Free The Impressionist by Hari Kunzru Page A

sound of the door-handle turning and a figure steps into the room. After that he is not sure about anything.
    In the days that follow, the special lassi plays a continuing role in Pran’s life. He is forced to drink it at least three times a day, with the result that he can never work out which of the things that happen to him are real and which are hallucinations. Most are so unpleasant that he does not care one way or the other.
    When he first wakes, bleak and sore, from a night of confusion, he finds he has been moved to a small dirty room which contains only a charpai and an enamelled chamber pot. The floor is dusty, and the tiny window shows a view of a section of cracked wall, perhaps fifteen feet away. In the absence of anything else, the square of wall and the diagonal crack which spiders its way from top right to bottom left of it become his sole interest. Hours of lassi-fuelled staring see it grow into a river bed, a honeycomb, a pit out of which crawl tiny skeletons, an interlocking web of cricket pads and bats, a spinning portrait of the King-Emperor with pale blue face and saffron hair, an ants’ nest, a market, and the backdrop to innumerable epic dramas of love, loss, civil war and conquest.
    Occasionally his dreaming is interrupted by a visitor. Most of the time it is Balraj. His routine is always the same. Jangling his keys the wrestler will unlock the door, lumber in, look at Pran sourly with his doleful red-rimmed eyes, then turn and lock the door carefully behind him. Sometimes he comes with food or another beaker of lassi. At other times he comes to tie Pran to the bedstead and beat him. He does this with a leather strap, coughing and wheezing as he works. It seems to be both duty and pleasure, and he performs it with the methodical, unhurried air of a rich man demolishing a plate of tasty food. Pran will shout and scream and Balraj will ignore him, hitting hard and rhythmically until his laboured breathing becomes a low gurgling moan, whereupon he will stop, hawk on to the floor and leave.
    Other people come, with varying degrees of reality. The beggar drags himself in to laugh. Pandit Razdan visits to shake his head and admonish him for his dirty ways and the low company he is keeping. His mother comes too, the end of her sari pulled over her face, her heavy silver jewellery tinkling musically as she moves. She never speaks, just stands there fading in and out like a candle flame while Pran asks her angry questions. Other figures come, their reeking mouths gaping, curved knives in their hands. They bend down and start to flay him, first scoring lines under his arms, round his wrists and ankles, then tugging the skin off his back like a tight kurta. As he screams in agony, they hold it up to the light, which glimmers through it in an indeterminate bloody glow. Sometimes they arrive with his parents, or are dressed in their clothes, burly men trussed into gold-bordered wedding saris or buttoned up in neat achkans, their pink faces like soft fruit sprouting out of high tailored collars. The girls from the courtyard come in threes and fours to hover above his bed and ask him to play. These are the only visits he enjoys, though they always end in disappointment, the girls fading to nothing as soon as they promise to open the door and let him out.
    Sometimes he scratches at the wall with a nail, taking off flakes of plaster with its tip, making tiny drawings of the scenes he sees through the window. The chipped wall fuels new pictures and adventures, and these make the rhythm of daylight and darkness, heat and cold, cycle more quickly. When he is not picking at the wall or talking to his visitors he lies and stares into space, taking sips from the bottle of water that Balraj places on the sill once a day. The bottle is small, and, though Pran is careful to make it last, by evening it is always empty. Night-time means a parched throat and a stricken feeling as the last lassi wears off.
    Soon the world outside