He sat there,rotating his brush between his slender,long fingers,sprinkling his shirt with a drop or two of colour.A gust of wind.A slight flutter of the canvas.A light tinker of the palette.But the brush ,it went on ,unnerved,unscathed,went on from one finger to another,as if in delirium in a prison,as if lost.Other days,the brush would move on its own,paint as if it needed no painter.Like it knew its strokes,under a spell and he remembered the times he had to just hold it and keep looking at it,following it in all its freedom.He then seemed to be in a trance but if people asked him he would deny.He would murmur something weird,something like, I am there but I am not there .But today was different because he was just there,sitting a couple of feet away,which seemed a mile today.The universe had contracted into the only reality that was him and his painting,yet nothing moved,not his eyeballs,not the window frame,not the statue of Madonna,nothing but his brush ,it kept whirling,its pace dying ,whirling, twirling till it came to a halt .Nothing happened.no sound remained.And,he suddenly became aware of the shiverthat was creeping up his spine,an impending doom?,he thought.
Till he looked around,raced his eye across the wall,up at the ceiling and then again across the wall and up at the ceiling because there was nothing for his eyes to stop at,because he had nothing,nothing save the chair he had borrowed from Mother's kitchen when he decided to leave the house.He had not much money ,when he left and so his childhood aversion for anything superfluously materialistic came in handy and a time came when out of sudden disgust, he even grabbed the bible lying at a corner of the room and tucked it under the cushion of his chair,out of sight.It was too intruding,he felt ,into the divinity of emptiness.
The green,blue,red and all other shades in the palette mixing together ,mixing his memories-Joanna's green scarf,the chocolate violin,Mother's blue skirt ,the orange marmalade of many breakfasts,the black smoke of the chimney seen through the window of his old room.................................He heaved a heavy sigh ,breathed in a whiff of paint and dabbled the brush into the slimy oil of the palette.He loved this act,pretty mindlessly.He could spend entire mornings doing just that,just meandering the brush in the pool in the most fantastic of curves.Sometimes he closed his eyes and took quiet pleasure in the intoxicating ease of movement.It was as if all existence was wrapped up in that quagmire of colour and only he had the power to unwrap it,to give it form and to dissolve it ,just as whimsically, into nothingness.
But today a shade eluded him for a long time and he knew not why.What is it,he thought,the crimson of the setting sun,the bandana of the Brazilian beggar?No, it was ,it was ,it was, Yes,the ceiling of the neighbourhood church.But alas,it was not even that.He frowned and nodded his head vigorously, at some place hoping that the mere shaking of his body would wring out the answer from nowhere.But that did not happen .He knew he would give in sometime and a tear did trickle down his eyes after a while.But he did not give up hope.He felt he should meditate.So he got down from his chair and squatted in the posture his Indian friend Ravi had explained him that day.It was tough.He knew he had to patiently destroy every other thought sneaking around.Only then he stood some chance,after all ,even Ravi was a novice at this.An hour passed.He opened his eyes.He looked at his own silouhette,and calmly lifted the palette with both hands and brought it within the boundary of his own shadow,hoping to discover the shade in the new contrast of the settings.But,nothing emerged.Yet,for some mysterious reason ,he still felt close.Maybe he needed a final dash of chase,Maybe the shade had transformed into a man,an invisible man sitting in that very room,watching him,sniggering with contempt for his foolishness.So,he got up and bustled up and down the room,flaunting the pride that any physical action bestows.
But,he got tired of it after sometime.He sat there and after another hour of silence,he grabbed the brush and pierced his left thumb with its tip.It hurt so much that he soon,began laughing,But he did not dare look at it.Not till he felt something crawling all across his palm and then across his fingers ,till his elbows,like a million ants!
And he looked at it.There it was.There it was ,what he wanted.The red of blood.
In an empty room in the millionaire banker , John Deridan's house,there is an entire wall which serves as background for Blood and Sun.Every Friday ,John locks himself up in the room and stares at the wall for ,people say,the whole night.
