Epilogue: Rang

The painting hangs in the living room now.

Not the Golden Temple painting — that one is gone, sold, living its own life in a collector's flat in Bandra where it is, I hope, being looked at rather than merely owned. The painting that hangs in the living room is the morning light painting. The one I made after Goa. The one with the cadmium yellow and the white and the space between them that holds the thing I've spent my life reaching for and that I have never quite touched and that I will never stop reaching for.

Nandini chose the spot. Above the sofa, between the window and the bookshelf, at the height where the natural light from the garden hits the canvas in the afternoons and creates, for about forty minutes, a secondary painting — a painting of light on painting, a collaboration between the sun and the pigment that I did not plan and cannot control and that is, I think, better than anything I could have planned.

"It's your best work," Nandini says. She says this about every painting I hang in the house, which is either a sign of consistent excellence or consistent generosity, and I choose to believe it is both.

The tin box sits on the bookshelf. Not behind turpentine. Not hidden. The letters are inside — Esha's letters, Amma's letter, the forty years of correspondence that I kept in a drawer and then a shelf and then a tin box and that now lives in the open, in the living room, where anyone can see it and where nobody reaches for it because the box is not a secret anymore. It is a fact. Like the painting. Like the garden. Like the gate between the two houses that is never locked.

Esha arrived in April. She moved into the flat on Prabhat Road — her niece's flat, the one with the balcony that faces east and the kitchen that faces north and the particular acoustics of a building that was constructed in the 1990s and that carries sound between the floors with the fidelity of a concert hall. She can hear her downstairs neighbour's television. Her upstairs neighbour can hear her morning raga practice — the sa-re-ga-ma that she learned at Khalsa College and that she has maintained for forty years, the voice older now but the notes the same, the reaching the same.

She and Nandini met on a Tuesday. I was not present — by design, theirs, not mine. They met at Vohuman Café, on the neutral ground of bun maska and Irani chai, and they talked for three hours. I do not know what they said. Neither of them has told me. The silence is not a locked room — it is a private room, which is different. A locked room holds secrets. A private room holds conversations that belong to the people who had them and that do not require a third party's attendance.

What I know is this: they emerged from Vohuman Café and walked to Jangali Maharaj Road and bought books at a stall that sells second-hand paperbacks for thirty rupees each and that Esha described as "the greatest institution in Pune, including your beloved Fergusson." They bought four books between them. They have since established a reading practice — the same book, at the same time, discussed on Saturday mornings at Vohuman Café, where they have become regulars and where the waiter knows their order without asking: bun maska, two; Irani chai, two; the particular friendship of two women who love the same man and who have decided that the loving is not a competition but a practice, like reading, like painting, like the morning raga.

I do not pretend to understand it. I do not need to understand it. Understanding is the painter's job — and some things are not paintings. Some things are not made to be understood from outside. They are made to be experienced from inside, by the people inside them, and the rest of us — the watchers, the painters, the men who stand at windows and observe — can only see the shape of the thing and trust that the shape is good.

The shape is good.

Roshni married Kabir in December. A registered ceremony — because Roshni is her parents' daughter, and registered ceremonies are the family tradition, the particular Oberoi response to the question of how to make two people legally committed without the intervention of religion or spectacle. The ceremony took eleven minutes. The judge — not the same tired woman who married Elina and me, but a tired man who shared her philosophy of efficient matrimony — stamped the certificate and wished them well and returned to his tea.

Elina attended. She sat in the front row — the row that was, by unspoken agreement, reserved for the parents. She wore a blue sari. Not white — not the white of her own wedding, not the white of endings. Blue. The colour of Goa, of the sea, of the sky above the Mandovi River where we had once walked and promised things we could not keep. She looked — and I say this with the particular clarity of a man who loved her once and who loves her still, differently but not less — she looked like a woman who had built a good life from the materials of a broken one.

I sat next to her. Nandini sat next to me. Esha sat behind us. The geometry was — I was aware of the geometry, because I am always aware of geometry; it is the painter's curse and gift to see arrangement in everything — the geometry was three women and one man, arranged in rows in a government building, watching a daughter become a wife, and the arrangement was not a triangle or a line but a constellation. Each point distinct. Each point connected. The whole making a shape that was visible only from a distance that none of us possessed, because we were inside it.

Madan was the witness. He signed the register with the particular flourish of a man who understood that his signature on his niece's marriage certificate was both a legal act and a personal redemption — the man who had failed at every relationship in his own life providing the official endorsement of his niece's beginning. He was sober. Nine months sober. The longest stretch since the 1990s. I did not count. Nandini counted. Nandini counted because counting was how she loved him — the daily assessment of a woman who had hidden the alcohol and who had created the pause and who had waited, with the patience of a retired school principal, for the pause to become a practice and the practice to become a life.

Balli flew in from Amritsar. The turban was immaculate — the Tuesday turban, the one he wore for occasions, the folds sharper than the everyday version, the fabric the particular shade of navy that he had worn to his own wedding and his children's weddings and that he would, I suspected, wear to his own funeral, if the Sikh tradition of cremation allowed for such sartorial planning. He was thinner — the hormone therapy, the particular erosion of a body being treated for a disease that was manageable but present, the cancer well-mannered but insistent, like a guest who refused to leave but who at least observed the house rules.

He embraced Roshni after the ceremony. The embrace was — I watched, because I always watched — the embrace of an uncle who was also a village, who had been present for the naming ceremony and the school plays and the university graduation and who was now present for this, the latest and largest of the milestones, and whose presence was not obligatory but chosen, the same choice he made every Tuesday at the Golden Temple, the same choice he made every day in Amritsar: to be here, to witness, to hold.

After the ceremony, we ate. Not at a restaurant — at the house in Koregaon Park, at the table that had been extended with a folding table from Nandini's house, the two tables pushed together to create a single surface that could accommodate the family. The family: Roshni and Kabir, Elina and her partner (a quiet man named Rajesh who taught history at Symbiosis and who had entered Elina's life two years ago with the particular discretion of a person who understood that he was joining a complicated arrangement), Esha, Balli, Madan, Nandini, Shobha (who had come from Amritsar and who had assessed the table with the particular expression of an older sister who was simultaneously impressed and unwilling to admit it), Kabir's parents (who had come from Kolkata and who were still processing the fact that their son had married into a family that contained a painter, an alcoholic, a retired school principal, and three dogs), and the dogs: Sheroo and Bholu under the table, hoping for scraps with the eternal optimism of Labradors, and Choti on the sofa, observing the proceedings with the detached authority of the family's true head of household.

Nandini cooked. The dinner was — I will list the dishes because the dishes were the language and listing them is the translation: dal makhani (overnight, the way her grandmother made it), jeera rice (basmati, soaked, each grain separate), fish curry (for the Bengalis), saag (my recipe, Amma's recipe, the recipe that connected this table in Koregaon Park to a kitchen in Katra Ahluwalia), raita, papad, pickle (Shobha's mango pickle, brought from Amritsar in a jar that Shobha guarded on the flight with the possessiveness of a woman transporting national treasure), and — because Nandini understood that a table was not just a surface but a story — Goan vindaloo (for Elina, for the years that Elina had been part of this family and that the divorce had not erased because divorce ends a marriage but does not end a history).

The vindaloo was Nandini's gesture. The gesture of a woman who had never met Elina before this week and who had, in the days before the wedding, called Elina and asked: "What would you like me to cook for your daughter's wedding dinner?" And Elina had said: "Vindaloo. My grandmother's recipe. I'll send it." And Nandini had made it — from Elina's grandmother's recipe, from the handwritten instructions that Conceicao had written in a notebook and that Elina had carried from Goa to Pune to Delhi to the kitchen of every flat she had ever lived in. Nandini had made another woman's grandmother's vindaloo for another woman's daughter's wedding dinner, and the making was not a competition but a collaboration, the two women cooking across the distance of their different relationships with the same man, the food bridging what the history could not.

I stood at the head of the table. Not because anyone asked me to — I stood because standing was what you did when you had something to say and because what I had to say required the particular posture of a man who was about to do something that he had not done enough of in his life: tell the truth.

"I want to say something," I said.

"Appa, no speeches," Roshni said. "You're a painter. Painters don't give speeches."

"This painter gives one speech. One. Then I'll go back to being quiet and painting things that nobody can afford."

Laughter. The table's laughter — the particular sound of twelve people laughing together, each laugh carrying its own frequency: Roshni's short and sharp, Kabir's warm and generous, Elina's musical, Nandini's decisive, Madan's belly-deep, Balli's measured, Shobha's reluctant, Esha's — Esha's laugh was the one I heard clearest, because Esha's laugh had been the first laugh I had loved and the particular frequency of first-love laughter was, it turned out, permanently tuned in, regardless of the decades and the distance and the particular noise of a life lived loudly and imperfectly and with too many silences in the wrong places.

"I have loved badly," I said. "I have loved by omission. I have loved by silence. I have loved by keeping things in tin boxes and behind turpentine and in locked rooms that I should have opened and didn't. I have loved the wrong way more often than the right way, and the fact that I am standing here — at this table, with these people, in this house — is not evidence that I loved well. It is evidence that I was loved well. By every person at this table. Each of you has loved me better than I deserved and more generously than I earned, and the fact that you are all here, at the same table, eating the same food, is the greatest painting I have ever been part of."

The silence after was not one of the old silences. Not the silence of omission or avoidance or the three silences that had broken my marriage. This silence was — the musical term is fermata: the held note, the pause that is not empty but full, the silence that the music requires in order to be heard.

"Now eat," I said. "The saag is getting cold."

They ate. The table was loud — twelve people, three dogs, the particular cacophony of a family that had been assembled from different cities and different decades and different kinds of love and that was, for this one evening, in the same room, at the same table, eating the same food.

I sat down. Nandini took my hand under the table. The touch was — as her touches always were — a decision. Deliberate. Warm. The hand of a woman who chose to hold my hand the way she chose to paint: with red, with boldness, with the refusal to be timid about the things that mattered.

"Good speech," she whispered.

"It was too long."

"All your speeches are too long. But the content was acceptable."

"High praise from a school principal."

"Former school principal. Currently: your neighbour. Your lover. Your pain in the neck. Your person."

"My person."

"Your person. Now eat your saag. You made it. It's rude not to eat your own cooking."

I ate. The saag was — Amma's saag, the recipe unchanged, the taste travelling forty years from a kitchen in Amritsar to a table in Koregaon Park, the garlic and butter and the particular greenness that was not a colour but a feeling: the feeling of home, of continuity, of the things that survive when everything else changes.

The evening continued. The food was eaten. The conversations overlapped — the particular music of a family dinner, where no single conversation dominated but all of them contributed to a sound that was simultaneously chaotic and harmonious, the way a raga was chaotic if you listened to the individual notes and harmonious if you listened to the whole.

Later. The guests gone — Balli to his hotel, Shobha to hers, Kabir's parents to theirs. Roshni and Kabir in the spare room (Madan had insisted, with the particular gallantry of an uncle who understood that newlyweds needed privacy more than he needed a bed, and had relocated himself to the studio, where he slept on the floor among the canvases with the particular comfort of a man who had slept in worse places and who found the smell of turpentine soothing). Elina and Rajesh had left, Elina pressing my hand at the door — a touch that carried thirty years and a marriage and a child and the particular gratitude of two people who had failed at being married and had succeeded at being parents and who were, now, whatever came after both.

Madan was asleep. Choti was asleep — on the sofa, in the spot that was hers, the kingdom that she ruled. Sheroo and Bholu were in the garden, doing whatever Labradors did at midnight, which was probably rolling in things.

Nandini went home. Through the gate. Three metres. The distance that was also the connection. The gate that was never locked.

I was alone in the studio. The morning-light painting on the wall. The turpentine on the shelf. The tin box in the living room — moved, as Nandini had instructed, out of hiding and into the open, the secrets that were no longer secrets sitting in the light.

I picked up a brush. Not to paint — the light was wrong, the night was wrong, everything about this moment was wrong for painting. I picked up the brush because the brush was how I thought. The brush in my hand was the particular weight that aligned my thinking, the way a pen aligned a writer's thinking or a needle aligned a surgeon's.

I thought about the reaching. The forty years of reaching — for the light, for the colour, for the thing that existed in the gap between what was there and what I saw. The reaching that had produced paintings and failures and exhibitions and sales and the particular life of a man who had spent more time reaching than arriving and who had come to understand, finally, at sixty-one, that the reaching was not a failure of arriving but the arriving itself.

The reaching was the painting. Nandini had said it. And she was right.

The reaching was the love. The daily choosing. The gate. The three metres. The saucepan chai. The fish curry for a stranger. The vindaloo from a grandmother's recipe. The tin box moved to the living room. The truth told, finally, after decades of not telling, told not because it was easy but because it was right and because the man who told it had finally learned — sixty-one years and three women and a daughter and a brother and a best friend and a turban in a drawer and a painting on a wall — had finally learned that the truth was the only paint that didn't fade.

I put the brush down. Turned off the studio light. Went to the living room window. The garden was dark — Pune's March dark, warm, the particular darkness that was not empty but full, the way the silence after my speech had been full: full of the people who had been here and who were now elsewhere and who would come back, because coming back was what families did, the returning more important than the arriving, the coming-back more important than the being-there.

The morning light would return. It would come through the French windows. It would hit the east wall. It would produce the colour that had no name. And I would be there. Brush in hand. Reaching.

Always reaching.