that sounded like lazy Sundays. Around college, he was called ‘Rock’, an abbreviation of Rock of Gibraltar, a title he’d earned after repeatedly attempting, and failing, his undergraduate exams in Chemistry. It made him oddly out of sync with the world, and considerably older than me.

‘Are you sure you don’t want?’ He held out an elegantly slender spliff.

I was certain. I had a lecture to attend. On Samuel Beckett and symbolism.

That, he demurred, offered even greater pretext to join him.

For reasons I cannot remember — perhaps the class was cancelled? — I found myself aimlessly wandering the college building. Through red-brick corridors divided by slabs of sunlight and shadow, passing rooms desolate as churches, their wooden benches and tables drawn and empty. To my left, through the arches, unfurled a length of grassy lawn, speckled, in winter, with sitting, sloping figures. Occasionally, squirrels scurried across to the stone-path edges, or mynas alighted for a quick walk-about, but now it lay empty, shimmering cleanly in the sunlight. I curved against the length of a pillar. If I leaned out and glanced up, I’d see a cubical tower rising into the sky, bearing, at the top, a cross and a star. On both sides, the wings of the building spread long and low, like a bird in flight. Beyond the hedged borders of the college campus, past the road trilling with rickshaw bells, stood the Ridge Forest, growing on gentle hills running all the way to Rajasthan. The lifeline of Delhi, its rainy, gasping lungs, its last remaining secret.

‘In a forest,’ Lenny once told me, ‘all time is trapped.’

The late summer air hung hot and heavy, coated in slick orange dust. Delhi’s sunshine, belying the city’s ancient origins, was a brash, brutish youth, dashing off stone, glinting against short, toughened grass. If there was one thing I missed about my hometown in the hills — and in honesty there wasn’t all that much — it was the weather. Those seemingly endless days of far-folded mists and glistening rain. My time in the city was marked by months of parched heat and brief, torrid winters.

In retrospect, I should have taken up Kalsang’s offer. He was usually in possession of stellar weed, not the kind that drove people crazy. I’d heard the stories, of course, about various drug-fuelled antics in the residence halls. Oral folklore shared year after year among students, old and new, amounting to a grand collegiate archive, embellished by time and generous imaginations. The one about a boy who uttered his name, persistently, for three days — Karma Karma Karma — for if he stopped, he believed, he’d cease to exist. Or how a lethal blend of the green stuff, cheap glue and cheaper alcohol, convinced a certain economist he could fly. He flung himself off a balcony and landed in a flower bed, emerging more mud-slain than maimed. Another ate three dozen omelettes at a nearby roadside dhaba. (The owner, Mohanji, said the rascal still owed him money.) More recently, a particularly potent brand of Manali cream had persuaded a historian on the floor above mine that he could see ghosts. ‘They hang around at the foot of our beds,’ he said, ‘watching us as we sleep.’

Now, I faced the rest of the day purposeless, and worse, perfectly sober.

Against my arm, the stone pillar burned gently. As respite from the weather, I usually slipped into the library, a cool basement level space where I’d find a corner, read, or more often, nap. That afternoon, when I checked, the library was ‘Closed for Maintenance’ — although there didn’t seem to be any work being done inside. I walked away, mildly disappointed, but further down the corridor, the door to the ambitiously named Conference Hall was slightly ajar, acquiescing a stream of startlingly cold air.

It was cooled sparingly, for special occasions; clearly, today, something important enough called for this luxury. I slipped in and found a seat at the edge of the last row. Before me spilled a surprisingly generous scattering of students, and a few professors up in front.

The speaker’s voice was low yet clear — a strange, deep birdsong — carrying the clipped crispness of a British accent.

‘For centuries, the Buddha was represented through an iconic symbols . . . his footprints, a Bodhi tree, a riderless horse, the dharma wheel, an empty throne . . . how could the infinite, the boundless, be apprehended? Early Buddhist art was shaped by non-presence. Devotees were face to face with a “no-thing”. Certain scholarship states it wasn’t until the Greek presence in South Asia that anthropomorphic representations of the Buddha emerged . . .’

The speaker gestured at a map projected on the wall, a rectangular window glowing white and unearthly.

‘In essence, the art created in the Gandhara region during the Hellenistic period derived its content from Indian mysticism while the form was that of Greek realism. It could have been purely for economic reasons, of course. Gandhara was ruled by the Kushan kings and it was a wealthy region, thanks to its position on the Silk Road . . . So with the luxury goods travelled the monks and missionaries, and with them the Buddha, in human form, perhaps because an image aids in teaching across language barriers. Yet is that all? What is this desire to humanise our gods? To make them in our own image . . .’

In the shimmering darkness, I watched him closely.

He had a face I wanted to reach out and touch.

Broad, yet not indelicate, with long, chiselled cheeks shaded by stubble. A nose that sloped straight and high between deeply-set eyes. I leaned forward, hoping to decipher their colour — but with his glasses, and from that distance, it was impossible to tell.

Only his hair gleamed dense and dark, framing his forehead, his temples, his ears, in waves.

He was never still.

A ripple here, a touch there, a step forward, a few back. With anyone else this might be a mark of anxiety, of nervous, undispelled energy, but his movements were — I can think of no better word — silent. Seamless. Precisely elegant, a tall, sinewy man on a wire, whose gestures swept gracefully through the air.

I had never seen anyone like him.

Or dressed like him.

In a mandarin collar shirt of lightest grey, rolled up at the sleeves, and tailored hazel trousers, belted smartly in black leather. I was certain he’d never set foot outside an air-conditioned room; otherwise impossible to appear, in Delhi, in summer, that immaculate.

(Excerpted from Janice Pariat's book Seahorse)

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