The Impressionist by Hari Kunzru Read Free Book Online

desperately fighting the panic building up inside his shivery frame.
    This is how Amar Nath chooses to face his illness. For it is real: this particular hypochondriac is facing the skull-necklaced embodiment of his worst fears. He picks at his chest, imagining in his increasingly disordered mind that he can pluck flu organisms off his body like mites. He sweats and the walls shimmer and the fever vibrates his body like a hammer hitting a metal string.
    Distantly he hears screaming, the sound of a bedstead being turned over. His son’s voice, Anjali’s voice, cursing each other roundly. He turns his head, trying to make out what they are saying to each other. But it comes from the other side of the world. In his bath of onions, Pandit Amar Nath Razdan is pleading the ultimate case.

Gita runs crying down the stairs to the courtyard, as her mother (personifying fate, doom, justice, karma and all manner of other vast impersonal forces given to crushing ant-like mortals underfoot) jabs Pran in the kidneys with a monkey stick. He doubles up, and she brings her weapon smartly down on his knees and elbow joints, each well-aimed blow producing sudden and excruciating pain.
    Anjali’s victory is swift and total. Hampered by his pyjamas, which are twisted around his ankles, Pran is unable to resist. As he tries to crawl underneath the protective frame of the charpai, she sprinkles his squirming body with a few choice curses, pincers his ear between fingers made vice-like by years of pea-shelling and okra-chopping, and drags him off to see his father.
    She raps on the door. An ominous squelching sound comes from the other side.
    ‘Master? Master, are you there?’
    There is no response. Impatiently, she tries the catch, and the door swings open into an onion stench of such ferocity that her eyes begin to stream. Pandit Razdan is in the thirtieth hour of his bath. Now he is definitely, conclusively ill, sweating and shivering like a man having a fit. His head protrudes over the white swaddling like that of a premature baby, his eyes red-raw, his skin flushed and unpleasantly puckered. He looks as if he has been pickled, which is more or less the case.
    ‘I am dying,’ he says in a tiny voice.
    ‘Maybe so,’ raps Anjali brutally, gathering the palla of her sari over her face. ‘However, I think I know the reason.’ Pandit Razdan’s expression becomes urgent, and he wags his head, indicating that she should continue. Filled with the gravity of the moment, she raises a hand in the direction of the heavens. ‘This household,’ she intones, ‘is under a curse.’
    The master succumbs to a violent fit of coughing.
    How does one tell a sick man that his only son, the son he has cherished for fifteen long years, is in fact the bastard child of a casteless, filth-eating, left-and-right-hand-confusing Englishman? The gifts of tact and sensitivity are given to very few, and Anjali is not among the blessed. She spares nothing; no surmise is left unfloated, no nasty insinuation unslithered into the long grass of the master’s mind. She besmirches Amrita’s memory with delicate indirectness, avoiding anything which might tempt the cuckolded husband to defend his dead wife. Then she paints a lurid (though admittedly not too far exaggerated) picture of Pran’s faults, drawing the incontrovertible conclusion that the boy exhibits all the signs of tainted blood.
    This would be enough for most people, but Anjali is only beginning. She expounds on the theme of miscegenation, and all its terrible consequences. Impurities, blendings, pollutions, smearings and muckings-up of all kinds are bound to flow from such a blend of blood, which offends against every tenet of orthodox religion. Small wonder the city of Agra is suffering a plague. She, for one, would not be surprised to discover that the entire influenza epidemic, all twenty million global deaths of it, was down to Pran. The boy is bad through and through. Finally she produces her trump