Platform
1,700 words

Dreams in Prussian Blue

All Savitri wished was he turn the darned light off. She groped for her watch under her pillow and held it up, squinting with half-opened eyes to make sense of the tiny hands in the dial. Three a.m.! He was getting up earlier and earlier by the day.

She groaned and smothered herself with the pillow. The first time she had asked, “Honey, do you need the light?”, he had exploded.

“Of course I do. Can anybody paint without a light? Or,” he said, pausing for a moment in his unseeing anger, “are you like the rest? You too think I am stupid?”

It was his first outburst after the accident. Not once, even after the doctors announced that the loss of sight was permanent, had he railed aloud. She had seen him cry quietly, when he thought he was alone, shoulders shaking in subdued anguish, but that was all. So when he yelled at her, she rushed to comfort him. “Sorry honey. I didn’t see you were painting.”

But she had. And before she could stop herself, in her semi-wakefulness, blurted the question. Thank god she had not asked why he needed to paint in the first place.

“It’s OK. You can’t understand what I paint, anyway. Few people can.”

She flung the pillow off her face. Sleep was out of the question now. If only they could afford a bigger house... just one more room would do. Where she could get her six or seven hours of uninterrupted sleep, and he, in his room could potter around all the night, bump into tables and chairs, before locating his easel and canvas resting against the wall.

Then he could make as much as noise as he wished, setting up the easel on its stand, unpacking all the brushes and tubes of paint he had packed carefully the previous day and letting them clatter onto the table alongside the palette, and dragging the stool until he was sure it was at the precise distance he wanted from the stand and the table.

And, just before seating himself on the stool, fumble with the switches and turn on the light. Why oh why oh why? Savitri dug her nails into the pillow and sobbed soundlessly. So many questions. Some which she could ask, and others which had to be left hanging in the air.

Why pack and unpack the paints and the brushes every day when there was nobody to disturb them? Just let them be on the table. Because a good artist always takes care of his tools. Why paint in the night, why not in the day? The other part—when it did not make a difference to him—left unsaid. Because that’s when he had always painted, even before the accident, and that’s when he felt at his most creative. Why paint with the light on? Why paint, now?

It was different, earlier, when his paintings sold moderately well, just enough for him to sustain hope, though not well enough for them to manage without the regular income of her job attending to the shopping aisles in the superstore. Later, when everything depended on her, she asked, “What about me? Don’t I need to get enough sleep at home so that I stay awake at work?”

To counter which, by turns, he blustered, pleaded, whimpered. “I need to. It’s not just for me. It’s for us. When I start to sell again, we can move to a bigger house.”

Of course he knew the argument would stop there, because she could never proceed to the next logical step: she was never going to ask, “But why does a blind man need to paint?”

The bigger house remained as distant as a dream. Everything cost. Those brushes, with their nuances of coarse and fine hair; the paints, the more economical ones which she bought and he flung away saying they didn’t mix properly; the reams upon reams of drawing sheets on which he practiced his initial sketches until he was satisfied; and the vast stretches of canvas that were to proclaim his talent to the world. They were not one-time expenses either—paints were consumed, paper and canvas used and discarded.

At four in the morning, half-awake, she watched her husband at work. Most of the time he sat hunched silently on the stool, gazing at the canvas so hard, as if by dint of sheer intensity he could make the colors come alive. Sometimes he even shifted from side to side to look at the painting from different angles. Slowly, he reached for the palette on the table, and then groped for the correct brush and paint he imagined he needed. Even more slowly, he mixed the paints in the palette, lingering over his actions as she watched, fascinated, the brushes go round and round forever. At last, with his left hand gripping the edge of the frame, his right rose with the brush, hovered over the canvas until he was sure of the point it had to descend.

She held his artist-friends responsible. When he was normal, he was just like any one of them; everybody was equal, everybody had more or less the same amount of talent. When he turned blind, when it was certain he could no longer be one of them, his lost talent became prodigious in their eyes. Their estimate grew and grew, like the size of the fish that got away grows with every recounting of a fishing expedition, until he almost believed that but for the accident, he could have paralleled Picasso.

Perhaps their encouragement was meant only as a solace, and not to be taken literally, but they didn’t have to pay the bills, pay the rent, buy the groceries, buy boxes of drawing paper, oils, pencils, paints, brushes. They didn’t have to help him move around the house, or, at the end of the day, most of it spent on her feet, exhausted from work, tell him whether his idea of spaces and colors on the canvas was getting better. And they could sleep with the lights off.

Once the brush touched the canvas, he grew sure of his movements. Whether they were long, sweeping strokes, or short, squiggly dabs, he executed them with confidence; at the end of one such bout of painting, he broke into a tiny satisfied smile for a second. Now that his eyes were frighteningly devoid of expression, that smile, it seemed to Savitri, was worth everything in the world.

His blindness, by some tacit convention, was never to be discussed, unless he brought the topic up himself. “You know, maybe it’s a good thing. A painting by a blind artist will surely attract more attention. What about a whole exhibition, one big series of paintings? That will sell.”

He faced her, looking for her approval, and under the steady gaze of his blank eyes, she laughed nervously. “I guess so.” So he didn’t mind being held up as a curiosity, a genius freak. Was he thinking of a deaf Beethoven composing a symphony? But she knew her husband was no genius. He had been good before, but it was clear even to her, that no amount of practice now could bring that skill back. Getting around without bumping into furniture or learning to read Braille was not the same as making a painting good enough to sell.

He had been brave; he refused to go to seed as she had feared he would after the accident. She was not sure whether she loved him more now or earlier. He held on, and she was glad for him, though she wished the holding on didn’t cost so much.

So one day, after some simple arithmetic about income and expenditure—savings did not complicate the calculations as they were non-existent after his treatment—Savitri decided everything couldn’t go on the way it was.

The first to go were the paint-tubes. In the superstore where she worked, she found she could get them much cheaper than elsewhere, if she got a whole box—and of the same color. She got one box of prussian blue because she liked the name. When he told her he had run out of red, her hand shook as she gave him one of the prussian blue tubes. But he went ahead and mixed the color in the palette with the same intentness. Savitri winced as the sun in the painting was eclipsed with blue.

After that, it was much easier. Following the sun, the sky turned an inky blue, the trees and the earth, the people and the houses, one by one, as the original paints ran out, all took on the same color.

Then, it struck her she could save on the canvas too. By the time she thought of it, he had finished four paintings, the third half in prussian blue, and the last one completely. She re-cycled the canvas. So painting number five slowly wiped out painting number one, six usurped the place of two, and nine erased five in its turn.

From the bed, she watched him count and pick the sixth tube in the box on the table. Yellow, he must have thought. She slid out of the bed silently and stood behind him. He squeezed out a little prussian blue from the tube onto the palette where the traces of all other colors had all but disappeared, and stirred it with the brush.

Savitri stooped and wrapped her arms around his chest from behind. He started, smiled and patted her hand. “What do you think of this?”

“Of what?”

“The sun. There is the sun, but you still have twilight. Do you get that impression? The orange suddenly turning to brown?”

“I suppose so. I don’t know honey, truly,” she said. “I don’t understand painting.”

“And you a painter’s wife!” He chuckled. “Never mind. After this, I will be done. Twenty-four paintings should be good enough for an exhibition.”

“Yes honey.” She would have to think of something soon; maybe take one or two more of his friends into confidence. She clasped him tighter and whispered in his ear. “Love you.”

“Love you too, dear.”

Savitri kissed him on the cheek, walked over to the switches and turned the light off quietly. She could save on the electricity too. Back in bed, she watched her husband silhouetted against the backdrop of the canvas, adding more prussian blue, now an obscure grey in the darkness. She let out a yawn and hoped she could catch some sleep. It would be a long day at the superstore.