Free The Impressionist by Hari Kunzru Page B

fades, so that the street noise which filters up to Pran’s sweltering box-room seems to come from another country.
    One day Balraj does not come. In his place is Ma-ji, accompanied by a thin, nervous-looking man who stands barring the door, his fists clenched as if Pran is about to rush at him. Pran lies curled on the bed with his knees pulled up to his chin. He looks at these new visitors with some curiosity. He has not seen Ma-ji since she dressed him for his first night. She looks like a dead person, a bundle of sticks. As she comes into the room, she presses a scented handkerchief to her nose and screws up her face. Pran supposes the smell must be bad. His chamber pot has not been emptied for some time.
    Ma-ji hands Pran a beaker of lassi.
    ‘Drink.’
    Pran is obedient. The familiar salty-sour flavour of the drink hits his throat.
    ‘Balraj is dead,’ Ma-ji says bluntly. ‘The sickness took him.’
    For the first time, for the only time he can remember, perhaps for the first time ever in his life, Pran smiles. As they tighten, the muscles in his face feel new and unfamiliar. Ma-ji lifts her hand as if to slap him, and then lowers it again. In a jerky, darting movement she turns and leaves.
    After she has gone, Pran takes his English father’s picture from its hiding place in his bedding and looks at it, letting the lines of the face, the shape of the eyes and mouth sink in. He mentally places it against a thousand memories of his other father – he can not avoid calling Amar Nath ‘father’: father looking at his nails, doing puja at the temple, washing his armpits, calling a servant to pick something up. The little square of stiff paper amounts to nothing next to this weight of memory. And yet it toppled it in a single afternoon. Pran handles the photograph as if it were a magical item, as if its power is in some way inherent in its substance, chemicals and paper laced with an energy of good and evil. He turns it over and over, examining every aspect, fascinated by a rip on one corner, by the way that at a particular angle the silvering catches the light and turns the image from a brown and yellow face to a featureless dazzle. An excess of light, a god, impossible to look on directly. For that one moment the silver is whiteness, all the blinding alien whiteness that this new father has poured into his once-comfortable life. He spends hours tilting the little picture to catch the light, repeating it again again again, feeling each time the thrill, the awe of the transformation achieved by a tiny movement of his hands.
    Pran moving outwards from the centre, gathering momentum. Whoever might be in charge, it is certainly not him. ‘Him’, in fact, is fast becoming an issue. How long has he been in the room? Long enough for things to unravel. Long enough for that important faculty to atrophy (call it the pearl faculty, the faculty which secretes selfhood around some initial grain), leaving its residue dispersed in a sea of sensation, just a spark, an impulse waiting to be reassembled from a primal soup of emotions and memories. Nothing so coherent as a personality. Some kind of Being still happening in there, but nothing you could take hold of.
    You could think of it in cyclical terms. The endlessly repeated day of Brahman – before any act of creation the old world must be destroyed. Pran is now in pieces. A pile of Pran-rubble, ready for the next chance event to put it back together in a new order.
    Here comes the sound of the bolt being drawn, familiar as the call of the muezzin from the nearby mosque, familiar as the crack or the chamber pot or the column of ants which for so very long now have been using the left-hand wall as a thoroughfare between one ant metropolis and the next. He does not look up.
    Two tall women look at Pran from the doorway. Ma-ji hovers behind them, wringing her hands, fingers turning through fingers like wriggling maggots. The women take in the scene. Then, not flinching from the