Canvas

She wasn’t Rushdie’s Sufia nor Marquez’s Remedios; neither did she have the Monalisa smile, but she was just right for Miraan. She was a girl in white sitting on a piano in a white room with white curtains swaying in the wind. The only thing coloured were her red lips. But most captivating was the attention with which she was focused on playing the piano as if nothing else in the world existed for her. He sighed with exhaustion and satisfaction; at times he managed to impress himself.

He called his manager, only friend and his best critic, Maya, at her office.

“Hey,” came the voice from the other end.

“I finished a painting today, thought you’d like to see it.”

“Yeah, I’d love to. I’ll drop by your place on my way home.”

“I’m going to call it The Lady at the Piano”, Miraan said handing her a drink while she stared blankly at the painting. “You like it?”

“I don’t know… It has captured me... Her expression is just so right she seems not to be in this world. I think it’s going to haunt me for days.”

“You can stop there. I’m not very used to good comments.”

“You’ve got to get used to them now because for this one, you are definitely going to receive loads of them. It’s beautiful.”

“It must be, if you say so.”

“I need to talk to you about something other than this painting,” he said dropping ice cubes in their second drink. “I want to paint a series of paintings on a pregnant woman. I have already thought about two of the settings and am thinking about the third, but for this one I’ll need a model.”

“A model? For what? You did not need a model for this one. As a matter of fact, you’ve never needed any model.”

“I know. But things were different till now. In this painting, I only made the girl feel what I feel while painting; what I felt when I painted her. But the expression of a pregnant lady is complicated. No matter how hard I try I just can’t get it right. A pregnant woman is happy that she is going to bear a child and become a mother. At the same time she also feels tired, and is frustrated by having to carry around the child inside her. So the expression that she wears is an outcome of her mixed feelings of euphoria and exhaustion.”

“Not that I know anyone who is pregnant, but I’ll try to find someone and let you know.” With that promise, she left. About a week later, Maya called Miraan to let him know that she had, through her friends, found a pregnant girl. She was a poor street girl and had agreed to pose for money, an amount that he could afford.

Maya brought the girl to Miraan’s place the next day. She was a fair girl probably in her mid or early twenties, very thin with a long slender neck. She was not the girl of his imagination, but something about her was very intriguing. She had a very bright face, but the sadness in her eyes made her face reflect a mixture of the contradicting emotions of happiness and sorrow; the exact expression he wished his model to wear.  After observing the girl for what seemed like eternity, he turned to Maya and said, “The girl needs a makeover”.

“Pull her hair up and clip it but do not apply any makeup on the face. You’ll need to get her a couple of dresses too. First a white frock with red polka dots that stops just below her knee and another long red dress that completely covers her body.

I’ll paint her in a room with white walls with a painting hanging on the wall just behind her. In the first painting she’ll be standing in the room turned to her left. Her left hand is not seen while her right hand rests on her belly. She will be staring out of the painting. By the way, get her a pair of black shoes too, no socks. In another, I’ll need a couch where she sits wearing the red dress in the middle of the same room with the same painting behind her. Get her to wear red lipstick for this one”

Then turning towards the girl he asked, “What’s your name?”

“You can call me Monalisa”, the girl said. “I’ve heard Monalisa was pregnant when she was painted, wasn’t she?  I’ll be your Monalisa and make you rich and famous.”

Miraan put up an exhibition of his paintings in a gallery a few months later. He tried to look for the girl and invite her to the exhibition but couldn’t find her. She seemed to have disappeared after accepting the money from him. The exhibition was a moderate success. Many people came to the exhibition, but no one bought any painting. About a month later Miraan was returning from a party late at night when he spotted the girl at a street corner from where people usually picked up prostitutes. She was dressed in yellow and was standing under a streetlight. The yellow colour of the streetlight along with the yellow dress made her face look yellowish. Looking at her, it wasn’t difficult to guess she was a prostitute waiting for a customer. He walked towards the girl and said hello to which she responded.

“I didn’t know that you were a prostitute.”

“Congratulations, you know now. Anyway, I wasn’t a prostitute when I met you. It is a profession I entered quite recently.”

“But why?”

He couldn’t say what made her laugh. Was it the question or him?

“Why? Because I needed money. Why do you think I posed for you? Because I needed money. I have been poor all my life. I’ve always been living on the streets but my life got worse when I got raped by three men. I didn’t want to carry the child that was forced inside me but I needed money for an abortion. That’s the point you come into my life and offer to pay me for posing for you. The money I charged you was just enough for my abortion but I needed more to survive. I met a girl who talked me into prostitution and ever since I’ve been what you see now.”

This made Miraan remember the first time he had met her. How he had thought her expression to be perfect for his painting. Now that he came to know more about her, he could tell that although he had been right in discerning her emotions, he had been completely wrong in guessing the source of her feelings. She had never been happy for the child she had been carrying. She had been happy because, after posing for him, she would have enough money to abort the child… The sorrow in her eyes had been reflections of all the suffering she had gone through in her life. He looked at her now and saw a similar mixture of contradicting emotions on her face.

“Today… will you tell me your real name at least?”

“Huh, what’s in a name? I don’t have any real name. I keep changing my name every day.”

“So, what’s it today?”

“Hmm, you can call me Maaravi.”

“Maaravi”, Miraan muttered the name few times then said,” Maraavi, will you pose for me again? I’m going to paint you in black. I’m calling it The Woman in Mouring.””

- Prashant Das