The Colour of Love

‘No. I just wanted to know if you knew that?’

‘No. Will you meet me, Nina, just to talk and listen to what I have to say?’

‘Will you promise to leave me alone if I do?’

He said he would and so we agreed to meet the next day at seven.

I woke up very late the next morning. It must have seemed like an eternity to my mum who was hanging about outside my bedroom door.

‘Yes, before you ask, I’m going to see some paintings with him.’

‘Paintings?’ she repeated.

‘Paintings?’ my father interrupted as he was passing. ‘If you want to see paintings you can see the paintings here …’ He indicated the numerous pictures of incarnated gods on the landing, hung on Seventies retro wallpaper.

These were the moments when I wanted so desperately not to be related to him.

As I got ready to leave for the Tate, my mother stopped me.

‘You can’t go like that,’ she said, thinking about the hundreds of girls dancing before Raj – the competition. I was wearing a pale blue polo-neck, jeans, a long black coat and had no make-up on.

‘What will he think when he sees you?’

‘He will think he hasn’t been the fooled. Fooled, I tell you,’ my dad shouted from the sitting room.

‘Put at least a bit of colour on your lips. I know you don’t need the make-up. I know that Bhagavan has given you a very pretty face, but it is to show you have made some effort.’

‘It’s not about looks, Ma, it’s about what’s on the inside.’ This was half the problem with the list system; for me it was all too superficial. Everything was to do with the outward appearance – what you looked like, how much money you had, what job you did. Also, it wasn’t as if you could go on hundreds of dates with a guy to get to know him and then say no, you didn’t like him. This would be another red mark against your family name.

‘But please, beta, do this for me.’

‘It’s the weekend, Ma,’ I said and then, feeling a little guilty, I went back up and put some lipstick on.

Raj was already sitting at a table waiting for me when I got to the cafeteria. I knew it was him by the way he was fidgeting with his cup. As he looked up I didn’t think ‘wow’ but it wasn’t a heart-sinking disappointment either like it could have been, and I could see how the other ninety-nine women would find him attractive. As I walked closer to him his aftershave smelled stronger and stronger. He got up to greet me and it was slightly awkward as we didn’t know whether to shake hands or kiss each other.

‘Hello, Nina, how are you?’ he asked, missing my cheek and kissing my ear.

‘I’m fine, thank you.’

His height at over six foot had been greatly exaggerated. He was slightly smaller than me and had a gap in between his front teeth, which I was sure that my mother would say was symbolic of good fortune. He’d also overdone it with the gel in his hair and it made it look greasy.

‘You’re very tall,’ he commented.

I didn’t know what to say to that so I smiled.

‘I’m always nervous about doing this,’ he said.

And then he went on at great lengths about how he felt. I caught the first part of it which was that he had now got a system in place when meeting the prospective date but then after that I wasn’t really listening to what he was saying, and I knew it wasn’t right but I was comparing him to Jean. Jean’s eyes sparkled, Raj’s didn’t. Raj’s lips were much thinner; Ki said she never trusted a man with thin lips. It was the occasional grunting laugh that brought me back to the conversation.

‘So how about you?’ he asked.

How about me what? I had missed that first part of the conversation. ‘Well, as you know, I’m a lawyer, as you know …’

‘You’re funny, Nina. I meant how many times have you done this?’

‘Done what?’

‘Meeting, on the arranged system?’

‘Ohh, this?’ I wanted to tell him about all the weirdos I had to see before meeting Jean, and about Jean, but I didn’t as I knew if word got back to the honchos who were responsible for matching up the CVs, mine would be marked with a red pen and my mother’s reputation tarnished forever. ‘A few,’ I replied.

‘You’re very beautiful, Nina, I would have thought you would have been snapped up just like that,’ he clicked his fingers.

There it was; cheesy line number one. Only one person in the world had ever made me feel truly beautiful on the inside and out; what did he know? Raj sensed my irritation. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it like that. It came out wrong … nerves ….’

Feeling guilty at taking my frustration out on Raj, I replied, ‘No, it’s OK. Thank you.’

It transpired that he really had no need to be nervous as he had been on about twenty dates, had got as far as two engagements, but for one reason or another, neither of them worked out. His perseverance was commendable.

‘Third time lucky,’ I said like a fool.

‘Indeed,’ he replied, smiling.

We talked about each other’s jobs, families and interests, and on paper the honchos seemed to have done their job well – he was a suitable match in the eyes of my parents at least. Raj then asked if I wanted to see the Matisse exhibition. I didn’t want to say that I had visited it all week.

‘I would love to. Do you like Matisse?’ I asked, surprised.

He nodded.

As he got up I was distracted by the T-shirt underneath his blue jumper. It was on inside out so that the label was showing. It was probably nerves, haste or just clumsiness, but I found it almost endearing. I was definitely warming towards him, almost despite myself.

‘“Creativity takes courage,”’ Raj said as we entered the room.

‘How did you know he said that?’ I replied, astounded. Was this a sign? No signs all year and then a bloody shower of them.

He laughed and this time I didn’t hear the grunting sound. ‘There’s a lot about me you don’t know, Nina,’ he said confidently.

‘Can I ask you a question?’

‘Ask as many as you like,’ he replied.

‘If you went to a casino, would you put all your money on one number?’

‘I wouldn’t go to a casino.’

‘But if you had to, what would you do?’

‘I would cover all eventualities – put as many chips on as many numbers – that way you can’t lose.’

We looked at the paintings together and his favourite was The Red Studio, the same as mine. To my surprise I found I could have spent much more time with him, but I was aware that Jean Michel would be waiting for me and that I was already running late.

‘Is there somewhere you have to be, Nina?’ he asked, spotting me checking my watch.

‘Yes, I’m really sorry. But I’m sure we’ll meet again.’

‘Look, Nina, I’ve met lots of people and I know that I like you and I’d really like to see you again. Tomorrow?’ he asked, pinning me down with a date.

I took a moment to think about it: I did want someone who was calm, who knew what they wanted, someone who was practical yet could understand me on some level. Above all, someone who was the total opposite of Jean. And how did he know that about Matisse?

‘Is it OK if I call you and let you know this evening?’

‘You can call me whenever you like,’ he replied.

I had said I’d meet Jean at seven but it was seven-thirty when I got to his apartment building. The concierge opened the door for me and smiled. I took the lift up and rang the buzzer.

Jean answered the door. He looked tired and just for one fleeting moment I wanted to forgive him and tell him that I had really, really missed him.

‘I thought you weren’t coming. I’m so happy to see you, Nina.’

Be strong, I kept telling myself.

‘Come in, cherie, come in,’ he said, coming to kiss me. ‘Cherie’ sounded stupid. I turned away so he caught part of my ear.

The lights were dimmed, candles were lit and he had made dinner.

‘Why didn’t you use your key?’ he asked.

‘Well, I don’t know, let me think … because I might find someone else here?’

‘Nina, I’m sorry, I was drunk. We got a deal with …’

I couldn’t believe what he was telling me. ‘Drunk …? Drunk …?’ If he had said he was angry with me and wanted to hurt me, maybe then I could listen, but drunk?

His eyes searched mine for something he could tell me that would make it better but they couldn’t find anything. He reached out his hand to touch me.

I wanted to tell him about my week, giving up work, finding a studio, but didn’t know where to begin and, besides, I felt I couldn’t pour my heart out to him any more.

‘Do you know that it takes courage to be creative?’

‘What?’ he replied, perplexed.

‘Creativity takes courage.’

‘Does it?’

‘I don’t know.’

He grabbed my hand, told me that he loved me, that he was sorry and would do whatever it took to make it up to me, that it would never, ever happen again. That we could start over. He said he would do absolutely anything to make me happy. And I wanted to believe every word of it, I wanted to believe it was all going to be all right, but I couldn’t because it wasn’t all right. And what if my dad was correct? What if love was fleeting and understanding was what was really important. If Jean understood me, I mean really understood me, he wouldn’t have done that. What if in a few years he found someone else again? I took a deep breath, moved my hand away from his.

‘You’ll need these back,’ I said, handing him his keys and then heading towards the door.

‘Nina, I love you,’ he shouted.

I closed the door behind me, fighting back the tears. The sad thing was I loved him too, but it wasn’t enough any more.

When I got home my mum was sitting downstairs with the contents of the jewellery box sprawled across the floor.

‘All for you, when you get married,’ she said glancing up at me. ‘Raj’s mother called to tell me it had gone very well.’

‘Yes, it went well, Ma.’

I didn’t need love, I decided then, I needed understanding; so I called Raj and asked him if he wanted to go for a walk in the park with me.

I wished I had had the luxury of a whole string of dates with Raj before having to make a decision but arranged introductions didn’t always work like that; well, especially in our family they didn’t. So if you see someone twice, especially in the space of two days, it’s a given that you’ll be walking around a fire with them and feeding each other sickly sweets on your wedding day, unless, that is, you want to deal with a distraught mother who says you have brought shame and disrepute on the family.

But how exactly events precipitated themselves that Sunday is beyond me. The walk in the park had gone well and by the end of the afternoon Raj wanted to know if there was possibly a future for us. At that time I couldn’t answer the question but by the evening I was somehow engaged to him.

It started in my absence when my dad was going through my things looking for my car insurance papers. He had taken my car out and bumped it, and true to his impatient nature couldn’t wait a couple of hours for me to get back and sort it out. While rummaging through my things, he came across letters from Jean. Letters that had been sent earlier that week, telling me how sorry he was and how much he loved me.

Putting together the fact that I wasn’t married at twenty-seven, the Zee TV lesbian talk-show incident, and believing Jean to be a woman, he almost had a heart attack as he finished reading how much Jean loved me.

He screamed at my mother, calling her to witness the evidence, and told her it was all her fault, that she had spoiled me and let me get away with ‘the murder'. They were both pacing the house, waiting for me to get home.

Raj had given me a lift back and, thank God, I hadn’t asked him in. My dad opened the door before I had even had a chance to put the key in the lock.

‘We’ve found out about you and the Jeannie,’ he shouted. ‘It is shameful. How will I hold my head in the community if anyone finds out?’ he ranted as I walked in.

My mother was weeping in the corner, refusing to look at me.

‘You don’t understand, Dad …’

‘No, Nina, you can not deny it,’ he said, pulling out the letters from his pocket and throwing them at me.

‘It’s not what you think, it’s …’

‘How can you do this to us, after everything we have done for you, it’s … it’s …’

‘It’s a man, Dad. Jean is a man. You met Susan, my friend Susan, who was pretending to be Jean who’s a man.’

My mother wailed even louder, the wedding sari ripped to shreds in her mind.

‘Don’t worry, it’s finished, and anyway, if it wasn’t why would I be seeing Raj?’

As they took a moment to think about this the doorbell went.

My dad answered it.

‘Hello Mr Savani.’

‘Oh Bhagavan, what more today? My daughter told you I have paid all my tax bills.’

Oh God, Jean, I thought.

‘Nina,’ Jean said seeing me by the door. ‘Who was that man who dropped you off?’

Dad looked confused as my world caved in around me.

‘Nina, I love you,’ Jean shouted.

My dad looked over at my mum who had gathered herself together. ‘Kavitha, the taxman is saying he is in love with Nina.’

‘He’s not the taxman, Dad, he’s Jean, “the Jeannie”.’ I turned to Jean. ‘What will it take for you to leave me alone, Jean?’

‘I won’t, not until you tell me that –’

‘I’m marrying someone else,’ I blurted.

My mother looked at me, wiping her tears with the end of her sari.

‘His name is Raj and he’s an accountant,’ I continued.

Jean looked at me, incredulous. ‘The man in the car?’

I nodded. And then he walked away. And soon after I’d said it, I wanted to shout out, ‘Don’t go, Jean, it’s not true.’ But my mother had somehow managed to wrap herself around me and was weeping with delight.

Dad thankfully thought that Jean had fallen in love with me the day he had met me at the door. It was understandable, he said, as I got my looks from his side of the family. Mum said that we’d have to keep it all quiet so as not to disrupt the wedding plans. But then she would say that as she kept a lot of things quiet. And me, I called up Raj later that evening to ask him if he felt he might be lucky the third time around.

My dad was right: in life you can’t have everything you want – it was better to make it as pain-free as possible.

The next morning I woke up feeling very dazed, and for one moment I breathed a sigh of relief thinking that agreeing to marry an accountant and being an unemployed owner of a studio had been a nightmare. The moment I realised it was true, I wanted to smother myself with the pillow.

‘What a bloody mess, Ki, suppose you’re unable to help me out here?’

She would be laughing at the mess, telling me to get out of it and give Jean another chance, but it was too late – wedding plans were already being put into action.

My mum was like a contestant on The Price is Right who had just found out that her name had been called and was running down the steps in a state of delirious excitement. ‘Get up, beta, and go to work and then you can come home early,’ she said bouncing into my room. ‘We have so many plans to discuss, so many things to do. Come on, beta, we’ve done it, we’ve done it.’

She pulled back the duvet and I dragged myself into the shower. Part of my job was getting artists out of contracts that appeared watertight, but this was something else: verbal agreements in the semi were binding.

I got changed into my suit, pulled out my sports bag and packed a change of clothes, a few jumpers, a dirty pair of trainers, towels and an old bed-sheet. Should I be caught I was prepared with the answer of the forthcoming charity jumble sale that the firm were holding.

‘So you’ll try to come home early? We have the engagement party to think about.’

‘I don’t know, I might go to the gym after work,’ I replied as she was eyeing my sports bag.

‘But the party …?’

‘You just decide, Ma, call whoever you want. I’m running late.’

‘Thank you, beta, thank you. You have made me the happiest woman on this earth and you know –’

I left before she could finish.

It was freezing cold but it wasn’t raining. All the units adjacent to the studio were closed. Just outside the studio door was a grubby pair of boots. I put them to one side, unlocked the padlock and went in. The studio looked bare with no Sydney Harbours looking down over it and the emptiness heightened the absurdity of what I was planning to do. Blank canvases were stacked against the wall and one hung on the easel with a note. ‘Good luck with the birds – play the tape if you get stuck.’

I stood in the centre of the room looking up at the skylight. ‘You crazy, crazy woman, Nina, what have you gone and done? What are you thinking of?’ I said to myself. I changed out of my suit and into my jeans and jumper, tied my hair back and put the suit on the suit hanger. The heater was already turned on full blast. What was I supposed to paint?

Tubes of paint had been laid on the table in an orderly fashion. It wasn’t my natural inclination to be orderly but I had to be that way at the firm. I had to be a lot of things at the firm. I stared at the blank canvas for what seemed like hours, thinking about my family, Jean Michel, about Ki and the deep insecurities the Guru had touched. It was as if I were looking at myself in the mirror and seeing all the parts that hurt. I picked up the paintbrush with my right hand. I wasn’t even really right-handed but from being a child my dad had insisted on me using it, as in our culture it was considered bad manners to do anything with the left hand.

‘Chi, Chi, Chi, dirty girl. Not with that hand, Nina, what will the peoples say if they see you?’

But now I rolled up my sleeve and put the paintbrush in my left hand. All down my left arm was scarring, blotchy skin that revealed my deepest inadequacies. I could have had the prettiest face in the world but it wouldn’t have mattered; inside I felt ugly and worthless; inside was a gaping hole that had been left by the people I had loved the most. The Guru had found his way into that place and confirmed what I already believed. I heard his words again: ‘You’re cursed.’

This was the arm that I hid from everyone, that I tended not to look at. This was the arm I covered, pretending that everything was fine, but here in the confines of this space there was no deceiving myself – this was the arm I wanted to paint with. Nobody here was telling me what to do or how to do it; I could reveal everything about myself and nobody would judge me. I stared some more at the canvas and started to see black. The optical illusion of colour was like the optical illusion of life: stare at something hard enough and eventually you see what you want to see.

Blacks, that’s all I saw: black hole, black deceit, burning black, black at the funeral, empty black nights waiting for my sister to tuck me into bed, the Guru’s black teeth, his dirty black fingernails. Thick ivory black squirted from the tube directly onto the canvas. But there wasn’t a hint of ivory in this black, not one shade of another colour, and with the thickest, hairiest brush I frantically covered the entire canvas with this black.

I swept my hand across the meticulously placed paints and went to get the pair of grubby boots that I had seen outside. They looked so miserable – maybe they belonged to a tramp who had rejected them. They had no laces just holes as if they had been deeply wounded. I hurled them onto the table and watched them land defeated. One fell on its sole, the other on its side.

While the paint was still wet I took another black and smeared the paint on with my fingers. I could not stop. Molten anger bubbled to the surface as I pounded the canvas with my hand and fingers, smearing black onto black, trying to find the shape of the boots on the canvas. My hand and my arm ached but I kept on pounding frantically, finding the ugly creases and the lacklustre holes where laces didn’t even want to go through, until eventually I had to stop and sit on the floor.

When Ki left she took a huge part of myself with her, the part that made me believe I could be anyone or do anything, Jean Michel took away a bit more and what was on the canvas was the part that had stayed with me.

As I hoisted myself up to go and knock the boots off the table, a shaft of light reflected back from them, wanting to tell me something else.

I stared at the boots in this light. They had walked for miles and miles and had been bought at a time when people saved up to buy things for special occasions. Maybe a man had saved up for weeks to buy them for his wedding and had proudly walked down the aisle. He’d also kicked a football in them with his son. When they had been chucked out years later, he searched all over the house and every subsequent pair he bought was in a vain attempt to replicate those cherished boots.

Perhaps a woman in a charity shop had picked them out just before they were put on display for the customers. She felt that they would fit her husband and had bought new laces that matched. Polishing and wrapping them up in newspaper, she had handed the boots to her husband, swearing it was a stroke of luck that she had found them as it wasn’t her turn to empty the bags that day. Shortly after that he was promoted. He would have wanted to be buried in his boots when he died but his son hadn’t known that and they were discarded along with the rest of his belongings.

Finally, a tramp had come across the boots quite recently after rummaging through some bin liners. He had also come across a decent suit. In a drunken state, he had taken them off and forgotten where they were. It became his mission to find them and every day he would search a different street.

Putting the canvas I had been working on to the side, along with the dirty black brush, I cleaned my hands, took a new brush and another canvas. Without mixing the colours I thinned paint with water and washed the canvas in a sea of cerulean blue. While I waited for the paint to dry, I put on the tape Gina had left me. It was Puccini’s Madame Butterfly. Opera wasn’t really my thing but I listened to it anyway. Carried away by the waves of emotion, I sat staring at the blue and then I suddenly saw something.

Dampening a rag with water, I looked at the spot two-thirds of the way down and wiped the space. I picked up an ochre yellow from the floor and oozed a buttery mass onto the empty space. The bristles on the paintbrush swirled the pigment into two rotund shapes that resembled the shape of the boots. I didn’t feel as if I were the one who was painting as the strokes were rhythmic and disconnected me from all my thoughts.

Pockets of green came through where the blue paint hadn’t come off, and these were effortlessly worked into the painting. Confident red-iron laces were added and where the yellow met the red a hopeful orange shone, the same orange as the soles; the same orange as the sky I had envisaged while sitting at my office window.

The bright colours made the painting look vibrant and full of life. For the first time in a very long time, it made me feel optimistic. Is this what Matisse meant by seeing flowers when there were clearly none? If painting could create an illusion, if it could make you feel things or see things that weren’t there, then this was what I wanted. At that moment I was certain of only one thing; that this was what I wanted to do with my paintings. I wanted to see magic and paint it even if it couldn’t tangibly be seen. I wanted to put bold colours together, see colours that hadn’t been painted and bring inanimate objects back to life.

I took white paint, squirted some onto the palette, thinned it with water and in the left-hand corner I painted the words ‘For Ki’. Looking at the space in between the words and sensing that there was a great distance between them, a distance that shouldn’t have been there, I inserted the letter ‘u’ so it read, ‘Foruki’.

I cleaned the boots with a damp rag so that most of the grime disappeared. There was string in the cupboard along with brown paper, both of which I placed on the table. I cut two long pieces of string and put each of the strings through the lace holes, and when I had finished I packed them both in brown paper.