Chapter 5: Madan Mila — Present Day

He was sitting at a table near the back of Shanti Shanti, and the first thing I noticed was not his condition but the painting.

It was propped against the bamboo wall behind him — a canvas, maybe two feet by three, and on it was a beach scene that was simultaneously terrible and heartbreaking. Terrible because the technique was amateur — the brushwork was heavy, the colours muddy, the perspective skewed in ways that suggested the painter had been looking at the scene through a bottle rather than through eyes. Heartbreaking because the subject was the view from where Madan sat: the rocky beach, the coconut palms, the sea, and in the corner, a figure that might have been a man or might have been a smudge but that I knew — with the certainty of a brother who had watched another brother try to be something for sixty years — was a self-portrait.

Madan was painting. Madan, who had never painted anything in his life except a fence (badly, at Taya-ji's insistence, in 1982, resulting in a fence that was three different colours and a neighbour's cat that was one), was painting.

"Farhan bhai!" He stood up. He was thinner than the last time I'd seen him — which was eighteen months ago, at Amma's birthday, where he'd been sober and charming and had made everyone believe, for exactly four hours, that this time was different. The thinness was not the healthy thinness of a man who had been eating well and exercising. It was the thinness of a man who had been replacing meals with liquor for long enough that his body had started consuming itself for nutrition. His hair — still thick, still black, the one genetic gift that all Oberoi men shared — was unwashed and tied in a loose ponytail. His kurta was stained. His eyes were — and this was the thing, the thing that always got me, that always broke through the protective layer of exasperation and reached the love underneath — his eyes were bright. Madan's eyes, even at his worst, were the eyes of a man who was delighted to see you. Who was genuinely, unreservedly happy that you had walked through the door. The eyes of a dog who had been left alone too long and had knocked over the furniture but was so glad you were home that the mess didn't matter.

"You look terrible," I said.

"You look old," he said. "We're both stating facts. Balli! Balli bhai!" He came around the table and embraced Balli with the particular enthusiasm of a man who had not been embraced in a while and was making up for lost time. Balli received the embrace with the stoicism of a man who was being hugged by someone who smelled of feni and unwashed clothes and who was squeezing hard enough to cause structural concern for Balli's ribs.

"You smell like a distillery," Balli said.

"A cashew distillery. In Goa, that's a compliment."

He sat us down. Ordered chai — "Real chai, Shanti bhai, not the tourist chai" — from the shack's owner, a Goan man in his fifties whose name was, improbably, Shantilal, making the establishment's name either his signature or a very committed pun. Shantilal brought the chai in steel glasses — the real thing, strong and sweet and flavoured with ginger and tulsi and the particular love of a man who made chai because chai-making was a vocation, not a job.

"So," Madan said, wrapping both hands around his glass, the warmth of it seeming to ground him. "Shobha called you."

"Shobha informed me. The calling was incidental."

"And you drove ten hours. With Balli. To collect me."

"We drove ten hours to see you. The collecting is optional."

"It's not optional and we all know it's not optional." He smiled. Madan's smile was — like everything about Madan — too much. Too wide, too warm, too willing to include you in whatever disaster he was currently inhabiting. The smile of a man who had learned, very early, that if you smiled wide enough, people forgave you for everything that the smile was concealing. "Amma sent you."

"Amma doesn't know. Shobha called."

"Amma always knows. Amma knew I was in Goa before Firoz spotted me. Amma has a GPS tracker on my soul."

He was probably right. Amma — eighty-three, still sharp, still arguing with the sabziwala, still lighting diyas — had a preternatural ability to track her children's locations and emotional states that no technology could replicate and no distance could defeat. She knew when I was worried before I knew I was worried. She knew when Shobha was angry before Shobha's husband knew. And she knew where Madan was the way a compass knew north: instinctively, magnetically, with the particular accuracy of a thing that had been calibrated by love.

"What happened?" I asked. The question was — I was aware — inadequate. "What happened" implied that something specific had triggered this latest disappearance, when the truth was that Madan's disappearances were not events but processes, the slow accumulation of pressures and failures and the particular gravity of addiction pulling him toward the lowest available point.

"Geeta left me." He said it simply. No drama, no performance, no Madan-theatrics. Just the fact, delivered with the flatness of a man who had been left before and recognized the shape of the loss even as he was experiencing it. "Three months ago. She came home from work, packed a bag, and said — her exact words — 'I can't be the woman who watches you die slowly and calls it love.' Which is, you have to admit, an excellent exit line. She should be a writer. She has a gift for the devastating phrase."

Geeta. Madan's third serious relationship. A schoolteacher from Dombivli — sensible, kind, the sort of woman who entered Madan's orbit and tried to impose order on the chaos and who eventually, inevitably, discovered that the chaos was not a phase but a permanent condition. I had liked Geeta. Everyone had liked Geeta. Geeta had been the latest entry in the family's ongoing experiment: find Madan a woman stable enough to anchor him, then watch as Madan's particular brand of turbulence tested the anchor until it broke.

"And you came to Goa."

"I came to Goa. Because in Goa, drinking alone on a beach is not a cry for help. It's a lifestyle choice."

"It's a cry for help."

"It's a lifestyle choice that looks like a cry for help. There's a distinction. The distinction is cocktail umbrellas." He reached for the painting. Held it up. "Also, I'm painting now. See? Creative expression. Sublimation of destructive impulses into art. I read about it in a magazine."

I looked at the painting. It was — objectively — awful. The beach was lopsided. The palms were cartoon. The sea was a colour that did not exist in nature or in any paint manufacturer's catalogue.

"It's terrible," I said.

"I know. Isn't it wonderful?"

And there — in that sentence, in the delight with which Madan presented his terrible painting, in the particular joy of a man who had found something to do with his hands that wasn't destructive — I saw it. The thing that kept me driving ten hours. The thing that kept me answering Shobha's calls. The thing that made Madan, despite everything, despite the alcoholism and the disappearances and the women who loved him and the women he broke, despite the decades of rescue missions and the exhaustion of loving someone who kept falling — worth the drive.

Madan was still capable of wonder. At fifty-eight, after everything, after the drinking and the leaving and the being left, he could still look at a terrible painting and see something wonderful in it. That capacity — the capacity for delight, for the absurd, for finding the marvellous in the mediocre — was the thing that addiction hadn't touched. The one room in the house that the fire hadn't reached.

Balli excused himself to call Paramjeet. He walked to the edge of the beach — where the rocks met the sand and the waves came in low and lazy, the Arabian Sea in its afternoon mood of benign indifference — and stood with the phone to his ear, his silhouette against the water, and I thought: prostate cancer. I thought: Madan in a beach shack. I thought: we are sixty and the world is still finding new ways to test us.

"Stay here tonight," Madan said. "Both of you. I'll get Shantilal to set up the back room. It has mattresses. They're terrible mattresses, but they're mattresses."

"We're not staying. We're taking you back."

"Back where? I don't have a back. Geeta's flat was my back, and Geeta's flat is now just Geeta's flat. I have no flat, no job, no Geeta, and no plan." He lifted his chai. "I have chai and a painting and a beach. For the first time in — I don't know, years? — I'm not pretending to be something I'm not. I'm not pretending to be sober. I'm not pretending to be stable. I'm not performing the role of Madan-who-is-getting-better for an audience that wants to believe it." He drank. Put the glass down. "I'm just — here. Being the mess. Being the mess honestly."

The honesty landed harder than any performance would have. This was Madan without the charm deployed as defense, without the jokes as deflection, without the smile-wide-enough-to-conceal strategy that he had perfected over five decades. This was the raw version. The unedited draft.

"You can be the mess honestly in Pune," I said. "I have a spare room. The dogs will love you."

"The dogs will hate me. I smell like feni."

"Sheroo once rolled in a dead fish and then slept on my bed. Your smell is within acceptable canine parameters."

He laughed. The laugh was — not the performance laugh, not the charm-laugh, but the real one, the one that came from the belly and shook his thin frame and showed the gap where he'd lost a tooth somewhere in the last eighteen months that I didn't want to ask about.

"Let me think about it," he said.

"That's a yes."

"That's a 'let me think about it,' which in the Oberoi family means 'yes but I need to pretend I have agency.'"

Balli came back from the beach. His eyes were slightly red — from the salt air or from the phone call with Paramjeet or from the particular combination of emotions that a man with cancer experienced when standing at the edge of the sea — and he sat down at the table and said, "Shantilal, three beers," and Madan said, "I thought you didn't approve of my drinking," and Balli said, "I don't approve of your drinking alone. There's a difference."

We sat at Shanti Shanti. We drank beer — Balli one, me one, Madan two (a negotiated limit that he accepted with the grudging cooperation of a man who was used to no limits and found limits novel). The sun dropped. The sea turned from blue to gold to the particular Goa-pink that looked like the sky had been dipped in pomegranate juice. Shantilal brought fish fry — fresh pomfret, battered in rava and turmeric and red chilli, the flesh flaking white and sweet, the coating crisp in the way that only coastal frying could achieve — and we ate with our hands, the way we had eaten as boys in Amritsar, when food was not a meal but a shared activity, a thing you did together because togetherness was the point.

Madan talked. About Geeta, about the months since she left, about the drinking that had escalated from maintenance-level to structural-damage-level, about the morning he'd woken up on Anjuna beach with sand in his mouth and a crab investigating his ear and had thought: this is either the bottom or very close to it. About the painting — how he'd bought supplies from a shop in Mapusa on a whim, how the first canvas had been even worse than the one I'd seen, how the act of putting paint on canvas had done something to his brain that alcohol couldn't: it had made the noise quieter.

"The noise?" I said.

"You know the noise. You've always known the noise. You just found painting forty years before I did."

I did know the noise. The noise was — I had never named it, had never tried, because naming it would make it a thing, and I preferred it as a weather: the background hum of being alive, of being a person with a past and a future and a present that required constant navigation. The noise was what painting silenced. The noise was what Madan had been drowning with alcohol for forty years. And now, at fifty-eight, in a beach shack in Goa, with a terrible painting propped against a bamboo wall, he had discovered that there was another way to quiet it.

"Stay one more day," he said. "Paint with me tomorrow. Teach me something."

"I'll teach you that your sea is the wrong colour."

"There's a right colour for sea?"

"Many. None of them are the one you've used."

He grinned. The grin was the real one. The one that reached his eyes. The one that I had been driving ten hours to see.

"One more day," I said. "Then Pune."

"One more day. Then we'll discuss Pune."

It was enough. For now, it was enough.