The Impressionist by Hari Kunzru Read Free Book Online Page B

to them, begging for help, most will not even make eye contact. One by one they are admitted, the door thudding behind them. He cannot understand it. He is Pran Nath Razdan: the beautiful, the son and heir. It is like a bad dream.
    As night falls, stallholders hang oil lamps over their wares and the woodsmoke smell of cooking begins to lace the air. Pran starts to feel hungry and asks for some pakoras. Digging in his pocket, he finds he has no money, and for some reason no one will give him credit, even when he explains that his uncle will soon pay them back. For a while he loiters, hoping someone will take pity on him. No one does. Little by little his empty stomach starts to rumble, an unfamiliar, frightening sensation. He wanders around, his bruised body aching, a reek of dried excrement rising up from his crusted clothes. Standing on the corner under the high mansion wall, he has to flatten himself against it to let a funeral procession go past. A smattering of lamp-carrying mourners follows a bier, carried by half a dozen white-masked men. The corpse, wrapped tightly in cotton strips, is strewn with marigold petals. A couple of subdued and portly priests bustle ahead, obviously eager to finish the job.
    ‘Ah, it’s the nasty little half-baked bread. Come to beg on my corner?’
    The voice is raucous, mocking. Pran looks down to see the old beggar with the withered legs. This man has sat in the same spot for as long as he can remember. His drawn face is grained with dirt, his skin the colour of coal, pocked by some childhood disease. He sits in front of a bowl hollowed out from a piece of orange peel, which contains a couple of small coins. Pran cannot meet his eye. Once, on impulse, he stole the beggar’s coins and ran away. It seemed funny at the time. Now he shuffles about and looks at the floor, and at the pair of grotesquely tapering stumps stuck out accusingly at the world.
    ‘I recall the time you stole my bowl and dared me to run after you and fetch it.’
    Pran makes a non-committal noise in his throat.
    ‘How I laughed,’ says the beggar.
    Pran nods. The beggar seems to want to chat, so he decides to ask the question which has been preying on his mind.
    ‘You don’t by any chance have some food, do you?’
    The beggar stares at him with a look of wonder, and mutters a couple of lines of prayer. Pran takes this to mean he probably does not have food.
    ‘Well then, what am I supposed to do about eating?’
    The beggar laughs so loudly that people in the street turn round to look. He thumps his hand against his thigh and drums his stumps on the floor.
    ‘He’s hungry!’ he shouts. ‘He’s hungry!’
    Passers-by laugh and smile.
    ‘When my uncle comes –’ Pran starts, but the beggar only laughs harder.
    ‘What shall I do?’ he asks crossly.
    When the beggar finally regains control of himself, he curls his lip into a nasty sneer. ‘Go and eat with your own people. They’ll feed you.’
    ‘Who are my own people?’
    The beggar seems to find this even more funny.
    ‘You’ll find them at the Telegraph Club. Don’t worry, little half-baked. I’ll tell you what to say.’

The Agra Post and Telegraph Club is not the grandest club in the city. It is a plain Victorian building, a functional box of red brick with a stone portico attached to the front like a snub nose. Inside lingers a smell of fried food which cannot be eradicated, no matter how hard the cleaners scrub and polish. The cleaners scrub and polish hard, even violently, scouring the surfaces, waxing the floors, dusting until their arms ache. It is never good enough. There is still the smell of food fried in ghee, the rich unmistakable smell of India.
    The members of the club have many things in common. The women share a liking for cotton floral-print dresses which, though perhaps not of the best quality, are always clean and pressed, even in the hot weather. These are not the kind of dresses some women order out of the Army & Navy