Seahorse. Janice Pariat

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      While Nicholas was an art historian, Lenny was the artist.

      Or so I like to believe, even if it probably isn’t a label he’d have claimed for himself. In our hometown, as in hundreds of small towns in India in the late 1980s, there was little room for the imaginative and abstract. The elusive and intangible. Our options indelectably confined to medicine, engineering, or government service—safe, sturdy careers, long, narrow ladders leading to a future ostensibly improved. A quest always for security, hardly for meaning—or what the Greeks called eudaimonia, a human flourishing—and, especially within the puritanical Christian circles our families moved in, rarely for enjoyment. Lenny wasn’t devoted to an artistic profession, but I remember how effortlessly creativity alighted on him, the startling deftness of his hands. He’d sketch portraits of strangers while sitting at roadside teashops, on scraps of paper and napkins. A quick, light touch, each one taking him less than a minute. Or fold paper into birds, which he’d place along his window sill, longing for the sky. Strum the guitar, casual and easy, singing low and tuneful.

      A month ago, I was at the National Portrait Gallery in London, for a retrospective on Lucian Freud. The man who only painted portraits. Room after room of faces, distraught, humiliated, indifferent, tenderly in love. A lifetime spent in attempting to capture all of humanity—its myths and frailties—with unrelenting intensity. I followed the eyes, and the eyes followed me. Paintings are always once removed, but not on this occasion. Each canvas raw and visceral. Turned to skin, loose, marked and scarred.

      The people he painted, he took their soul.

      There’s a sketch Lenny sent me before he died that looks as though it could have been drawn by Lucian Freud. That’s why I like to believe he’s an artist, and that if he’d lived longer, perhaps he’d have come to realize it too.

      Instead, he was enrolled, through his parents’ persistent coercion, in a science degree—zoology? biology?—in a college in our hometown. Except, I never saw him attend class, or complete assignments, or venture near an academic building of any sort. He did what all parents found impossibly infuriating—he drifted.

      I knew Lenny all my life. We grew up in the same neighborhood, although he was older and we became friends much later, when I was fourteen. Unexpectedly, at the side of a basketball court. One of those dilapidated public sports grounds where youngsters congregated in the evening for lack of anything else to do. Mostly, I hovered around the edges, invisible, pretending to follow the match, watching the big boys play, the ones who jumped like they had wings on their feet.

      One day, Lenny showed up and declared it the silliest game he’d ever seen.

      “Is this what you do?” he asked. “Sit around watching these guys fight over an orange ball?”

      “Sometimes.”

      “Do you play?”

      I thought it pointless to lie. “No.”

      He lit a cigarette, and threw his head back. His face pieced together by an irreverent sculptor—an uneven nose, slanting eyes, a rough chin, and sharp plane cheeks. He smelled of smoke and pine forests, of something wild and unexplored.

      He said nothing until he’d finished the cigarette, until he threw it to the ground and it flickered and died, burning itself out.

      “Come.”

      And I followed.

      Before Lenny, I was unattuned to much else apart from my parents’ precise clockwork regime. Weekdays stretched taut between school and homework, punctuated by weekend visits to my grandparents, and church service on Sunday. When I was with him, though, time dissolved into insignificance. It lost its grasp, and loosened, unfurling endlessly as the sea. He’d rent VHS tapes from a movie parlor in town, and watch one after another—it didn’t occur to him to stop if it was late, or dawn. Or he’d walk, for hours, winding his way to unfamiliar neighborhoods on the other side of town. Often, he’d ride his old motorbike СКАЧАТЬ