AN ODE TO AN ARTIST

             

“Ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, my friends, for just two minutes I would like to talk to you, just two minutes I’ll take from your journey. As per the latest studies, 80 % of people today suffer from one or the other kind of dental problem. Cavity, tooth decay, loose teeth, gum bleeding, resha in your gums, paling teeth, the list is long. Many of you might be ailing from one or many of these, but my brother, my sister, you can get an instant relief from it right here, right now. Yes my friend you can a change, a relief within a minute and just for rupees 50. This packet in my hand is the ultimate solution for all your problems and it will last up to six months and just for rupees 50 my friend. Many of you might be consuming tobacco, beedi, cigarette, gutkha, kheni, zarda, and cigar which would have caused or will cause in future many mouth ailments, but not to worry my friend, this small packet here contains its treatment, just try it. Apply it just a size of a pea on your index finger and rub across your jaw and within a minute my friend, just a minute feel the pain fly away. Created from a mixture of ayurvedic herbs and modern medical drugs, this is what you need for you every mouth related problem.”  This was the monologue of my father travelling from bus to bus, selling any kind of rubbish products with a precision and movements of a performing artist, holding his audience with his jet black eyes as robust and confident as of a magician and with his tall and lean physique and strong demeanour of a leader.

 He used this fast paced ranting for a wide range of products and sold everything in the same diligent manner. His products ranged from face creams to mock watches, from fake jewellery to portable juicer he sold each product much more than any other salesman with shooting words at a high speed of atleast five words per second and the main reason behind his success was that there would always be a passenger on the bus who will try his product very early in his speech and will be very satisfied with its quality, that passenger would be either me, my elder brother or my elder sister, sometimes even my mother or my friends, his partners varied as the range of products he sold. The most enthusiastic implant customer of his was I, because in my adolescent age I believed that this was a master stroke and my father was a genius. He was a successful man in his class and society and everyday he celebrated his success by indulging his senses in the company of a spirit rising from a stinking bottle. A fervent intoxicator, he had assigned different addictions for different times. Opium if he gets tired during work, cannabis with his friends and alcohol at night in the house. Although he never hit my mother like my other neighbours, even in his most hammered state which she rocked very proudly in her neighbourhood circle. Opium and cannabis were periodical addictions for my father, but alcohol was part of his diet, just like evening tea is for some, but he wasn’t a drunkard, but an artist.

 My super salesman father at day was an artist, a painter at night. And like any great artist he also needed to loosen up a bit and rise above the normal sensibility to create great art. His canvas was the back holder of a truck. He painted those plain planks of wood with the distorted and disproportional images of humans, animals, landscapes or the mixture of all these. His masterpiece was a disproportionate lady, who for some ambiguous reason, truck drivers and their cleaners found irresistibly attractive. The woman with a strip like forehead, fish-shaped long scary eyes, fishing-rod’s hook shaped nose, invisible chin and a pointy, tent-shaped bosom with arms the length of her face was heart throb of the truck drivers and cleaners. There was a strong rumour that when truck drivers were in the absence of their wives or a whore or a good-looking, flesh trading eunuch, they entertained their desires by fondling their loins to the image of the lady who had a caption “come, meet me darling”.     

This utterly disproportionate erotic art piece was first created by my father under the influence of too much alcohol and the next morning he realised that the lady that he created if were a real person, would never be able to scratch her head, but somehow the truck owner was delighted with it and said, “oh yaara, she has an intoxicating quality” and my genius father was smart enough to understand that the ‘intoxicating quality’ was the result of telepathy of some sort which worked through his mind to his brush and on the back holder of the truck. Thus alcohol became a starter for the artist inside father to rise above the normal intelligence quotient and reach the level of genius.

He had a very high, unmatchable opinion of himself, and always used to say, “I have achieved something that is very hard for a normal person to achieve”. I didn’t ask him what was that as I was just a kid, but I thought it was that he had estranged himself from what was as per him the stupidity in this world and that was the human race. He had much more regard for that stinky, three and a half legged cat of our colony that used the dump yard of our society as the nursery for her kittens, than any of his relatives, friends, neighbours, society or for that matter even his own family. He used to have hours of silent conversations with that cat and I am inclined to believe that she was his muse.

Once I asked him that why we weren’t rich and he replied “how much more rich you want to be? What does rich people have that you don’t have?” “they have cars and bungalows and air conditioners” “well, we have public buses, our ‘kholi’, and sweet cold wind at night, plus what I  have, none of those snobby, rich snots does”  “you are kidding, there isn’t any such thing”  I said mockingly, which made him furious, he gave me a grave look and then rushed for his wallet, took 2000 rupees out and burned them in front of me, “no matter how rich, can any of those brats do this, I told you I have ‘something’ that is precious than this paper” and I was too confused and a little afraid to ask what was that something.

He was a hero for me and for my siblings in their childhood, but somehow with growing up we started to feel more and more estranged from him, although he wasn’t doing anything different, he did everything that a good father in our society was supposed to do. He never ever beat us, he sent us all to school, we had a new school uniform every year and new clothes twice a year. As far as I can remember we always had three square meals, plus monthly visit to the nearby “mughlai restorent”. But somehow over the years all three of us started to realise that our hero was actually a self-indulgent, self-proclaimed genius. I don’t know the exact reason for how we all felt the same way as we never discussed it. What was there to discuss? But for me it was that he never ever asked me a basic question, “how was your school today?”

He had a weird quality on his face, he always appeared to be smiling, maybe it was in his eyes but he never laughed, the only thing that amused him was when he looked at his complete art piece, ready to be exhibited at the rear of a truck. But his ‘never laughing but always smiling’ face was soon going to change. Many of  amateur painters mastered this strange erotic art, some of them learned to hold a brush from him, and as a result started to lose his clients then his glee and later his ‘genius’. His face started to looks awfully gloomy and ironically he gained a mysteriously loud and uncalled for laughter, he would now laugh at anything and many times at nothing. My whole family noticed it but as the tradition goes, nobody cared enough to discuss it. He started laughing at daytime and remained awake and still like a stone at nights, sitting in front of a plain wooden plank of a canvas. He would be drinking the whole time and not a single stroke of paint would appear on that plank, his telepathic genius had faded out. He started ageing exponentially and although he was in his forties at that time but looked more than 60 years old and his tall, strong physique seemed to have folded and shrunk.  He was never much of a talker apart from his salesman job, which he left after a few years in the wake of dried out artist in him, but he hardly uttered a word in the whole last year. And since the last month he decided to refill for his lost sleep and slept almost the entire last month except for meal times. But as it runs like blood in our family, everybody noticed, but nobody cared. My sister got married two years back and my elder brother is running a small business in the big city and I am 21 years old now and got a job in a B.P.O one and a half months back, so caring for my sleeping father became even a more forlorn and irrelevant task for us.

He broke his silent spell once last week, when I came back from work, he called for me “Sattu!” that is my nick name, I followed his call and went silently into his room and sat beside him. I looked at him in the real sense of the word for the first time in years, His face had wrinkled so much, and multitudes of it can be seen in his eyes, which have become dreading transparent and unsteady all the time. He cleared his throat and with a hoarse voice he asked, “How is your job going?” Like an automated machine I replied, “It’s going good” “do you like it?” “Yes, quite much” “What is it really about?” “I, kind off sell things on phone or on computer to foreign clients, it’s like of a salesman but on telephone” to which he smiled briefly and patted me softly on back, for some reason that gave me goose bumps & I could hear my heart pounding. After a long pause he said, “be good at your work beta, like you were when you worked with me, your work is all you become in life” he kept looking at me and then again went to his hibernation from his long lasting insomnia.

Yesterday, he passed away  and while everybody was weeping and sobbing around me  at his funeral, the only thing genuine I felt was his last sentence to me, constantly running in my mind since the moment he died, maybe because now I realised what was that ‘something’ that he possessed over others.