Dreams Of Déjà Vu - Chapter 4

Something dark shifted inside Nathan. He didn’t remember a thing after that.

When he woke up, he was swirling in white on a bed, facing a large window. An old man, somewhat familiar, was stooping over him with great concern over his smug face. “How do you feel now, my boy? It is indeed unfortunate...” He tapped Nathan’s hand with his thick, stubby finger.

Chuck and his father were standing on either side.

Nathan felt calm. He smiled at that old man in the white coat. Eternities were spreading through him, and before long he was discharged from the hospital. The fact that Leonara got married didn’t seem to bite him.

“If you take these,’ his father said, pointing to the medicine cases, ‘you won’t feel much, Nathan. How much will you go through, my boy? How much?” His father murmured, leaving his room.

Chuck stayed with him for a few days.

“What happened to me?” Nathan asked.

“Uncle says you fell unconscious. When you sat up you spoke about art, aesthetics, criticism, perspectives of beauty… the beauty of perspectives. You spoke for hours with such rage and vigor that you passed out again. He got you to the hospital and when you woke, you spoke of assemblage, caricature, expressionism… Uncle noted it all down. That’s when Dr. Oak took charge of the situation.”

“Leonara got married. Do you know that?” said Nathan.

Chuck nodded, looking at his friend, eddying in his grief.

The next day Chuck returned with a small tote bag to Lovely Sadan. “I think I’ll stay here for a few more days.” Those days lasted two months, during which Nathan got back on his feet. Chuck egged him on with his daily rituals, living, and painting.

Her marriage was someone’s idea of a poor joke, whispered Nathan. He let this truth crumble inside him into a heap, though outwardly he appeared intact. He wasn’t going to allow Chuck or his father to get more concerned. He was going to hold his own failing bits and parts, no matter how difficult it was.

Even after Chuck left, he visited Nathan often, and the year inched on with Nathan remembering what had gone into it only faintly. All that the year was - the year in which Leo got married.

With Chuck’s help, Nathan immersed himself into setting up the other panel of his diptych life: the dream of being a painter with wide-open eyes, where he could explore, question, seek, rage, fight, and find himself in this world and above it, from dawn to dusk, unfurling on canvas.

He occupied the upper floor of the Raman house.

When Leonara’s father had put up their first floor house for sale, Mr. Raman had seized the opportunity of a low-priced acquisition, knowing little about how much his son would be grateful for it. Mr. Raman restructured the new house into studio space, a bedroom for Nathan, a small drawing room and linked this with a spiral stairwell to the floor below, on which he lived.

Chuck helped Nathan decorate the studio by slathering the stone-washed walls in chalk-white and curtaining it in pastel chiffons. They hung a hammock that symbolized tentativeness and drift and adorned a wall with an Untitled painting gifted by Nathan’s mentor. Long mirrors on either side of the walls amplified a self-created mural titled ‘Mind’, painted by Nathan while at college. In one corner, a wicker basket chair sat with a coffee table and in another, a writing bureau stuffed with paints, brushes, rugs, and paraphernalia.

The floor gleamed with white tiles, carrying every so often reflections of the things above it, as if it was a separate world. Burly ceramic potted plants sat at five of the six corners of this room. Chuck placed a daybed in the center of it for Nathan’s naps between work.

If an outsider stepped into this studio, they would have entered a soothing dream of vastness. Chuck called it, ‘the sunset enclave - an armchair in the desert.’

The only window in it was called ‘the stencil of inspiration’. It gave way to a view of swaying coconut trees and a cacophonous company of parrots.

Leonara looked out at the world from this window, thought Nathan. But now, he was not to think of her. He was to look out of this window through his eyes alone. Not through any other association, however possible.

A few weeks later, when Chuck visited again, Nathan’s studio was a mosaic of mess. It looked as if it had been ransacked. There was paint smeared all over, things upturned and strewn about. Nathan stood at the window, lost to the world.

“What happened, Nate?” asked Chuck.

“I fought this. This is mine. This is me,” mumbled Nathan.

“Who? What?”

“The voices inside me keep telling me to clean up and be neat. They were hounding me to tidy this place up, but I stood my ground,” Nathan muttered.

“What are you talking about?”

“I love this mess. It is mine. This is me. They better accept it instead of telling me what to do all the time.” Nathan flung tubes of paint across the studio as if aiming at invisible targets. These tubes smeared the walls with the paint from their bellies. Chuck felt as though he was inside a wet raging rainbow. He retreated without a word.

But the next time he visited, Nathan was on his fours scrubbing the tiles. The studio gleamed in whiteness and order. It couldn’t have been more organized. Chuck soon realized there was a pattern to this. If he visited in the morning, the studio was in chaos like a graffiti-ghetto. Closer to dusk, it was fresh and clean like a crisp seven-star hotel room, every surface clean, a potpourri of aromas punctuating the room.

He wondered if this was because of his friend’s creative mood swings.

Nathan initially painted faceless, featureless, nude, translucent, or glum-looking women. But soon he grooved into newer themes. Leonara featured in his paintings for a while, before she was replaced with abstract motifs of ephemeral, universal, organic loss and longing. Microcosmic, existential pain poured through Nathan’s paint. Leo receding from his thoughts, as if she had physically stepped back in awe to watch his mastery. But she was always a muse, an underlying thought, disconnected only by the flexing strings of many realities and memories, as he plunged into the expansiveness of color.

Once Nathan was doing well with his paintings, Chuck said, “Why don’t you get back to your madness about music, trajectories, mind paths, milieus, inscapes, and what not…? You were so happy when you tried those things. ”

“That was when Leo was mine,’ said Nathan, ‘when I wanted to get her into my milieu. Now she’s better off somewhere else and I’m better with this.” He picked up the easel.

Soon Mr. Raman asked Chuck to hunt for an agent for Nathan. He himself rang up a few friends for contacts at exhibitions and galleries. Chuck sent photographs of each painting and compiled a glossy brochure of Nathan’s work and posted it to various addresses until one day Mr. Bhardwaj replied, agreeing to promote Nathan’s works.

Chuck was overjoyed. He goaded Nathan for a meeting with Mr. Bhardwaj. It was at his insistence that Nathan accepted the agent’s proposal for a contract and exhibition schedules.

“Get your act together Nate,” Chuck said when they were out of the agent’s office.

“I don’t think I’ll have time for music, waves, or trajectories… It’ll only have to be painting for now.”

“Then don’t! Forget about it. Let’s concentrate on your work.”

Nathan did just that for months on end. It might have been two years in real time, but two decades within the experiencing of it.

His name was getting recognized in art circles. His paintings becoming the latest investment options. All this was making his agent happy.

Leonara’s marriage to David turned out to be an unhappy sojourn. Month after month, every accurate prediction of how a successful romantic partnership ought to have been, went the other way.

David was promoted to Regional Countries Manager in his international conglomerate which brought more work, responsibilities, traveling, and hence, more time away from home.

Leonara concentrated harder and deeper on her work to abate the misery of her loneliness. She was unwilling to give up her life and travel with David, fragmenting her time into flights and jet lags, waiting and floating around lonesome hotels rooms of alien countries. It wasn’t like she did not have travel lust, but the baggage of her unmet dreams was too heavy to ferry around. She preferred anchoring herself to their home in Bombay.

And in six years, their marriage fell into the rhythm of a distant friendship when David was away and a harmonious housemate-ship, when he was back home.

In those six years, Nathan bled his heart on canvases, in every shade, color, and mix; his healing coming in pigments over pixels. This is how he developed into a painter to be reckoned, earning fame, awards, citations, and spaces for exhibitions.

That is how Leonara fell through the sieve of being and not being in a relationship.

The next jolt came with Paapu’s death.

Nathan sunk into a grey abyss. He felt orphaned and abandoned, and here he had thought his life had just begun.

After three months of grieving over Paapu, the only person Nathan could think of was his mother. Perhaps, it wasn’t Paapu’s death as much as what it had brought along. Why did Paapu say mama didn’t die a natural death? Where was I when she died? Why can’t I remember anything about the time of her passing away? Wasn’t I here in Lovely Sadan?

His father had gone three months too far into the past with funeral cinders growing quiet and cold over his sooty bones to answer his questions. How much Paapu had carried with him into the far-spreading silence of his soundless death? Dying, which was nothing but living somewhere else.

His father had never cherished his mother’s memories in front of him. But wasn’t he swallowed by the grief of her absence? Just like Nathan was now by his absence? If sorrow could be measured, Paapu would have held within himself more than anyone could or should have. But who decided how much sadness one got in a lifetime? Was there a pre-ordained limit?

That’s when the nightmares came, stringing through the loops of these thoughts and questions. They knocked with hard fists on the doors on Nathan’s reckoning and when unheeded made a quiet entry through daylight and daydream. They invaded his paintings. Waiting for twilight they then made an entry into his nights.

In a week, they spilled into his weariness, flooding his sleep in visions of thick umbilical cords, placentas of memory that seemed familiar, yet distant and placid. These dreams prodded him to follow them.

When Nathan picked up the brush the next day, the colors flowed in earth and rust. When he stepped back to view his 12 ‘mother’ paintings, they streamed like a film reel, unspooling and moving around him at dizzying speeds. He slumped onto the day bed, watching paint dribble and dry into knots of blood at the base of those canvases. The blue was not sky but ocean churn, the green not chlorophyll but lost thicket, the yellow not mustard but a mashed burnt sun…

He couldn’t continue. His brush strokes were edging over shadows bleeding into sepia, browns, and mud. A wraith-like woman flew overhead like a cloud, or stood at all hours at the corners of his eyes. When he turned, she would turn into a wisp of yellow and orb and fly in the red center of every canvas. Who or what was all this?

His mother? Or a memory?

A nerve had ripped open.

He was losing perspective on everything; he was losing his sleep.

The ordeal followed him into his bedroom, until the crack of dawn when it would disappear leaving him frozen and awake. Each time he entered his studio, the 12 botched up canvas-faces collected into a conspiracy of a dialect around him, trying to whisper something, as they elevated him into a screaming vertigo.

Nathan avoided his studio for a few days.

He suffered because of this. He knew no other place where time and mind could bend seamlessly if not in his place of worship: his studio. There light and color rolled, spun, danced, pranced, spreading story, yarn, mood like fibers of celebration, mistletoes of mirth and grief.

He had to be away from his temple of epiphany, morphing pillars of reflection, domes of habit, archways of happiness, brushes, palettes, easels, slippery pigment, mood, window, and muse. Away from extricating dimensions where air and imagination funneled a whole universe in one frame, nailed down in one room.

His agent Mr. Bharadwaj called, concerned and letdown.

Exhibitions had to be cancelled.

Nathan’s bold-colored works were in demand. “These six years have been a steep and worthy climb,’ Bharadwaj reminded him in a strict teacher’s accent, ‘Don’t lose momentum now! Is success getting to your head, my dear man?”

Nathan didn’t own up to anything, but he felt responsible for those nightmares.

He believed he had invited them over the lucidity of his daydreams by unleashing those 12 paintings. Why do we go to the depths of creation when we cannot bear what it might bring to its surface? Even in the samundra manthan, sea-churn, Shiva had to drink vish, poison turning his gullet a toxic purple.

Nathan’s last nightmare was the worst, where a bullet drove in tearing skin, splintering bone, cracking muscle, tissue, and splattering blood. The blood was thick red paint. Even in his dream, he could sense its splashing at the foot of his paintings. What was going on? Who could he ask?

He turned into himself and pressed against the limits of endurance, started meditating.

He was three years old and perched on a dining table. His mother balled rice with curry in the softness of her hands. He kept seeing her hands and the balled food in it, until sated. Was that real? Did his mother feed him like that?

“Your mother did what you think she did, Nate,” said a husky female’s voice from inside his head.

 “No, she never did a thing,” said a finely quivering elderly voice.

“It doesn’t matter, Bro,” said a child’s lilting voice. After a while it whispered, “anymore.”

These were voices as close to conscience. With a stab, Nathan realized these were the ones that had always kept him balanced in times of chaos. They had tilted the flavor of his understanding this way and that, through whisperings that got bolder and louder as time went by.

He set those voices aside for the moment, going back to the root question. How was his mother with him? What were the things they shared or laughed about? He searched for something that she might have told him, but couldn’t fetch a memory’s worth of their past.

His head hurt for long.

But finally, like a gilt-edged treasure, too sluggish to float, too thick to drown, a scene floated by: static at first then flickering like an old film, it burst into life.

He was sitting with his friends Leonara, Mihir, and Firoz across a tea table with a bottle of Rasna - an orange juice - on it. Plates of deep-fried potato chips and slim wedges of creamy-chocolate cake sat in between them. In the background, his mother was answering a doorbell.

He searched but couldn’t find streamers, baubles, birthday balloons, Diwali lamps and lanterns, gifts, or a Christmas tree, nor the clear remembrance of party music.

There was no other person in this sudden new memory frame.

So he gathered it was a regular confluence of friends. Only why he should remember such an average day of no consequence after waiting for a clue for so long, was difficult to understand. Why not an eventful or life-altering day of his life?

The door in that remembered scene was ajar as his mother disappeared behind it to answer a doorbell. He couldn’t see who she had gone to receive, but it gave off a force-field of worry. All he could see was the edge of her sari glittering in golden zari thread, tempting him to follow it.

Was this manufactured memory? Was the doorbell an alarm, an omen for that day, place, and time?

But this scene was… a place where his search could begin.