The painter girl

Her heart was full of colour. I know, not because she told me, but because she painted them for me to see. They were beautiful. All of them. In bright oranges and blues and yellows and greens. With streaks of purple and gold here and there. There was never any black. Black is a dull colour, she told me. It’s not for happy people.

She would start with empty white sheets and then daub on the colours straight from her heart; like it was some sort of magic. I could never do that. I guessed you needed to be a special person to do that. And I knew she was special. I loved watching her paint. Could watch her paint all day, if I didn’t have to go to school. But, as an eight-year-old, I didn’t have much choice, did I?

So, I let her become my Muse; and tried my own hand at art. I carried my own sketch-book, my brushes and box of colours to her place, and painted along with her. But my sketches were too dark; my paintings too messy. She laughed and said it didn’t matter so long it came straight from my heart.

Did that mean my heart was dark and messy? I asked her.

She gave me a pained look. Sometimes the heart is lonely and empty inside, she said. That’s when it gets filled with all sorts of dark and messy thoughts.

I looked at her. But…

But the mind understands this, she said, and quickly fills the heart with happy and wonderful thoughts. Then there’s no more room for the bad things. The mind has its own way of making up for the heart’s emptiness, she said. That’s why the mind is busy all the time. You’ll understand when you grow up, she told me.

My life changed soon after this conversation. We moved to Delhi and that was the last I saw of her. I did send her a few of my sketches but she never replied. I was heartbroken, of course, and thought of her all the time. But the pressures of a new city, a new school and a new set of friends overwhelmed me. Over the years she faded out of my memory.

So, it was a surprise when my mother brought my attention to an article in one of the women’s magazines. Isn’t this the painter girl who lived next door to us in Mumbai?

I was intrigued. Many years had passed. I looked at the photo next to the article. Yes, it was the painter girl! She was a celebrity now: beautiful, sexy, daring; the darling of many parties; the curator of some of the most-talked-of feminist art exhibitions in Mumbai; a critic and an author; an icon of our cultural establishment, the article said. And, though it was rumoured that she was a consort to one of the richest men in the city, she hadn’t denied it.

She painted bright happy pictures, she said in her interview, because the alternative was too dark; too cruel, too painful to remember. The alternative haunted her, she said; made her feel trapped; weakened her resolution. She painted the world as she wanted it to be; not how it really was. For, she said, her life had not been as happy as she had wished it to be.

The alternative? Hmm. I thought she had a wonderful life, I told my mother; painting all day; not having to go to school when the rest of us did. What was unhappy about that?

There was a reason for that, beta, my mother replied; you were too young to understand then.

The painter girl, as my mother referred to her, had a misfortune. Her idyllic childhood was shattered at an impressionable age when she was raped by a family friend one summer vacation. The situation was made worse not only by her parents disbelieving her story of the rape, suggesting she had seduced the man and led him on, but also by her being infected with a shameful disease from the incident.

She had to be pulled out of school for medical treatment, lasting two painful years, and for the shame she had brought upon her family. She was locked inside her house. Not allowed to go out for walks or meet friends at home. The whole neighbourhood talked in whispers about her predicament. She lived through her isolation by turning to art; the only indulgence her parents had allowed at the time.

I turned to the magazine article. Where did she get her inspiration from? the interviewer asked. Fortunately, she said, she had found her Muse early in life. An unlikely Muse, she reiterated: an eight-year-old boy who had lived next door, the only friend she was allowed to have. The boy used to sit with her all day after school, encouraging her to paint in bright happy colours and applauding her work.