The Impressionist by Hari Kunzru Read Free Book Online Page A

card: the battered photograph. Ronald Forrester, IFS.
    ‘Now tell me who he looks like.’
    Razdan turns the snapshot over in his onion-encrusted hands. Forrester’s sepia face stares back at him. The nose, the fine lines of the mouth. But for the skin it could be an Indian face. The photograph-man seems to smile at him, a distant, water-damaged smile which cuts through his fever like acid etching a metal plate. For the first time since Anjali dragged him into the room, he turns to look at Pran Nath.
    The boy is kneeling on the floor, blood flowing from a wound on his temple. Dishevelled and snivelling, he looks faintly revolting. At last Razdan realizes why he avoids him. He always thought it was because of the mother. She would whisper to herself. When he entered a room he would feel he was interrupting. Yet despite his public campaigns for purity, since her death he has made secret visits to the lamplit rooms upstairs in the bazaar. There he tells the women to behave in a certain way, to touch him in places he finds embarrassing to name. The son has always been an unwelcome reminder of the mother who planted that guilty seed in his consciousness, a sign of his enslavement to carnality.
    No. It is simpler than that.
    With a feeling like drowning, he realizes that the servant-woman is telling the truth. Pran Nath and the photograph are two versions of the same image. This is not his son. With that, something snaps. His orderly life scatters like an up-ended wooden tray of letters at a printing press. His breath leaves his body in a drawn-out sigh of disappointment.
    ‘Father?’ asks Pran Nath plaintively. There is no response.

They do not even wait for the corpse to cool before they throw him out. The servants drag him straight to the front door and sling him into the street.
    Pran lies in the dust, smelling the onion-stink on his clothes. A crowd gathers, fascinated by the unprecedented events unfolding before their fortunate eyes. The chowkidar brandishes a lathi and Anjali gives a reprise of her miscegenation speech, adding that the evil boy has, to cap it all, just caused Pandit Razdan’s untimely death. Then the door is slammed shut, the bolt drawing across it with a heavy metallic rasp.
    Pran gets up and hammers on the door, the familiar door with its iron studs and hinges, its scuffed blue paint. The crowd scrutinizes him eagerly for signs of Englishness, pointing out to each other the alien features which suddenly seem so obvious.
    ‘Please!’ he begs. ‘Let me in!’
    From the other side, the chowkidar growls at him to clear off.
    ‘Please! Open up!’ There is no response. ‘My uncle,’ he shouts tremulously, ‘will come and flog you. Then you’ll be sorry.’
    To his delight, the bolt scrapes back, and the blue door opens a chink. A hand appears briefly and drops a little sepia square in the dust. Then the door slams shut again. Pran picks up the photograph and carries on pounding with his fists, crying and pleading. In his confusion he turns to the crowd, only to be faced with a ring of people who have no reason to like him. The sweet-seller, the old woman from next door, the man who sells dry goods, the druggist’s boy – all are smiling the same wolfish, unsympathetic smile. He starts to wish he had not played quite so many practical jokes.
    Out of the crowd arcs a lump of dung, which hits him, hot and wet, on the back of the neck. As he scrapes it off, another missile splats into his face. He lunges forward, and a gaggle of little boys scatter, howling with mock alarm. The adults laugh indulgently. Then he goes sprawling on to the ground, tripped by an unseen foot.
    He spends the afternoon skulking around outside his house, his mind as blank as one of his school notebooks. A string of people knock at the blue door, members of the community who have heard about Pandit Razdan’s tragic death, and have come to pay their respects. They all seem to know about Pran’s disgrace. Though he rushes up