Image credit: www.flickr.com/public domain

In spite of all my love and unending adoration for all the greatest painters of all time – Van Gogh, Monet, Picasso and all the rest – I could never bring myself to drawing a perfect straight line without using a ruler, and all my circles looked somewhat like a hybrid between an egg and a balloon. However, having had rare glimpses of the artist inside me, I had realised over time that the precious vision that I had needed, and could, find expression through the hands of my son. Yes, like all Indian parents who had not dared to chase their artistic ideal and had given up midway; taking up the safety and security of a job that paid well, I had grown complacent, but only towards myself. For my son, I harboured a huge deal of expectations and I believed he would make me proud someday, do justice to my art that never really found fruition. And even though my son would keep telling me from time to time that he did not like going for the Drawing Classes, I promised him how this was all part of the bigger scheme, how it would all make sense in a decade or two. Although his drawing teacher had told me he was not exactly what they could call ‘cut out’ for painting and even though I had seen some of his drawings myself and found the same curvy crooked line trudging along the length of the paper, unsure of its own course, the same oval, irregular circle that I thought was particular to my drawing alone, I had convinced myself that the lines would get straighter as he went along, the circle would get smoothened with time and practice. “Just don’t give up”, I told him, snubbing the voice in my head that reminded me of the hypocrite that I had become. I had loved to draw, but maybe not enough for it to love me back. I thought my son would be able to alter the course of history, mutate the laws of genetics, and bring about an evolution – from the weird shapeless apologies of figures to proper symmetrical art. Like many middle-class Indian fathers, I had, indirectly projected my personal aspirations onto my child.

One Sunday morning, I was walking Joy back home from his class. The teacher had organised a drawing competition that day. Joy, being the visionary that he was, had tried to outsmart the teacher by leaving his canvas blank. The image in his mind, he had justified, had been so beautiful that he could not possibly do justice to it with his own hands; the idea was so colourful, no palate could supply the vibrancy and the life of those natural hues. I scolded him for playing the fool, but deep down, I smiled knowing how he was becoming more and more like my son, with all the perfect excuses and all the big talk and little work. He’ll be a smart kid someday, I giggled to myself, but my face betrayed no trace of forgiveness for what he had done. I decided to punish him by making him promise to go back home and draw at least three sceneries.

On the way back towards Maidan metro, there was a huge crowd towards the left corner of the street where they usually parked cars. From a distance, I thought it must have been an accident. Rushing closer to see what had happened, Joy and I tried to stick our heads into the inner circle. Surrounded on all sides by men, women and children who stared with their mouths gaping wide, was a lean, dark man sitting on the road with his legs folded. On his arm, there was a tattoo, half blurred, almost indecipherable. In his hand, was a piece of chalk and in front of him was the face of a God he had drawn. Long hair tied in a bun on top of the head, a thick winding structure descending from his neck, which soon became a snake, bare bodied, eyes closed, with a wide smile on his face. With a few more strokes, as the pitch on the road became even and the grains of sand and rock vanished, we realised it was Lord Shiva that he had drawn.

Joy, like the rest of us, was dazed. He looked up at my face, questioningly, as if to verify the truth of all that was happening. The people who had gathered around him to notice the spectacle clapped in frenzy. It was as if the painting had cast a magic spell on every onlooker – those who looked forgot the world. There was nothing else happening anywhere on earth, but a tiny man in a tattered shirt and a worn out lungi drawing a God on the street with some broken bits of coloured chalk. After a while, as if to take a break, he brought out an apple from his little red sack, and started biting into it. You could tell from his eyes how much he enjoyed the apple. It was as though all the effort he had put into earning the apple had made it Holy, forbidden but beautiful. He finished the apple but he was still hungry. There is no obsession greater than that driven by hunger. Enchanted, obsessed, almost driven by madness, he drew like an addict. He drew as if there was no one around – never smiling, never laughing, never looking up to see who clapped or who frowned or who tossed a ten rupee coin into his sack. But maybe that is why he could draw – because he did not want to be noticed – he did not want people to look at him or click photos of him. For all I knew, he could have drawn this in an obscure corner of some squalid, forgotten street in the city. He could have drawn on a blind street, but his eyes were always open, and if you looked at them long enough, it’d open your eyes too.

While he was on a road, he’d fallen in love with it. He was giving his all to it, and sometimes in trying to brush aside the rocks and pebbles, his fingers got scraped and bruised. When the tiny pieces of chalk had been exhausted to the tips, he almost attached them to his fingertips, and they looked like organic extensions of his thin, feeble fingers, and it seemed as though he were drawing with his bare fingers. Soon his fingers started to scratch and bleed – until the red of the painting and the red of his blood became one, mixed together in an inseparable way.

People clicked photos and started uploading them on Facebook and Instagram, feeling proud of themselves for being the only one in their circle to have witnessed this anonymous prodigy first-hand. No one knew his name, and no one dared to ask. They clicked photos almost perfunctorily, not knowing why they were doing it. The only thing they knew how to do (but not why) was to click photos of anything that seemed out of the ordinary. “Isn’t it a sin to put God down on a road where men walk every day, where dogs poop and pee and men spit out betel juice?” Joy asked.  I nodded in disagreement, with a smile on my face: “God is everywhere, beta. We put him on a pedestal, but who knows; maybe he loves the street better?”

Anyway, what’s born in dust will never be dirty, I thought. It was a temporary God with momentary blessings for all those who watched. Tomorrow, the rain would wash it away, or the wind would blow it to dust. Who could dare draw on such an unsteady canvas? Who dares to write on a piece of paper that is burning from the other end?

The man got up. His drawing had been completed – everything perfect to the smallest detail: the nose, the eyelashes, the thick, dark eyebrows, the third vertical eye on Shiva’s forehead, the curl of his smile, the Trishul in his hand. He pulled out a box from his sack and opening the lid, took out a lump of golden glitter on his palm and blew it over the drawing, as if to give it his final touch. Then he got up, took his sack, put all the coins in his bag, and walked away, wriggling his exit through the crowd. Not looking back to see what he had drawn, as if he feared that if he did stand back to look at his masterpiece, it would stop being a masterpiece. That if he stood back to admire his art, he would helplessly fall in love with it, and thereby destroy it.

The next day, all that would remain of the man-made God was some chalk dust – pink and blue and white and black. I imagined him at some corner of an obscure street, creating another God– drawing intently, without blinking his eyes, pouring himself into what he was drawing.

Joy tugged at my fingers. We’d been standing there for over half an hour – it was time to go home. After that day, Joy and I never talked about drawing. I let him quit the drawing classes, so he could go out and play cricket on Sunday mornings. Sometimes, he just sits and scribbles with a pencil when he feels like.  

His lines are still crooked.