Masterpiece
Name: Dinesh Mehta. Age: 35. Marital status: married. Occupation: accounts manager in a financial company.
Did I say he is a painter? I guess I didn’t. So, he paints. “And he paints well”, says two already successful exhibitions. Enthusiastic in nature, he tries imitating anything in a picture that attracts him.
Five feet six inches, handsomely built, anyone who looks at him from a distance finds him completely sane. But as soon as he comes near him (or uses binoculars, for that matter) the signs of insanity will start showing. This is what he is: sane insane.
Why so?
He has a secret which he tells everybody, and which I am going to tell you now. He is a member of the ‘Insane People’s Association’ (IPA).
The association includes two poets, two writers and Dinesh. They meet once a month. The meeting starts with sharing their latest creation, gradually progressing with healthy discussion, and consistently ending with an abusive altercation. Dinesh always painted two to three pictures in a month (not to mention the sketches) but, even though there is an IPA meeting next week, he has not painted anything, not even a sketch yet. Reason?
The reason, dear reader, lies in their meeting which took place about 20 days ago, where his fellow IPA members impelled him to make his masterpiece.
In the meeting, after he showed his paintings, Vijay Vora, a poet, said, “Hmm…good. Dinesh, we all know you paint good. You carry that spark within you which an artist should have. But we expect more. I mean, every painter should try to make his masterpiece. You know what kind of picture I am talking about, right?”
He shook his head.
“A masterpiece is something in which we can lose ourselves, something which disturbs us from inside. You see? For example, the mysterious smile in monalisa, or those abstract faces and shapes in Guernica, they are so disturbing. I am talking about such pieces. You see?”
Dinesh blinked in agreement.
“He is right. We are all now expecting a masterpiece from you.” Akhilesh, the writer, said.
And this was how it all began. The masterpiece was what he thought of every day; while walking, while talking, while eating, while urinating, and in the office, instead of concentrating on work, he would surf the masterpieces by great painters, would note minute details, would observe the portraits for a long time, would gaze at the colours, and even when he came across some ordinary painting, he would think of it as a masterpiece and would get disturbed ‘from the inside’. Even at nights, in his sleep, he would see mysteriously smiling monalisa coming towards him with a vase of sunflowers in her hand.
His wife Neha noted this but was not surprised. When an insane person behaves abnormally, it is considered normal.
He would try to paint- a line or two here, a stroke or two there, but then would disapprove his efforts, thinking, “No! This cannot be my masterpiece.”
There is only a week left to their meeting, and right now, creating overlapping circles on a plain paper, he thinks, “What can be the motif that makes any picture a masterpiece?” Words, said years back by his drawing teacher, come flying towards him randomly, and when he arranges them in order, a sentence is formed-“An artwork is the portrait of emotions which cannot be expressed in any other way.”
He smiles.
He waggles his dormant emotional system, and suddenly finds before him the things which he was not able to see till then: hidden birds behind the smoke from chimneys, children playing in the streets, imprints of palm on the doors of cars…
Next day, when Neha hands him coffee, her fingers accidentally touch his. Touching your wife’s fingers is a very commonplace occurrence which most of the time goes unnoticed, but today it was different. He looks in her deep blue eyes and gets surprised. “Do her eyes show the reflection of emotions hidden in my eyes?”
Quickly finishing his coffee, he rushes towards the office.
At evening, he goes for a walk in a garden. Like most of the people, he walked for fitness and freshness. Seeing many flowers at a place, he stops. A dewdrop falls from a petal to another petal exactly below it and falls further to mix itself in the greenery. “Dew-fall in the evening? How is that possible?” he thinks. He looks around as if looking for an answer, and finds a gardener sprinkling water on the flowers. He sighs and walks back home.
At night, he thinks of making a picture based on the emotions caught in the radar of his heart during that day.
Sharpening the pencil, he adjusts a big canvas on a stand and starts drawing. He draws a palace in a dilapidated situation, with cracks and broken windows. Then fills it with shining golden colour. When he sleeps, the painting starts making itself. The palace widens, occupying more space, and the colour changes to a darker shade. This always happened. Whenever he would draw a picture, it would spring to life and, without Dinesh knowing anything about it, would start making itself. Things at the right may slip towards left, sometimes colours would change their shades, lines would appear out of nowhere, and the existing lines may often vanish into nothingness. Was Dinesh making the paintings or the paintings were making him? It was difficult to tell.
Next morning he looks at the picture.
“Hmm…something is wrong. The palace seems bigger.” He wonders, and adjusting another canvas, he makes a smaller palace, in ruins, and fills it with an appropriate shade of golden.
In his office, his boss comments, “Dinesh, so many goof-ups in the past two days, 3 customers already complained. What’s wrong? All fine? You Know, this kind of work is not appreciated here. If it continues…”
“I am sorry sir, It would not happen again. I shall concentrate now.”
That day, he forcefully concentrates on work. He is stuck in the complex web of numbers, but the amazing world of colours does not leave him. The blue colour of eyes diluted due to tears, the red colour of cherries which one finds only in films, the white colour seeming like black due to the shadow of death, and the seven colours dispersing from that white…slowly, one after another, all the colours gallops and dances, and spreads around him like a whirlpool.
He is not able to continue his painting that evening due to uninvited guests. But next evening, he draws a flower beside the palace and fills it with attractive, bold yellow. The petals were drawn in such a way that they look different from each other. While painting that, he feels- “Yeah, this is my masterpiece!”
Three days before the meeting, he makes vast sky, and a bird locked in a cage, sitting with its wings folded. Then he affixes wings to the cage, due to which it seems as if the cage is flying. He fills the sky with light orange- the colour which prevails after the sun sets and before the darkness dominates. He fills in the bird with white, and the wings affixed to the cage with red.
The moment he turns back to keep brushes and colours, the bars of the cage shrinks and turns thin. Next evening when he returns home, Neha tells him-“I went to a doctor today.”
“Yeah? What did he say?”
She does not answer but looks at him sadly. He holds her hand.
Warmth… Dampness…
That night, looking at the picture, he feels that the bars of the cage should be thick. He does accordingly. Then, he paints a face, with both its eyes of different colours- one is blue, one is black. The eyes are looking at the palace. A tear is falling from the blue eye and is going towards the petal of the yellow flower.
“A final touch tomorrow, and its done. My masterpiece!” he happily thinks.
*
He is in the IPA meeting. It is his turn to share his work.
Taking out the Painting from his bag, Dinesh says, “After our last meeting, I too felt that I should make my masterpiece. I worked this entire month for it. And see, it’s ready.”
Everyone looks at the painting with astonishment.
“What is this? Is it modern art or something?” Akhilesh asks.
Dinesh, looking at it, is bewildered- the colours of the palace, and the petals, and the wings, and the sky, and the eye…all got mixed in a hodgepodge, making a colour which has no name…
When Dinesh had seen it last time, it was perfect. But right now something was wrong.
He keeps staring at it for some time, then, stammering, says, “I don’t know what happened…I mean, I wanted it to be little like this…but…” He is not able to speak anything further. Everyone, for some moments, is distracted from the picture while looking at Dinesh. During those very moments, the lips of the face in the picture move and slowly turn into
the shape of an enigmatic smile.
