Читать книгу Blind Faith - Sagarika Ghose - Страница 4

Mia saw him for the first time in London and at once realized the truth of the phrase, ‘not being able to believe one’s eyes’. He reminded her eerily of her father’s painting. He was a replica. A colour facsimile. A 3D projection of the man from the painting. A painting that had hung in her room for as long as she could remember. She frowned and looked again. Yes, unmistakably him. The man from the painting had leapt out of the canvas and walked into her life and the impossible had occurred as easily and as ordinarily as taking a train to work.

She stared around and upwards. Boundless city, once on the frontlines of the Luftwaffe, now swarming with nations, religions, sexualities. And miracles. Yet for her the city had become remote. She felt excluded from it, as if the drunks sleeping in hotel doorways along the Strand were trying to trip her up as she passed. Bankers, lunchtime joggers, newly arrived Serbs, blues guitarists and students from the Czech Republic shouldered past. She felt far removed, sitting alone on a high wall from which she couldn’t climb down. She was at once over-excited and bored, liable to burst into tears even at advertising jingles, sometimes wanting to fade out from the world, other times wanting to courageously lead it.

‘A rapidly alternating state of sorrow and elation is often believed to be one of the first symptoms of hyperactive psychosis.’ The Drama of Depression by T. Rosenthal and M.O. Silver, M.D., a book she had been reading on the advice of a colleague.

She had recently moved back into her parents’ nineteenth century, white, stucco-fronted flat in Belsize Park from her own apartment in Putney. She worked for a satellite television channel called SkyVision where the purple and pink studio sofas reminded her how unhappy reunited families could be.

She tried to find the sun but it was only a vague outline through the clouds. Every evening she watched the faces on the Northern Line and wondered why everyone wasn’ t protesting aloud that the sun should be more responsive to consumer demand; that by not providing adequate amounts of sunshine it was artificially driving up its own price.

Her parents’ apartment looked out onto a cherry tree and it was only a five-minute walk to the Eagle And Flag. After her father’s recent suicide, damp faces had begun to grimace through the wallpaper. His ghost lived on in the odour of oil-paint-and-turpentine that hung about the rooms.

But now, as if to compensate for his death, her father’s painting had come alive in front of her eyes.

The painting had appeared in Hyde Park. Clothed in white, mystic, wonderful. Ebony skin rose out of his white clothes like granite crags in a landscape of snow. Under a thick beard and bushy, shoulder-length hair she sensed a careless slant of cheekbone and a thin line of jaw. He wore small round glasses. Windswept. Windblown. Someone who looked as if had recently touched down on earth. Perhaps he wasn’t real and she was hallucinating. Her brain had registered something other than the physical reality – the way she had recently mistaken a stranger for a neighbour who, she had known, was long dead.

Yet, there he was, standing in a crowd of people in Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park, holding a demonstration of some kind, which she had been sent to cover for SkyVision. A group of men, in white shirts and trousers and no warm clothing despite the cold, held up banners. ‘Purification Journey’, the banners read. ‘Join the Movement to Purify Humanity’. ‘Your Water Is Pure, But Is Your Love?’

A red-haired man was making a speech: ‘This is the time for the Inner War! A war between the positive and the negative self! Don’t turn your back on this war! Look around you! We have returned to a world of lust and obscenity. What is our solution? Come and find out in the Purification Journey. Learn breathing exercises, the joy of being human, the Pure Love of the Mother Woman. Learn about the Inner War.’

He stood a little apart from the group. The odd man out. She noticed that strapped to his back was a childish toy: a wooden bow and arrow. A hilarious, fancy-dress party accessory. His eyes were intense and watchful, a novitiate, recently inducted into a monastery, looking around and thinking: Ah-so-this-is-my-life-now, this-is-my-life.

Except for the bow and arrow, he was frighteningly, incredibly, similar to her man from the painting.

She couldn’t work any more today. She had to go home and look at the painting again. She folded up her notebook, waved to the cameraman and called: ‘Hey!’

‘Yah?’ he yelled into his camera.

‘I’m not feeling too well. I’ll call in and take the day off, okay? I’ll be back tomorrow. These guys are going to be here for a while.’

‘Bet they are.’ His voice came round his denim-jacketed back. ‘They’re pulling crowds. Jesus. Fucking Halloween!’

‘You carry on with some shots if you like’ – she pointed towards the bow and arrow exception – ‘and take some of Robin Hood. I’ll see you tomorrow.’

‘Yeah, Robin Hood,’ he zoomed in. ‘Must be freezing their asses off.’

She turned on her heel and almost ran to the tube station.

It was January and freezing. Rivulets of dirty snow ran along the pavements. The streetlights looked wan in the gloomy afternoon. Cold rampaged through the city, curling into a dragon tongue of ice that licked at every footstep. At home, icy rain slanted down on the cherry tree outside her window.

‘What happened, Goldie?’ shouted Mithu as Mia walked in. ‘No work today?’

Goldie was Mithu’s name for her. It was a translation of the Bengali shona. It was a concession to England. It was an acknowledgement of the displacement of the family from India to Britain. It was an allusion to the cultural difference between mother and daughter. Only at the very bottom of this hierarchy of references, was it a grudging endearment.

She raised sheepish eyes to her mother. Mithu was a graceful, excitable Bengali from Kolkata who had met and married her father Anand on a trip to the tea gardens of Darjeeling. Mithu’s family was now scattered over Canada and the United States; she despised Kolkata almost as much as she loved and missed it.

‘Not feeling too well.’

‘Skipping work?’

‘Only for today. It’s such an awful day.’

‘Every day is awful,’ sighed Mithu, getting up from the sofa and throwing her magazine to the floor. ‘Have some cha.’

‘Okay, thanks.’

‘At your age you shouldn’t be coming home to a mother,’ Mithu slammed the kettle on the stove. ‘You should be coming home to a husband.’

‘Ma,’ Mia replied at once. ‘Listen, I’ll move back to Putney if you like. Don’t want to cramp your style. Besides,’ she looked around, ‘this place is a bit strange to me now.’

‘I didn’t mean it like that, Goldie!’ Mithu cried. ‘You always misunderstand everything I say. You twist everything.’

Mother and daughter looked away from each other in mutual exasperation. Without her father they were like a theatre company without an audience and had no reason to stay together in the same repertory.

Then Mithu fluffed her newly trimmed hair and said: ‘I’ve decided to get married again. And move to America.’

The man from the painting had stunned her. But normally marooned on her high wall of grief there was little that could touch Mia. Day-to-day life had been vital only in her father’s gaze. Without him, numbness came easily; a brain-dead state of robotic responses. ‘Great, Ma!’ she replied automatically. ‘Good news. Go for it. Is it Tiger?’

‘Who else? Tiger’s a very nice person. He’s easy-going and he doesn’t drink like your father used to. He always comes straight to the point. He’s being transferred to New York. He wants to take me with him. Lovely, no? The Statue of Liberty… It’s always so cold in London these days and see how dark it is outside.’

‘This is very good news, Ma, very good news,’ Mia said in the singsong that she and her mother sometimes spoke. ‘Everyone will be happy for you. Everyone will. No one will say, “Oh no she shouldn’t have, oh no she shouldn’t have.” No one will say that. Papa wouldn’t say it either. He’d say, “Go! Go on and make a life for yourself.”’

‘I don’t care about what your father would or wouldn’t say,’ snapped Mithu, shaking the teapot with menacing jerks. ‘I care about you. I can’t make a life for myself just like that. How can I make a life for myself when you are still unmarried?’

There was another silence.

‘In India,’ declared Mithu, ‘at your age, you would have been a mother-in-law by now. Understand? A mother-in-law!’

‘A mother-in-law at twenty-eight? That sounds like a criminal offence.’

‘Why not? It used to happen in Bengal. If you married at seven, had your first child at ten, then you would have a twenty-year-old son who could be married by the time you’re thirty, which is almost your age!’ calculated Mithu.

‘A bit competitive,’ Mia said, draining the last of the tea. ‘Everyone fighting around in the same generation.’

‘Not at all,’ returned Mithu sharply. ‘There would be no generation gap.’

She stared at her daughter. Not strictly beautiful but appealing. Definitely appealing with her crown of soft curls and her petite frame. Dark eyes and long eyelashes that blinked constantly with an excess of thought. The shy yet reaching-out quality of the only child in spite of her attempts at self reliance. Something sweet in the curve of her cheek. She spoke in an unusual and droll way and when she wept her whole being crumpled in silent sorrow. When she laughed (which, these days, was hardly ever) she looked as if she had never been happier in her life. Every emotion played out fully on her face, which looked fierce from some angles but innocent from others. She had her mother’s natural grace and her father’s black hair. If she dressed right, if she grew her nails or styled her hair, she might be quite attractive. But she was a discontent. As much of a grouch as Mithu was a blithe spirit.

And nowadays, Mithu suspected, Mia had lost her mind.

Mia had always been her father’s daughter. The dead Anand: Marxist-turned-Mystic. A radical in his student days at Delhi University, Anand had enrolled in Naxalism as an undergraduate, slinking through mountain villages in the dead of night with a couple of police packs sniggering about rich-kid revolutionaries, on his tail. On one of his trips to the north Bengal hills, to try and convince tea-garden workers to overthrow their masters, memorize the teachings of Lenin and strive for the workers’ and peasants’ Utopia, Anand had met Mithu, who had come to Darjeeling on holiday with her parents.

Mithu didn’t have any knowledge of Marxism, but she did have a lopsided grin and fawn-like limbs; Anand’s nascent artist’s eye was captivated.

Subsequently, all the Naxal uprisings were stamped out, the leaders were lodged in jail, and others were made to squat on burning stoves to get them to confess. Anand was tempted back to the bourgeois life in the nick of time by his businessman father. He completed his studies, published his thesis on farmers’ agitations in the north Indian hills, married Mithu, and moved to England to teach History of South Asia at London University.

In London, for many good reasons, he became convinced that Communism was stifling the religious genius of India. And turned to a spiritual quest. He began to paint and became a far better painter than an academic, revealing how much more excited he was by god than by Marx. His oils on canvas were technicolour and realistic and although there was always some confusion among critics about why a Leftist historian like Anand only explored godly themes, yet lots of people bought his paintings and the family moved to Belsize Park on his combined earnings as rational academic and mystic painter.

Mia was born in England. Anand and Mithu never went back to India except for fleeting trips to Delhi to visit Anand’s widowed mother, who died a few months after he became a British citizen. Anand had insisted that Mia understand well who she was and where she came from. He had pitched a wigwam for Mia in the back garden with a banner announcing, ‘I’m not a Red Indian!’

He painted the Sistine Chapel with Jesus’ shadow falling over the dome like a raincloud. He created Mount Kailash reflected in Lake Manasarovar like an upside-down pyramid in a pebbled sky. He painted the qawwals of Nizamuddin’s shrine in Delhi with whirling sufis reflected in their eyes. The Kashi Vishvanath temple at Benares with a demon-faced priest shrieking in a typhoon of incense. He even painted the church St. Martin-in-the-Fields in black and white strokes with only the plasterwork in colour.

Last year, Anand had gone to the Eagle And Flag, then for a walk by the river, fallen into it, and drowned. The police report said there was a massive amount of alcohol in his blood. Alcohol-induced suicide.

Mithu said it was just like him to go off and commit suicide when the daughter was still unmarried. He had become so English in his ways, so English and disconnected. Not tied up like Indians were, tied by this life and the next, tied up in an elemental, fire-and-water sort of way.

Father – efficiently incinerated in a crematorium. Nothing whatsoever left of him anywhere in the world. How foolish were those who believed in ghosts and spirits. Papa was gone, vaporized into the odour of oil-paint-and-turpentine, no other shred, no remnant of him, anywhere at all.

Even greater than her sorrow was Mia’s puzzlement at his desertion. If he had died of illness or accident he would have simply and gracefully transmuted into an ancestor whom she would have missed and mourned for. But to throw himself into a drunken death by water – just as they were getting to be such good friends and setting up their debate along such promising lines, just as their conversation was beginning – was so unexpected, so shockingly uncharacteristic, that she couldn’t but see it as a terrible rejection of herself.

He had often said that she had been his favourite painting. But without him, she was only half-finished, the brush strokes dry but incomplete…

The undimmed focus on the good, the trekker’s upturned face towards the sun of new delights – all of that was gone forever. Poor old gentle Pop. Hope he wasn’t too disappointed if heaven turned out to be full of Marxists.

Now the oil-painting man had appeared. He had walked out of the painting and into her life and transformed Hyde Park corner into a festival.

‘Your father did a terrible thing,’ grumbled Mithu clattering the teacups into the sink. ‘But there’s no point missing him all the time. You’ll wander around all your life, trying to find a father here, trying to find a father there and never being able to find a husband. That’s what will happen to you.’

Mia stared apologetically at her mother. She had never been a companion to her. She, with her gloomy silences, could never be a companion to a childlike virago like Mithu, who needed pampering and cosy moments. Anand had been the unifier of mother and daughter. He had been mother to them both. He had spread his apron and let them pull in different directions.

Anand’s death had had a very different effect on Mithu. Mithu, after a few days of robust weeping, had rapidly gone global. She became re-sexualized. She cast off her dowdy, professor’s-wife clothes and mutated into a sari-clad Boy George with plucked eyebrows and powdered cheeks. She became lively and democratic in her friendships and dumbed down from novels to glossy magazines in relief that she no longer had to please Anand by pretending to be highbrow. She sprinkled gold dust on her forehead and streaked her hair with Natural Auburn 5.1. She painted her fingernails a rich red and dangled gypsy earrings from her ears.

Mithu’s survival skills were admirable, thought Mia. Lost in the Amazon rain forest she would speedily contract a marriage with the king of apes so he would take her into his protection. Abandoned in the Sahara she would jump on the back of the passing captain of the Bedouin and take over the best tent. Mithu’s need for marriage was equivalent to the immigrant’s need for an air ticket. Marry with steely determination and give birth to a range of new passports.

‘Don’t worry about me, Ma,’ Mia climbed the wooden steps to her room. ‘You deserve all the happiness in the world. I’ll meet someone, there’s no hurry. You go ahead. Get married. Go to America. I’ll stay here with SkyVision and move back to Putney.’

Since this morning, between the time I left for work and came back, I’ve made an extraordinary discovery. A false discovery perhaps, but for me, a discovery nonetheless. What would Rosenthal and Silver say? They would say that the man was nothing but a delusion, a mirage caused by the drunkenness of grief.

‘No hurry?’ shouted Mithu. ‘What do you mean, no hurry? Of course, there’s a hurry. You might get prolapse of the rectum! Mejo Mashi had it and nobody would stay with her because of the smell. Only her husband cared for her. Until his dying day. Even though they were staying in a leaking place overlooking the basti because they had no money left. Oh god,’ Mithu shuddered at the memory. ‘Thank god, I never have to go back to that horrible country.’

‘No point thinking of rectums and all, Ma, and you don’t ever have to go back,’ Mia called down from her room. ‘You’re on your way to America.’

‘Only if you help me, Goldie!’ Mithu called up the stairs. ‘I can’t get married before you. I can’t. First you. Then me. If you don’t, I won’t. You have my life in your hands. Remember that. You must get married. Married! Married! Married!’

The silence of death was the most annoying thing of all. The hushed wipe-out, the impossibility of further contact, the irritatingly vacant space. Quiet runways stretching towards other quiet runways. Everything as it was, yet everything in mourning. Why had he not stormed into death more grandly? Drowning was such a weak surrender, such a slothful fall. Do not go gentle into that good night, Papa, Rage, rage against the dying of the light…

The streets, the billboards, the trees would remain, but she would be gone one day too.

Gone where?

Perhaps to some Hollywood-created studio where there were layers of shining clouds or an oily pit crawling with spindly arms.

Rain whispered in the cherry tree outside. In her room – where Mithu had often burst in smelling of chicken essence demanding explanations about men and music; where Anand had knocked softly when she had a fever and laid his palm on her hot forehead – was the painting that contained him. She kicked off her shoes, sat cross-legged on her bed and peered at it on the wall. Yes, the face in Anand’s painting was exactly like that of the man at the Purification Rally. She could see no difference.

She had seen him every day for the last seven years. She had watched him looming above her Raggedy Anne. She had studied him in the evenings, glowing in the light of her bedside lamp. Her father’s gift to her on her twenty-first birthday had been his painting of the Kumbh Mela, the largest religious festival in the world.

‘What an experience, Maya,’ Anand had exulted. ‘How can I describe it so you will understand? Imagine a huge Hindu Woodstock … a spiritual Glastonbury… crowds of people! Thousands! Hundred thousands! The water with the sun overhead, mist along the banks, sadhus and nuns, tourists, yoga teachers, a giant celebration of being a nobody.’

‘A nobody?’ she had asked.

‘Sure, a nobody. That’s what we are. Non-entities next to a river that is millions of years old. One of India’s greatest contributions to world civilizations is the idea of the naked body. The naked body not as a pornographic product, but as a civilizational ideal, the most pristine surrender to being a nobody, a non-individual, nothing but a technological member of the Milky Way.’

Anand had bought her a dog-eared copy of GS Ghurye’s Indian Sadhus written half a century ago. The sadhus and their ascetic reformist spirit was unique to India, Mia read. But while some are beautiful lotuses, the vast majority have become unhealthy scum. Only when the water begins to flow again and the people are awakened to life, then, and only then, will the scum be carried away. Until life returns to that long dead spirit of rebellion and renunciation, sadhus will remain monstrous distortions of the ascetic ideal.

Sadly, no one was interested enough in the ascetic spirit to re-ignite the flame of philosophical protest that once burned so brightly. The relegation of almost the entire tradition of sadhus to hippies and dharma bums, to comic book depictions by India’s scornful elite, Anand said, was no less a tragedy than the intellectual conquest of India by the British. Indian historians write of workers, peasants and kings, but they never write of sadhus or the Kumbh Mela because their minds are imprisoned in scorn – scorn for themselves and a squeamishness about their own traditions.

None of Anand’s paintings had been as talked about, as written about or as appreciated as this particular painting. It had been displayed at the Tate Modern. At the back of the painting, Anand had written in black paint: To my dearest little Maya, love from Papa. ‘Maya’ was an improvement on ‘Mia’ Anand had said. Mia was as pretty as a Hollywood heroine, but Maya meant god’s dream.

The Kumbh Mela or the Festival of the Pitcher. Every four years, on the banks of the Ganga, thousands gathered to take a dip in the river in the conviction that the cleansing bath would wash away their sins. If they didn’t gain peace in the after-life or everlasting union with the almighty, at least there might be a raise in salary or favourable rates of interest in a new bank loan. In Anand’s depiction, a ghostly white river arched across the painting like a sky. Below the river sky, pilgrims, ascetics, elephants and cattle-drawn carts were drawn in painstaking detail. In the foreground was a face in magnified close-up, of a young bespectacled priest with black hair down to his shoulders and a thick beard down to his collarbones.

And under the hair and beard, a careless slant of cheekbone and a thin line of jaw.

‘All well?’ Her SkyVision producer asked the next morning. ‘How are you feeling today?’

‘Fine. Sorry. Just a headache suddenly. Bit strange living with my mother after all these years…’

‘Get them today, won’t you?’

‘Definitely.’

‘Not yoga instructors…not Kashmiri protestors. So what is this Purification Journey all about? Should make a cute tailpiece.’

‘Yes.’ She felt his hand on her arm, ‘Never heard of them before, I must confess.’

‘Mia,’ He gripped her elbow. ‘We’re a little worried about you, darling. You’ve not been yourself lately. You need to get back into the swing of things. Your mind is all over the place; you’re simply not being able to concentrate. You forget something almost every day. Is there something wrong?’

‘ I’m fine,’ she shook herself free. ‘ I’m absolutely fine.’

‘If you carry on like this, you’ll need some help,’ he said firmly. ‘We all think so.’

‘Oh rubbish!’ she tossed over her shoulder. ‘Just been a bit preoccupied, that’s all.’

‘It’s your dad, isn’t it?’

‘Come on, it’s been a whole year.’

‘Then stop acting as if you’re going mad.’

‘Fuck off!’ she laughed. Mad! That tired term used by men to dismiss women, as the sisterhood says. Maybe Rochester locked his wife away because she was a real big cheese.

‘You’re losing it, child,’ his voice echoed after her as she ran through sparklingly empty corridors. ‘You need a break.’

She confronted him again.

He was standing among the group, standing very still, as if concentrating hard. The red-haired man was shouting, ‘We are in the process of getting ready for a new Inner War! The war to save our values! The war to save our ability to love! A war to save our families! To save ourselves from ourselves!’

The men were all young. They were tall, spare, a ramp-row of trendy faith-healers in their white clothes; a chorus-line of groovy godmen.

She walked up to him. When lightning waits behind a thundercloud, the cloud looks perfectly calm. Only when the lightning bursts out suddenly from behind, does the cloud shine jaggedly. The traffic that rumbled around Marble Arch was as loud as always. But when his voice sounded in her ear, for a moment, everything jangled louder than a fairground.

‘Yes?’

Through his glasses, his eyes on her were sharp and interested. She felt angry that he looked only interested instead of instantly passionate. She felt the atmosphere between them grow charged with memories.

‘Yes,’ he said again. ‘Can I help you?’ His voice sounded hoarse, as if he was speaking from the back of his throat.

‘Hello,’ she replied. ‘I’m a journalist. You know, a reporter? Television? SkyVision channel. I’ve come to interview you. There’s’ – she pointed to the bulky denim jacket – ‘the cameraman.’

‘Me? Interview me?’

‘Yes. Can we chat?’

‘So I’m your freak show for the day? The mad man with the bow and arrow?’

‘Not at all!’ she lied loudly.

‘Instead of interviewing me,’ he said wearily, ‘maybe you should interview yourself. Ask yourself a few questions.’

‘I do that all the time,’ she smiled. ‘But I’d like to know a little more about you.’

‘Well, I’d like to know a little more about you.’ He spread his hands in a gesture of incomprehension, ‘I’d like to know why you think I’m worthy of being interviewed. We have been touring all over England, Europe, United States and Japan and I’ve met many people whom I would like to interview. I would ask them why they are all running to buy gold. Running to buy things. Why they are happy to serve the empire controlled from New York and London. I want to ask them, must everyone be a banker or an accountant? Just run after money? How much money do you want, Ma’am? How much money does everybody want? Is there no such thing as just a celebration of being human? To be remembered not for making money but for taking being human as far as possible?’

‘Lovely idea,’ she grinned. ‘Wish I didn’t have to work. Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s take being human a little further into the park. Let’s sit down somewhere. Please come.’

They settled down on a bench, watching the buses circle around the trees down towards Oxford Circus.

What was his name, she asked. Karna, he replied. K-A-R-N-A. And why the bow and arrow? Just part of the costume of a novice. He wore the bow and arrow because he was a novice. Once he had completed his first mission, he would wear the same white uniform as the others. And could he please tell her a little bit more about the Purification Journey? He thrust a black-and-white printed pamphlet into her hands. It read:

Rebirth of Pure Love: The Need for a New Inner War

The 21st Century has dawned. But we have strayedfrom the true path.

The true path towards Pure Love is the rebirth of simple life patterns.

Let us recreate the peace of the past.

Let us work towards the Rebirth of the Mother Woman.

Let us wage the war with ourselves so we may set free our best selves.

Come to PAVITRA ASHRAM, NEW DELHI, INDIA for a 15-day Purification Retreat.

In unpolluted lakeside air, learn about the martyrdom of past heroes, eat nutritious food; live a simple life.

Learn to purify being human.

Learn to serve in the new struggle and the war of our century: the war within.

‘This particular instruction,’ Mia said, ‘interests me. The Rebirth of the Mother Woman.’

‘Well,’ he leant forward. ‘If it was up to me, I would put that right at the top. But the Brothers thought otherwise.’

‘The Rebirth of the Mother Woman? What does that mean exactly?’

‘Exactly what it says.’ His stare was so sharp that she thought his glasses might crack. ‘Fight the female ego! Make the woman return to her natural habitat, her home, and accept her role as mother. Not aspire to become a computer-tapping sexual slave who wears less and less clothes.’ He shrugged, ‘Lots of people are saying it. We are also saying it.’

‘So what’s your solution?’ She scribbled, ‘Purdah? Burqa? Segregation?’

‘You are trying,’ he laughed, ‘to sensationalize it. Give it funny names. Make it sound old-fashioned and silly because you are so convinced of the rightness of your ways. You can accept no challenge, you can tolerate no disagreement because you only want affirmations of what you think you already know. All I said is that the human mother is becoming an object of lust. In fact, she is the object of her own lust, her own vanity. In the guise of freedom and equality, women are being degraded, encouraged to pursue their worse rather than their better selves. A mean selfish woman is apparently an ideal woman in today’s times. To paraphrase Rousseau, woman is born free but everywhere she is in chains.’

Mithu, for example, Mia confirmed to herself, was definitely not capable of the Pure Love of the Mother Woman. In fact, Mithu was an excellent candidate for the Purification Retreat. Perhaps she should be sent off with this sporty brotherhood to their ashram and return, purified, dressed in white, and raging about the Inner War.

She frowned into her notepad. Yet another eccentric whose life made an excellent alliterative tagline. How easily a clever sentence might leapfrog out of the paper. ‘Male Mystic Meets Modern Mom’. ‘Furious Forecaster Fights Feminism’. ‘Demagogue Demands Domestic Duty’. Just another clank of metal in her prison of 20-second summaries of events, her armoury of one-liners and text messages, a deluxe steel prison set back comfortably from the flabby rough heartbeat of the day-to-day business of evolution.

Her father had analysed her predicament on many occasions. He would say:

An excess of instant-knowledge has made you too easily pessimistic. Too many pictures have finished off your capacity to see and too many words have robbed you of the ability to speak. You’ve ceased to grow. Unless you free your mind to the possibility of faith, you’ll never understand the world.

She had protested: But you don’t need to believe in order to grow! You just need to travel and read.

Aha, but what is travel after all but a kind of pilgrimage, basically a journey seeking unknowable truths? One of the world’s greatest travellers, Ibn Battutah, wrote of how a nameless fakir carried him through a parched landscape when he was too exhausted to walk any further…

Nameless fakir, who?

Exactly. Just a stranger who carried Battutah to safety and then disappeared…

You mean it was god?

Maybe. Maybe not. The important thing is he never could find out.

So the tourists on the Costa Del Sol are on a pilgrimage…?

Of course they are! They don’t know it but they too are pilgrims, they’ve gone there to pray for love and happiness in the future. And they’re naked, just like the naked sadhus at the Kumbh, perhaps there’s some unconscious link between the search and nakedness.

Perhaps Karna was searching too, trying to reconstruct a bruised world in the way he could. His words were meaningless. Yet he wasn’t just playing a part. He was struggling to believe his own clichés. He hadn’t said the right things. He hadn’t tried to reassure her by affirming that he was a mere anecdote. Instead his words had come tumbling out, amateur and raw. He had no polite skills. He was only a bespectacled monk from a river bank who had rushed out of his ashram to teach people how to love each other. For his pains, Scotland Yard might drag him away, strapped to a stretcher, and slam him in a cell for daring to be so corny.

Her father’s painting was even more attractive in the flesh. The hare-brained speech and crazy costume made her want to hug him hard and never let go. Anand had deserted her, but she would hold on tight to Karna. She imagined him injured, beaten by the police or stoned by Neo-Nazis, a battered Jesus, a suffering diviner. She felt awakened to fantasy. He would create a new body for her with his hands – a moonlit, newly voluptuous body. His skin would be darkly luminous, and when he threw his hair behind him, she would catch a glimpse of his long throat. In the rain, he would be a bedraggled rock star on stage, wet with sweat and dripping hair.

His formal manner infuriated her, so did his talk of this stupid Purification Journey. She wondered if she should tell him about the painting. Had her father seen him somewhere and captured his exact likeness? Maybe Anand had caught a glimpse of him on one of his many trips to India. She wanted to tell him that she knew him very well. That he was more muscular and tall than she had hoped for. That to see him now was a message from the dead, that her father hadn’t even seen his subject’s best angles. Perhaps most people in the world are waiting to be carried away by strangers on the street, or searching out fervent religious preachers to fall in love with because the software sector was turning out to be far too unromantic and their camouflage of office jokes was wearing thin.

She bent into her notepad, but instead of taking notes, drew a face that was an ideal version of her own, with every feature stretched to perfection. ‘Interesting,’ she said after a pause. ‘Tell me, d’you ever watch TV?’