Book Title: Unknown City: A Novel
Author: Amitabha Bagchi
Publisher: HarperCollins India
Number of Pages: 332
ISBN: 978-0143465560
Date Published: Jan. 20, 2024
Price: INR 539
Book Excerpt
Part 1
Pg. 72 – 75
We had been through all the displays: the Amrita Sher-Gils that were voluptuous but approachable, the Jamini Roys that were earthy but, nonetheless, evoked awe with their geometric discipline, the soothing beauty of Gaganendranath Tagore’s watercolors, and on and on. I was overwhelmed, floating in a world of colors and textures, looking for an exit into the outside where I could process all that I had seen, but Supriya gestured, shushing me although I wasn’t saying anything, and took me up a spiral staircase that Jaipur’s kings and queens must have once used, into a musty corridor that, despite the old-world stone flooring, was clearly a government office. At the end of the corridor there was a half-open door through which I could see the file-laden desk of some kind of minor official. Supriya asked me to wait outside, swept into the office and engaged the master of the desk in what sounded like pleasantries for a couple of minutes, then, emerging, took me by the hand in a sudden motion that sent a frisson of excitement through me and ushered me into a side room that I had assumed was locked. ‘Look, Rindu,’ she said. ‘This is the real stuff.’
As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I saw that there were rows and rows of canvases stacked vertically. She stepped up to one set and started leafing through them at light speed, reeling off one name after another: Raza, Gulam Mohammed Sheikh, Benode Behari Mukherjee, Anjolie Ela Menon … ‘Look Rindu, look!’ Just the summer before that, I had visited the Met and the MoMA in New York, and in the years to come I was to visit the grand museums of DC and London, not to mention the Louvre in Paris, but nothing has come close to the furtive, hurried, guilty, luminescent pleasure of those five minutes I spent in that room using whatever light had found its way through the cracks to look at some of the most beautiful achievements of twentieth-century Indian art with Supriya. ‘Why are we in a hurry? Didn’t he allow you to come in here?’ ‘No,’ she whispered. ‘I just went in and asked him if Rishipalji was still here. Rishipal has been transferred to the National Museum, but I needed an excuse to come to this floor. To bring you here.’ We ran down the stairs like schoolchildren fleeing the playground after smashing a cantankerous neighbour’s window.
A perfect winter day lay waiting for us outside, cool and bright. We stood in front of the museum for a while, regaining our breath as we looked through the majestic grillwork, beyond which stood the India Gate of shared ice-cream memories. ‘I really feel like,’ she said, and before she could continue, I had broken in with ‘chaat at Bengali Market’. She turned to me, eyes wide with surprise. Then her face softened, and she said quietly, ‘You completed my sentence.’ From her voice I could tell that she was falling in love with me even as she spoke. How happy I had been in that moment! Those four words—‘chaat at Bengali Market’— had sprung out of some deeper instinct, and I immediately interpreted my ability to guess what she was thinking as evidence of our deep connection. I ignored all our many differences, lonely and desperate for love as I was, joyously coming to the conclusion that the success of my intuition indicated that our many commonalities linked us together tightly at the subterranean level where intuition does its work.
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I completely forgot a statement made by one of my professors at IIT, a statement that I had otherwise clung to so hard when I fought the battle to maintain my self-esteem in the academic crocodile tank that college had been: ‘Arindam, he can figure out things on the fly!’ Years later, in 2005, back in Delhi, when I briefly worked on a TV script, one of the writers began describing a plot idea, and I unspooled it completely without further prompting, leading to the comment, ‘That’s what you call an IIT brain!’ If I were to be honest with myself, I would have to admit that since the time I read the Sherlock Holmes books end-to-end at the age of thirteen, I had regularly striven to deduce what people were about to say or do with some reasonable success. But a combination of low self-confidence, aggravated by my time at IIT, and my English-speaking Delhi middle-class upbringing’s insistence on modesty, prevented me from seeing that day under the blue January sky of 1999 that my ability to complete Supriya’s sentences may have been driven by the fact that we were soulmates, but equally by the somewhat prosaic fact that I was smart. On that same day when it was able to pull ‘chaat at Bengali Market’ out of a hat, my ‘IIT brain’ let me down as it rushed to the conclusion it so desperately wanted to believe.
Even today, transposing that moment from the radiant realm of Amrita Sher-Gil and Gaganendranath Tagore to the dull domain of the ‘IIT brain’—of coaching classes and engineering school and higher studies and published papers and journal editorships and chaired professorships and all such grey things that we all ran after, and still do to some extent—feels like a betrayal. Not a betrayal of Supriya, who has probably buried all memories of our time together fathoms deep, but of myself, of that younger self who felt that there was nothing more wonderful or more uplifting than the ability two people possessed to connect with each other. No, even of my current self, who, after everything that has happened, still believes that connection is possible.
Excerpted with permission from Unknown City: A Novel by Amitabha Bagchi published by HarperCollins India.
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