Seahorse. Janice Pariat

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      It may have been a coincidence, as these things usually are, but after the talk in the conference hall, I frequently noticed Nicholas around campus. It wasn’t all too difficult to spot him, since he was one of few Caucasians around, although admittedly Delhi University had seen its fair share of white folk, most of whom eccentric. A French sociologist who cycled around wearing a Vietnamese nón lá (some say that’s how he’d traveled to India from Paris), an Anglo-Indian professor of literature who couldn’t ever remember who’d written what, “Shelley’s Ode to a Nightingale”, and a visiting biologist from Germany who brewed his coffee in intricate laboratory apparatus. Nicholas, though, was more object of fervent curiosity.

      Often, he’d visit the senior member’s common room, mingling with the other professors, obtrusive for his youth—the rest were mostly grey-haired gentlemen and a few prim salwar or sari-clad ladies—and attire. Pale shirts of impossibly fine cotton, pressed and pristine, sharp-cut trousers, stylish loafers. Simple yet hard to imitate; everything I could afford in the market looked—there’s no other way to say this—cheap. Sometimes, he’d lounge in the college café, drinking endless cups of tea, writing in a black notebook, picking at a serving of mince cutlets and buttered toast. Or he’d read, on the fringes of the lawn, under the generous canopy of peepal trees.

      I’d watch him, follow his movements, keep a lookout for when he’d visit the campus.

      As, I suspect, did many of the other students.

      It wasn’t only because he was a white stranger.

      There was something thrillingly mysterious about him.

      Or so everyone liked to believe.

      From here and there, I caught snatches of rumor.

      That he was a new lecturer who’d recently joined the faculty, that he was a visiting scholar from Cambridge. Someone else said he was here on fieldwork, conducting research at the National Museum.

      Among the students, the girls in particular, he was of special interest; they sought him out and jostled for his attention. Some claimed to have befriended “Nick”, saying he’d paid keen attention to their theories on the earliest figurative representations of the Buddha.

      Occasionally, in the corridors and lawns, I saw him with Adheer.

      And strange as it may sound, I was stung by jealousy. That Adheer was marked out from the rest. That it wasn’t me. Although then it seemed impossible, unthinkable even, that I could be similarly acquainted with the art historian.

      I was in most ways unremarkable.

      I’d always felt so. Once, I read about Italo Svevo, a nineteenth-century Italian writer whose characters are often referred to as uomini senza qualità… men without qualities… people whose qualities are ambiguous, dilute… perhaps in some ways even inept with the world.

      And I thought that could be me.

      When I looked in the mirror, I always wished I occupied more space, that my reflection was less inconsequential. In college I wasn’t painfully thin, or scrawny—I played football often—just… slight. And I’d examine my face, in the time it took for me to splash it at the sink, knowing they were there to stay—the eyes, a shade slanted, that diminutive nose, a full stop rather than an exclamation mark. My mouth. Like squashed fruit.

      Above all this, I had no reason to approach the art historian. Even if I did, I was certain I’d be unable to muster up the courage. And why shouldn’t it be Adheer? Marked out from the rest. From a royal family in Indore, I’d heard. With his elegantly tailored kurtas, long and light, flowing like a breeze around him. Adheer was the most sophisticated of us all (though, at the time, we preferred СКАЧАТЬ