not a coincidence that people who question the world are consigned to the corners. If they didn’t consign us to corners, they would all go mad themselves.’
They talked all afternoon and into the rainy darkness of six o’clock. The cold began to close in around them as crowds hurried home and tourists melted away towards the pubs. Across the path, she noticed the Purification Journey Brothers were dispersing quietly through the freezing mist.
She wished she could see his face more clearly under the Castro beard. If Anand had painted him in such perfect detail, could it be possible that she too might have seen him before? Perhaps Karna was famous, perhaps his face had appeared in magazines or newspapers and inspired Anand. Perhaps they had all seen him on their trips to Delhi to visit Anand’s mother. Seen him in a puja pandal in Kolkata, among the people gathered to watch as the women danced during sindoor khela. Or in Varanasi, on Assi Ghat, huddled in a blanket of hash smoke on the steps leading down to the river. He had existed all this time in some distant city. She might even have heard his voice on the phone in a cross connection. Seen the arch of his neck in a crowd.
The Purification Journey didn’t matter. It was only a joke he was playing on the world. A marketable formula to lead the gullible to his ashram. She could process it into a headline and dump it in the daily trash can of journalism to be taken away by paper recyclers and made into grainy sheets scribbled on by children and crumpled into waste. That would be the public arrangement. But in private, alone, he would be the idealist riding in to rescue her from the luxuries of cynicism.
‘ You talk about the Mother Woman,’ she waved the pamphlet. ‘Where’s your own mother? Your father?’
‘ Oh,’ he laughed. ‘I have no mother or father.’
He was an orphan, he said, one of the thousands abandoned on a footpath in India. The only mother he had known was a billboard with the picture of a cow above his head, saying ‘Drink More Milk’. He had lived under that billboard for the first three or four years of his life, sheltered by it, fed by charitable folk on festival days, sleeping in temple verandas, at the mercy of the beggar syndicates. Then, on one Independence Day, when the prime minister in a speech from Red Fort exhorted citizens to help the poor, the Purification Journey Brothers had adopted him and a few others as part of their new Hope-on-the-Road street children project, taken him to their Pavitra Ashram, and put him in school. When he was old enough, the Brothers even sent him to college where he got a degree.
His childhood had been happy enough. During festivals, the Brothers would dress him up like Krishna, paint him navy blue and stick a peacock feather in his hair so that wonderstruck passers-by would give him money. Sometimes they would take him to the slums through puddles of water into tin-roofed huts with shit curling in at the front door, so he could entertain factory workers and street vendors with his natural gift for story-telling. He said he had grown up close to the ground and in times of trouble, the ground would protect him. He was a renunciant who had vowed never to marry.
‘ A renunciant?’
‘ Sure,’ he smiled. ‘All pray and no work.’
‘ You say you want to purify love,’ she searched her mind for a suitable query. ‘But isn’t all love pure?’
‘ No, not all love. When god created love it was pure. But love is being ruined. Ruined by lust. Ruined by jealousy. The love of man and woman is being ruined by competitiveness. We have taken our message all over the world. To New York. To Paris. Asking people to purify their love.’
His voice was defiant. He was inviting her to tease him because his outfit and conversation were tailor-made for ridicule; he was setting himself up to be laughed at, to have water dumped on his head, or for his hair to be pulled. He was ridiculous yet in need of protection; as if he was upholding the last of a dying world.
‘ And what religious denomination are you?’ she asked.
‘ We have no religion as you understand it,’ he said smoothly. ‘We worship the Pure Love of the Mother Woman. To us she is the ideal.’
‘ And finally,’ she asked before she switched her tape off, ‘you said the bow and arrow was the dress of a novitiate. But why the bow and arrow, exactly?’
‘ Bow and arrow,’ he shrugged, ‘is for Cupid. To create love where there is none. For aiming at those who have a heart of stone and making them love. Just an ornament. Just part of my dress. Look,’ he drew out an arrow and pushed it at her. ‘Completely blunt. Once I finish my apprenticeship I’ll take it off. I don’t think it’s stupid. No more stupid than a shiny tie. You don’t’ – he shrugged again – ‘have to believe me. You can forget me. You can do your interview and walk away with me as your crank of the day. Everybody who is different is a crank. Only those who keep on buying…what is it?…Dior and Nike…are not cranks. They are normal.’
‘ They too,’ Mia agreed heartily, ‘are cranks.’
Anand used to paint at dawn. Dawn, he said, was the time of insight. Dawn was the time of vision. One’s own vision, not someone else’s, bottled and tinned to acquire at a price in the shopping mall of vision. After Anand had died, she had woken early to try and hear if he was calling to her through the first watery rays of the morning but all she heard was the jangle of Mithu’s new jewellery.
Irrationally, she brought him a slew of expectations. He would fill the emptiness. He would help her down from her high wall of grief. The intimacy of childhood would return, he would always watch out for her and care about what happened to her.
‘ Sometimes,’ he smiled self-deprecatingly, ‘I think I’m a genius, far ahead of my times. Other times, I think I’m nothing but an idiot. And you,’ he pointed at her, ‘think I’m a crazy guy from India who eats snakes and drinks human blood.’
‘ Karna,’ Mia’s voice was quiet. ‘I don’t know how to say this. Sounds silly. I’ve been a bit off lately. A bit loopy. My life’s been a bit…here and there. My dad suddenly committed suicide, I moved back in with my mother, but it’s not really working out. I need to make a new beginning. With my life. For some reason – and there’s a good reason – for this good reason I feel as if I know you very well. As if I’ve known you all my life. No, no,’ she said hurriedly as she saw him stiffen and sit up straighter, ‘please relax. Nothing to be scared of. I know you are a – as you said – a renunciant, and I’m not making a move on you. What I mean is, I can’t stop here. I can’t just stop my interview and walk away and never see you again. I’d like to be friends and I’d like to get to know you better.’
‘ Of course,’ he said excitedly. ‘There is a connection between us. There is definitely a very deep connection. I have sensed it too, from the start, even though I did not want to mention it for fear of scaring you. We are going to be here all week for our publicity campaign. Please come again. And please come and visit us in India.’
‘ And can I meet you here?’
‘ I will be here,’ he said after a pause. ‘But then I leave on my mission.’
‘ Your “mission”?’
He smiled. ‘Yes, my mission. There is a mission that I need to finish before I’m accepted as one of the Brothers. I can take off the bow and arrow once I have taught someone a lesson in love. But we will meet again. Let’s meet every afternoon from now on. I’ll be right here.’
‘ Great,’ she said. ‘I’d like that.’
‘ There are so many things I’d like to tell you. To convince you that there is no meaning in colour photos and magazines. Only a lot of stupid money chasing more stupid money.’
It’s precisely because I’m so jaded, he sounds to me like a quack shrink. But there’s an invitation here to let go of the weighty shit, to drop the posturing and rejoice in miraculous coincidences. Papa had no time for overeducated fault-finders and I could never bring myself to be corny. Papa wasn’t afraid to sound foolish but I’m petrified of even a tiny concession