1 Dreams of Déjà vu - Chapter One

If you hear a voice within you say you cannot paint, then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced. ~Vincent Van Gogh

Twenty-five-year-old Nathan Raman tried to cut out the way light fell over a female classmate's hair and face, the way a male classmate's kurta sleeve flapped to the wind, the way the smell of oil paint emanated from his teacher's body, the smell of turpentine that filled the class. He tried to cut out every influx of every sense, so he could concentrate on what the professor was saying, just like the other students were.

In this first year at Fine Arts college, every student was asked to render their first paintings. The first year's syllabus would concentrate on Purab ki Chitrakala (Arts of the East) before moving to European and other art forms.

I hope I can do this. No… I don't think I can do this… This is the wrong course for me. These people seem so talented. And I seem like an idiot. Empty.

You can. You can. You can. Just try. And you can do anything you want to do. Most of the good things, most of success is about having confidence in yourself.

After that, Nathan didn't take long to arrive at what he wanted to paint. Ideas were never in short supply, really. Like laundered clothes, they were stacked in the shelves of his mind. This was ready to spring through his fingers, and the rhythm of his body.

While the others were deciding on smaller canvases, Nathan decided to oil-paint a triptych, eight feet high and 12 feet wide.

On the day before he began this, he woke at the crack of dawn and sneaked out of the dorm. His hometown, Saravalli, was just an hour-and-a-half away by train, but Nathan had opted to stay in the college hostel.

Now he wandered in the hostel compound humming a song whose words he couldn't remember. The sky hadn't struck alive yet. Nor had the sun painted its rays into it. The trees lacked color and hunched like sleeping shadows as Nathan walked through bramble bushes, and stepped out of the hostel compound through the barbed wire fences.

He ran across the road in the pre-dawn chill. At the shoulder of the road, a group of beggars were sleeping. Nathan had seen them often: a man, his wife, a toddler, an older girl, and a younger boy.

He sat in front of them, observing them for long, taking them in. He had an hour before the sky would grimace and brandish the quiet sky, robbing him of his privacy with them. He would have to do what he wanted before his subjects stirred.

Sweat beaded his skin as the pink-orange of a full-fledged sun tore through the curtain of mist. He abandoned the pavement, running across the road with the five essences inside him, feeling distended and sick, as if he would throw up all that he had eaten the previous night.

But scrambling onto the scaffolding and ladder in front of his canvas, Nathan began work. He wasted a lot of paint in haste. The lilt and heaviness inside his head hammered and came through his fingers, in color, in shapes coming to life in the bodies he carved. He had one small day with the essences inside him. He'd better hurry.

Walking muses, he called them.

He worked without a break, setting out layers and layers of paint on the wide canvas, losing sense of time as he hummed an invisible tune. As the tune changed between his lips and throat, each pixel of his mood changed. His feelings morphed into newer ones, creating base moods. His emotions curved, and memory turned translucent.

By nightfall, Nathan was back on the pavement and in the shortest of time before the traffic lights changed from red to green, he ejected all five essences.

Then feeling empty and depleted, he left, happy that those beggars were stirring back to consciousness, one by one.

A month later, when others viewed his work, they strummed into silence.

"So real! Full-bodied!" said one.

"It has soul! Strange intensity!" another said.

Many came to view his painting again, and day after day they became more and more articulate as they beheld it.

"It is those eyes — they seem too too real. Look at those irises… and eyeballs."

"And the skin?" "Maybe it's the light that falls on them?"

"No, they will spring to their feet any second."

"Way too haunting."

"I feel I'm being tricked,' said another, 'cheated, and bewitched."

Some used unkind words like: 'wizardry', 'devilry', or that Nathan had done something diabolic or even horrible. They complained they were disturbed for nights in a row after viewing and studying the painting.

Nathan's painting was a life-sized triptych of farmers and farm life in a sugarcane field. The left panel had a cloud of fleeing locusts over sugarcane leaves under which stood a toothlessly smiling, colorfully-clad pair of young boy and girl. The middle panel showed a furious harvest between farmer and his crop. The right panel was a zoom-in of a weather-beaten shoe and a coal-black child sitting near it crying tears of diamonds. A woman in a veil sat stale, distant, and frumpy in a small corner away from that child. All the figures in the painting looked out of the frame as if through a window, at the viewer.

"But how come they look so real?" asked Chuck when Nathan and he lay down at the edge of night, alone in their hostel room.

Nathan acknowledged his friend's question, but rooted his answer in silence.

How many times could he take people's consciousness away like this?

It could get risky for them and him. He was yet to reach or know the outer limits of his own skill. How much could he stretch and challenge it? How dangerous would it get? It was disturbing that those beggars lay comatose all day long and only he knew why. What if they were picked by the municipality workers and burnt on a pyre or flung into a morgue?

Just because they were lowly people in a crowded city living on a haunted patch of street, no one had missed them. Just because there was nobody to ask after their hazed stupor, everything seemed safe.

But the immorality of his skill frightened Nathan.

All this had started when he was eight years old.

When his parents were away, young Nathan would sit in his living room getting sheaves and sheaves of blank paper out for his charcoal sketches.

One day he drew his nanny — Aunty Marie's face as she sat in front of him, sewing buttons on his father's work shirt.

As he sketched her, she felt dizzy and by the time her sketch was done, Aunty Marie had passed into unconsciousness. After a few minutes, when she regained composure, Nathan showed her the sketch.

"What on earth is this? What made you do this?" yelled Aunty Marie.

"But… so nicely. I thought you would be happy."

"Happy? How… how can this be so real?"

Right enough the sketch of her face looked like it was breathing, like it would tear through the paper and face them or begin to talk.

"What in the devil is this?!" As Aunty Marie raged on, Nathan saw her gliding to the other end of the hazy, shape-shifting room. Her clothes, skin, and features began to dilute into a gray mass in the outline of her body. He kept looking at her, and her blurry mass turned static. He saw clumps and pockets of thick gray in her X-rayed shape.

Nathan didn't have names for all this yet. He didn't know pain, grief, fear, insecurity, or loneliness. But he guessed this was something everyone had… maybe in different proportions.

He sensed sorrow from those gray clumps of Aunty Marie, out-stretching from the core of her heart to the outer limits of her body, like a spider's web. And the roads off Lovely Sadan that shot across toward the town's shops, church, school, playground, garden, and bank. These same roads on which his mother walked away, ever so frequently, never once turning to wave him a goodbye.

The living room moved around like a carousel, turning him dizzy.

When it stopped, Aunty Marie too returned to her normal self with skin and clothes on, and Nathan's headache subsided. He was relieved. Whatever was happening?

As Aunty Marie massaged her head, he said, "I understand you, nanny. I understand you." His voice then arrested between thought and throat. But why can't you understand me? You, who are the only person with me when Paapu and Mama are not there.

He knew Aunty Marie would bring out the cane by three in the afternoon. That was when her irritation peaked.

She paced around the house, bewildered with his drawing.

"You are not getting any lunch today! Understood? This is your first punishment, but this will not be enough I know." She waved the cane, soon drawing an orchestra of pain over his cheeks, face, neck, wrists, stomach. His skin singed as he tried dodging the lashes.

No matter how well he behaved every single day, she still did this to him. Nathan ran into his bedroom and crouched in a corner, crying not from his wounds as much from its injustice.

When he turned to the left, he was startled. Leonara was in a corner, looking at him. She was his neighbor from the first floor of Lovely Sadan, and a few years younger than him.

He quickly wiped away his tears. "Hey, when… did you come here?" He looked around to see if Aunty Marie was coming.

"Don't worry, Nathan. Everything's going to be alright." She smiled at him. Her silken hair flew in her eyes, and beyond her shoulders.

"Thank you, Leo. But I didn't know you were here. How did you come in? When?"

"Not Leo, Nathan. Larz. I'm Larz and I've always been here," she said.

"Larz? Come on, now. Don't make fun of me."

"But I'm not Leo,' she insisted again, 'I'm Larz."

"And you were always… Larz?' he straightened up, 'You look like Leonara, but…"

Her face went red.

"Okay! Sorry! If you say you are Larz and not Leonara… I've heard of doppelgangers, missing twins. Nowadays girls look the same with shampoo, straight hair, jeans. You all even wear the same hair clips." He forced a smile out at her.

The girl clenched her teeth and said, "I'm myself. Not a doppelganger. Not a missing twin."

"Okay, but where do you live then? Your flat number? Are you a new neighbor?"

She shook her head. "I've always been here in this very room with you, Nathan. I'm not new. I'm very very old, actually."

There was a time when besides the boy toys: guns, cars, and soldiers, Nathan had a blonde-haired, blue-eyed doll called Daisy. He would drag her along everywhere, clutching her to his chest, and talking to her so much that his mother had to repair her limbs every time they came off. The doll had to be discarded eventually because it had become dirty and sodden with use. Nathan remembered it now.

"Are you Daisy doll then?" he asked Larz softly.

Aunty Marie had entered the bedroom by now. "Who are you talking to? You mad boy, you mad creature! Mad! Mad! Mad! At this rate, you will be put in a mental hospital." She drew the cane hard over him slashing his skin into rawness. "Mad! Mad! Mad! They'll call you. And no one likes a mad boy."

Nathan screamed. The lashes tore at his flesh. His welts throbbed. Hot tears rolled down his cheeks.

"Disobey, disobey, and you shall have it. No food for you tonight also — your mama's instructions, if you misbehave… I'm just doing my job."

Nathan prepared himself for the long night of hunger.

After Aunty Marie left the room, the girl reappeared in the corner. She inched close to Nathan and wiped away his tears. Yes, she was Daisy doll. The same face, hair, even the same dress, much as she would deny it.

From that day onward, she appeared whenever he was alone.

One such afternoon after Nathan was done crying from Aunty Marie's lashing, Larz was by his side. He sucked in a happy gasp, grateful for her presence.

"Don't your parents mind that you're here?" he asked, wiping away his tears.

"No, if I tell them I'm with you, they're happy," she said.

"You look like Leonara, you know?" he whispered.

"I told you Nathan, I want to look like myself and only myself."

"You would have to look like somebody. You can't look like nobody,' he said, 'At least you look like your parents…?"

"I wouldn't like that either."

This time before Aunty Marie came into the room, Larz disappeared and Nathan was relieved.

Aunty Marie pursed her lips as she whacked him with a heavy stick. Then, she drew out the fine cane. "Always in your own world. Lost! Never answers a single question! See what your teacher gave you… a big zero. You failed this exam. And your parents will think I'm to be blamed. If only they knew how much you daydream and talk to the air!"

Spittle foamed at the edges of her mouth as Nathan stifled a shout for fear of more beatings.

"Your mother told me to do this if you disobeyed. Don't listen, and you shall have it!"

Nathan muttered pleas and slumped near his bed, with his head between his knees. He also hugged himself tight to make his body forget about the hunger that was ripping through, making his head feel like a cloud. The walls were drawing close, leaving lesser and lesser spaces for him. They touched his bed and wedged him as if into a coffin. He shrunk to a quarter of his size with helplessness. Aunty Marie's slaps — screaming red and hot — singed across his face. Her words thorned his heart and scarred his spirit.

After this, Larz's visits grew frequent. She appeared at all times of day and night, dawn or noon, in the bleakest moments and lonely weekends, or long May school holidays. Nathan realized she would be there whenever he needed someone.

She would make him laugh, entertain him with strange tales that made his imagination soar.

They grew up together, and he never felt alone. She looked so much like Leonara and yet responded only to Larz. She provided him with hours of mirth and comfort. So much so that he was more comfortable sharing his sadness with her, showing her his tears, opening up about his fears, emptiness, and helplessness to her than to Leonara.

In Larz's company, Nathan could be morose, angry, hurt, sad, depressed, out of control, and yet she was patient with him, clearing his moods like cloud-cobwebs off a blue sky.

For Leonara, Nathan kept his brighter, more cheerful and chirpier side.

It seemed to work well that way.