A gentleman’s agreement

COVER STORY

Based on true events

In his pictures, great grandfather looks very sophisticated - more sophisticated than you would expect of a young man born in Mandi Baha’uddin. But then again, a surplus of money and servants can do wonders, perhaps unusually so for a small-town boy.

In the pile of black and white photographs in a cardboard box in the attic, my favourite is the one taken two years before this story begins. Great-grandfather, then no more than twenty-two, sits in what is obviously a Lahori coffee house at a wooden table, his long, smooth fingers delicately curled around a stylish coffee mug. He wears a dress shirt of some light color, unidentifiable in the black and white picture, with a patterned tie hanging loosely beneath the large, pointed collar. The hair, which is styled to remind onlookers of Gregory Peck’s better days, is slightly ruffled, because of the wind perhaps, and his eyes, which were grey according to the stories I have heard of him ever since I could understand words, are staring somewhere beyond the camera, almost as if he can see out of the picture into the present.

This picture, if the date scribbled on its back is to be believed, was taken days after he returned from Durham, where he had finished an art course with average grades. His family was still rich then, which explains the expensive clothes and location in this picture.

It was mere months later, however, that everything around him started to crumble. His father died, then he had to give up almost all of his inheritance to the various creditors his father had very kindly left behind. Eventually, when he had no property left to give to the creditors, he had to start doing the unthinkable - painting for a living.

How do you paint for a living in a country that is literally breaking apart, especially when you live in a small city like Mandi Baha’uddin? The answer wasn’t easy, but he found it eventually.

You fool the local elite into thinking they need customized paintings.

He started painting giant portraits for narcissistic rich women, and Hindu gods and Arabic verses in calligraphy for religiously inclined rich men, replicas of famous paintings for those who considered themselves mentors d’art. Once or twice, he had even painted a particularly revered congressman (though he was a firm Leagui himself). The money he received for these paintings - which were only good by small-town standards, to be honest - was more than enough for his family and Bala Ji (more on that later) to live comfortably on and pay monthly installments of their debts.

Some would say this was conning, seeing the people paying him had, usually, zero artistic taste and were usually talked into needing the painting he would do for them in the first place, but in great-grandfather’s - but I suppose I should call him by his name now - in Ghazni’s defence, he needed the money severely for two reasons.

First, he had two people in his small family who depended on him completely. Second, he had made an agreement with one of them that he would have died rather than not follow up on, and that agreement - namely, of marriage - required money to be put aside as well as a steady income.

The two souls in Ghazni’s family besides himself were Maa Ji, his silent mother who had never been able to stop her husband from creating financial trouble; and Razia, his uncle’s daughter, who had stayed with them ever since her mother had died, leading to her father’s second marriage and subsequent memory loss of his first, then sixteen year old, child - not that Razia cared very much.

Unlike Ghazni, she had chosen a useful discipline, medicine, and was an excellent student. There was not much, in fact, that the two cousins had in common but with all their differences, they had decided to get married very early in life and neither the death of both their sole guardian nor the looming threat of destitution had so far done anything to shake their resolve.

The looming threat of destitution was conquered mostly through the haveli - the only valuable thing left to him of his inheritance. It was big enough to house an army, and empty enough - with all the expensive furniture carried away dutifully by the bailiff - to depress one.

Having decided how he wanted to make his fortune, the young man started planning everything meticulously. First of all, he very wisely rented out the entire southern wing of the house to a petite little Tamilian lawyer named Radha Chakravarthy and her husband, an irrelevant, generally boring soul.

The northern wing housed the family, with the three separate, rather bare bedrooms respectively housing Razia, his mother and him. Here too was the dining room and the billiard room that was now Razia’s study, with towers of books piled high on the rapidly deteriorating billiard table.

The western wing belonged completely to Bala, the loyal cook, cleaner and gossip from the outskirts of Mandi Baha’uddin who had arrived under mysterious circumstances to the haveli the day Ghazni’s parents had gotten married and had somehow stayed behind long after the rest of the wedding guests had left. The husband had spent most of his married life thinking his wife had hired him and the wife, that the husband had hired him. When, fifteen years into the job, it was discovered that neither had, under mutual consensus, they had not investigated the issue more. Bala had become integral to the household by then and was now considered a divine marriage gift.

The last wing of the house was turned into a “studio”. Ghazni’s old canvases and stands were grouped together in a room with the expensive and almost unused painting kits he had acquired during college. Extremely big and very average replicas of everything ranging from Da Vinci’s The Last Supper to the original poster of The Thief of Baghdad were hung up on the walls and Razia was conveniently set up as the resident secretary when she was not studying in college - or protesting against a United India.

It was a year into the business, now rather successful, that Ghazni received a letter inviting him to the residence of Mister Sethi, a rich jeweler who, for some reason, had chosen to live in this sham of a city despite his wealth.

On a sunny morning in July 1947, Ghazni cycled down to the Sethi manor and was shown in by a uniformed servant.

“Mr Sethi will see you in the study, Sir.”

He had been led into a luxurious study like the one his father had had once, and seated on a plush leather sofa.

Mr Sethi had arrived five minutes later, a small man in a fashionable suit tailored to fit him, with extraordinarily sharp eyes and white teeth.

“Ghazni beta,” he sat down on the revolving chair behind the desk, conveniently hiding all but his face from Ghazni’s view. “How are you?”

“Quite well, sir,” Ghazni had smiled professionally. “And you?”

“I am very fine, my child. I am sorry about your father, you know.”

The belated condolences were received graciously by Ghazni.

“A very good man, your father, but not a good businessman.” The face behind the table said sadly.

“Unfortunately, sir,” Ghazni agreed pleasantly.

“Have you paid off the debt completely then, my boy?”

“Not completely, sir, I’m still paying Chattha Sahib back but the rest I’ve managed - gave the last installment to the bank this month, in fact.”

“Bad business that, but then, with Chattha involved, any business goes bad.” Sethi Sahib shook his head. “What induced your father to borrow from him? He had friends - good friends - ready to help him.”

Ghazni shifted into a more comfortable position on the sofa, wondering what, if anything, he was supposed to say to that.

“But I hear you’ve managed everything well. That art course paid off after all, huh?”

“Thankfully, yes, sir,” he smiled.

“Which is why I’ve called you here today, beta.” Sethi Sahib got out of his chair and walked to a gilded cabinet in one corner of the room. Taking out a small wooden box carved with Sanskrit alphabets, he dusted it off and carefully set it on the table.

“Open it,” he ordered and Ghazni obliged. The box was lined with red silk and in it lay a black and white photograph. It was a close up of an Indian woman, in her late thirties, Ghazni judged, with her long black hair blowing back from her face, a small, rose shaped nose pin in one nostril, eyes lined with kohl. He could see the sea in the distance. She was on the beach, probably.

“She’s beautiful.” He said.

“Indeed.” Sethi Sahib smiled a little. “My wife, Kavita Sethi. She died last year.”

“I am so sorry.”

“What is gone is gone.” The small man sighed, then clapped Ghazni quite unnecessarily on the shoulder, making him jump. “But - today I’ve called you here because I want you to paint this picture.”

“You want an enlarged version of this, sir?”

“Yes.” Sethi Sahib nodded. “A colorful, larger, artistic version.” He paused. “I will pay you well, but I have a condition.”

Ghazni inclined his head to indicate he was listening.

“The picture does not go out of this house. You come here every day to paint it.”

“That really depends on the fees.”

“Fifty rupees per session. I have already set up a studio with all the required equipment.”

“Sixty rupees,” Ghazni placed the picture carefully back onto the red silk, wondering why someone would care so much for a photograph. Rich people. They had their own quirks. He told himself, conveniently forgetting he had been very rich once.

“Sixty.” Sethi Sahib shrugged.

“You have yourself a gentleman’s agreement, sir.” Ghazni held out his hand. “Can I start tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow it is.”

To be continued ...