Rajat Chaudhuri is a free thinker born in middle India,  now practising in Calcutta, India’s cultural Mecca. Highbrow print  journals like Indian Literature, online SF mags like The Scientific Indian and popular dailies -- The Statesman, Telegraph and Times of India have helped put his writer’s act together. He has published one novel, Amber Dusk and is now playing ping pong with his editor with the MS of another.

The Made-to-Order Muse (June 20, 2010. Issue 18.)

He owned the little bookshop, Atlantis, that used to stand right at the corner where Lancer's road cut across the Avenue of Philosophers and continued with a different name and attitude along the eastern edge of the university greens. Those days you would always find a flock of undergraduates from the nearby colleges browsing the shelves, asking him for writing tips or chatting away under the shade of the spreading  chinar tree, where a Nescafé kiosk with its polished Espresso machine and printed paper cups had sprung up, noticing the business the bookshop would provide.The  metro station was still a few years away and the Atlantis was the only attractor of an otherwise under-the-radar neighbourhood.  

It was at his bookshop that I first met Greg. Apart from running the shop, Greg was a poet and he published one of the better known litmags of the day, the Atlantis 2. It was an uncommon name for a magazine, even allowing for their inclination towards over-the-top, and I guessed it was 2 because the shop was Atlantis 1, but Greg shook his head. He smiled, he was something forty, with a shine in his eyes -- blue and gunmetal grey, said, `perhaps it's something else Nandini. Something to do with laundry.'

"Laundry?" I said.

"Yes detergents."

Greg could be vague when he was in the mood. 

I was not from the city and the English department of my college, while advertising a cosmopolitan attitude, still did not make me comfortable as far as friends go. Most of the girls were locals and they created an invisible force field around them, that was difficult for out-of-towners to negotiate. There was another girl from Kerala, where I came from, but she lived with a relative in a distant corner of the city and I couldn't get along well with the few others who were mostly from towns of central and northern India. It was an all woman college, I rarely met men my age and being in the midst of a breathless P. G. Wodehouse phase, soon became friends with Greg -- his shop had all the books. 

Not that Greg lacked admirers but he was the shy type. Twice my age and an accomplished poet while I the gawky undergrad, floundering my way through Shakespeare. I still carried with me the accent of the south yet we didn't make an odd pair at all. At least it didn't look like that at the beginning, when it was simple. 

Most of the day you would find him behind the counter reading a book -- he preferred the classics, starry-eyed about the Russians, or writing in a black Moleskine pocketbook that he would put away as soon as a customer came by. On one of my visits to the Atlantis, we had hardly spoken before that, he asked me if I was at the university and what I studied there. I told him I was doing a BA in English. I noticed he had a delicate voice, almost like a child.

Next time, I had been looking for a book at the back of the shop, he had asked, `would you care for some coffee?' I stood up: about closing time and it was winter outside, the bone-chewing Delhi winter that made an outsider feel lonely -- Delhi with its open spaces and the wintry unswept boulevards, doubly lonely in the January dusk; I got my book, went up to the counter saying that coffee was on my mind too, half-truth that one. He offered me a cushioned chair and the Nescafé-man -- poor chap freezing, got us the cappuccinos, the lingering aroma making that first encounter with Greg special. 

I remember reading somewhere, that scents can act as bookmarks to events in our brains and that five rupee cappuccino with Greg in his bookshop, that cold evening, had perhaps etched the memory more clearly than the hundred other days that brush past without trace or fold. Perhaps this was not so, for cappuccino is not a rare beverage and there are uncounted times when we encounter the coffee aroma, too many times for it to be a good marker for the memory of that evening. I think, I know what it was, but let me tell my story, now that I have come to it after all these years.  

Crammed in this metro coach, rushing fifty feet below what used to be Greg's amazing little shop, the vividness of those long gone time comes like a shock. I wince under the assault of a barrage of recollections, but this is the only way I can deal with the oddest adventure of my life.   

I had sat across from the counter that evening and sipped my coffee. He told me about the literary magazine and that I should try send in a couple of poems for it. 

"I am poor with verse," I said.

"Anyone can write poetry, once they get the mind to behave and the spirit to flutter," he said.

"I love to read but that too in a haphazard way," I said.

"The next major spoilsport is inspiration, the lack of it. There are those who can do without it, but they are like, well they are no better than long-legged bugs dipped in ink, crawling on paper," he said and went on talking about the magazine. He gave me the current issue of Atlantis 2, "Tell me what's  wrong with it."  I riffled through its pages and said I will read it. 

"Don't be scared, you will only be telling me and we need young minds to think for us."   

I had laughed at that, for Greg was not all that deep in his years. He could be passed of as the college-boy lead in a Bollywood romcom with his dark hair that tended to form waves that were quite appealing in themselves, a noble face without blemishes nor overdone in any department and those eyes, blue with a dash of a metallic grey that was the color of the sky with the certain possibility of a storm.    

I had finished my coffee and rose to leave. Greg put my book  in a brown envelope, stapled it and gave me my change. `Drop in whenever you please, we are open till nine,' he said. I took his magazine to my barsati, fried some dodgy mutton kebabs for dinner and and read it from cover to cover over that teeth-chattering winter weekend. 

Greg seemed to know noone but us -- the students and professors who bought his books. We didn't know if he had relatives or a home back in England. He received no mail, except for publisher's catalogues and we never saw him having guests over. I asked him about this one evening, sitting upstairs in his study, on the upper level of the bookshop. He had closed the shop early with a notice outside the collapsible gate saying -- `Semi-closed. Please ring the bell if you need a book.' He did this often when he was planning to write and wanted to see me, We had become good friends by then.  

Winter had gone by then and slowly the weather moved to the other extreme. It brought burning days and restless nights with the noisy coolers throwing a superfine spray of water on you, as you tried to sleep on the breathing hot floor. I had left my old barsati lodging near the Anglo-Indian hostel and was now sharing a flat with a girl from Nagaland, near the bazaar and cinema hall area, hoping the hum of the neighbourhood would be good for my spirits. This girl, Crystal, my flat mate, was in our department and she was friendly and easy to live with and  we jumped on the offer for this new place when it appeared on the market. Delhi had no doubt changed me and I was quite happy sharing the flat with someone not from Kerala! But perhaps the most important reason why I liked this new place was that the Atlantis was just a  short rickshaw-ride away. 

I had told Greg that the magazine could give more space to prose and he had promptly invited more prose contributions. We -- sometimes there would be more than one of us, would hear him recite his poems with coffee downstairs or now and then, in evenings like the one I was talking about, when he was in the mood to write, he would invite me to his study. I asked him that day about his folks and Greg after some thought told me that his grandfather had been a Lieutenant in the Fourteenth Army and  may have died fighting the Japanese in the jungles of Burma at the fag end of the second world war. Perhaps he was killed by the sword of a Japanese officer or he could have been captured and killed later. His father, Edward, then a young boy of fifteen, helped by a British army officer, continued his studies to Calcutta. When this country was getting independent, Greg's father was finishing his studies in the east. Soon he was to be rewarded with a job in a tea garden in Kurseong, where he thrived and where he met Greg's mother, Isabella. They decided to stay back. 

Later in life they had shifted to Shimla where Greg was born. Growing up among the pine forests and enveloped by Himalayan vistas the young boy went to private boarding school and then to college in Shimla, where he did a Masters in History. But the good times had run out. His parents had gone for a holiday to England where his father was killed in a  balloon crash at an amusement park. It was a freak accident, some called it sabotage but there was no clear opinion as to who the target of the sabotage attempt could have been or what was the message being passed. While his mother survived -- being afraid of heights she had not taken the balloon ride, she couldn't cope with the shock and died a day later of heart failure. She was quickly buried by her family in England, who were in no good terms with Greg and his father Edward. Greg was too bewildered by the severity of the events, to be able to make the trip to England to see his parents for one last time. He sold the Shimla house, crept down to  Delhi and with the family savings set up this book shop. 

I felt bad having revived these memories but I was not comfortable, not knowing anything about his past. "I have spoilt your evening," I said but he had waved my concerns away. 

He had better coffee up in this study and and it was a cosy room, with a thick rug in the middle, an easy chair, a leather sofa and a sturdy mahogany desk at one corner. There were more books here, Greg's personal collection, arranged in burnished cases against the walls. Winding wooden stairs went down to the shop below while a door at the back of the room opened to his living quarters.  Across from the writing desk, on the opposite wall, hung a portrait of a young lady done in oil. It was painted in an impressionist style with the light talking in hushed voices and a snow white cat - a soft creamy pile in her lap, adding interesting counterpoint to her big powder blue eyes. She was very fair with long delicate hands -- marble-white and I felt I had seen her somewhere, in a book perhaps, but couldn't remember. I asked Greg. 

"She is Isabella, my mother," he said, not adding anything more. Of course it was Isabella, how could I have missed that face. Her son had come to inherit all her fine features. Perhaps it was the creamy white pile in her lap that had distracted my attention from this simple fact, that was right before my eyes. Ignoring Greg's diffidence I asked who was the painter.

"Heard it was a friend of father, in Kurseong," he said. He dipped his head to write. I knew this was a signal for me to stop and I didn't disturb him any more.

In the beginning I was hesitant when he asked me if I would like to come upstairs to his study but Greg knew how to make a person comfortable. He would sit down at his writing table and ask me to choose a chair and I inevitably chose one close to the stairs. Often we would just talk over enormous mugs of coffee brewed by Greg. We would discuss the winds of the new economy hitting these shores like wary weathermen, ponder on imponderables, try predicting the future like seasoned clairvoyants or kvetch about those endless summer months or brutish autorickshaw drivers. It was me who would do most of the talking while he would be the good listener. He would ask me to write and I would make one excuse after another. Then he would suddenly fall silent in the middle of a conversation and I would see him drumming his fingers on the table top as if laying out his thoughts to a rhythm. Soon he would be in the mood to write and get slowly absorbed in it, while I took out a book and read. He would be still writing when I left, trying my best not to distract him. "Thanks for coming," he would say shyly, "I kind of like what I have written today." 

When I told Crystal about Greg and the time I spend sitting in that room while he writes, she looked concerned and asked me to be careful with the `Atlantis guy'. I thought she was paranoid. In fact, she had been so close to the truth, that she had seen it but not in a way that could be of use to us. She was blinded by the fiery disc hovering too close to her eyes. 

So I went to the Atlantis often. The student crowd would thin out after seven, especially during the winter months and I would take a rickshaw to Lancer's road. Now and then I would get a couple of boiled eggs sprinkled with a tangy masala that he liked or a packet of ghee-dripping imartis that we shared. I noticed, he was writing more often and had begun to close the shop early to make time for it. One day, I had gone to a party with Crystal and it got a bit late but seeing the light at the Atlantis, I asked  the autorickshaw to drop me there. Crystal, nice that she was, insisted she wait for me outside but I said I would be fine.

It was about half past nine and I found it odd that the main door to the shop was ajar and all the lights burning inside. Did he have guests, I wondered or maybe a late buyer?  I was a little tipsy from the wine at the party and pushed through the door without caring to knock. There was no one at the counter or the back. Pretty unnatural. Greg always locked the door or pulled the collapsible gate when he went upstairs. Maybe he had just gone up and would be back in a minute. I decided to wait. Five minutes passed but there was still no ssign of him. I quietly walked up the wooden stairs and peeped in through the curtain. I didn't know why I was doing this but I knew I must find where Greg had gone and why.  

There was no door to the study, only a curtain and I moved it aside and saw him. Well, I couldn't see him clearly because the electric lights were all switched off and someone had lit thick candles in the room. One at his desk and two on the bookshelf on the opposite wall, throwing a flickering light on the portrait of Isabella. He was sitting at the table, eyes fixed on the painting and there was a low murmur coming from his direction. I realised he was talking to himself. 

His notebook was open before him, pen in hand but he was still as bubble frozen for eternity in a globe of glass. I waited and watched but he never saw me. In the smoky candlelit darkness he looked like a waxen image with the power of speech. But what were those words playing on his lips. "Mother, mother ..." or was it "Mother talk to me, mother I am waiting," like a chant it went. Inspite of the buzz of the wine I felt my neck go stiff and quickly pulled back from the room and padded down the stairs and out of the shop, into the empty but familiar outside. 

I didn't tell Crystal about this little adventure and went to meet Greg the next day, when it was still light. I had been an intruder last night but there had to be some explanations. He was at the counter of his shop, packing pictorial dictionaries into a brown cardboard box. A Wodehouse title that I had been searching for was lying there beside the cash register and I knew he had kept it there for me. He looked content, a ghost of a smile on his face. I picked up the book asked him how he was.

"I am superb, Nandini!" he said.

"Uh-huh"

"I have been up all night, writing. It kept coming and see I am not tired at all. Let me finish this packing and I will read it to you. You will tell me if it's any good," he said. 

This humility of his, blew away my defences and upset my plans. I was quickly forgetting that seance like set-up of his room last night and waiting to hear him recite. The sparkle of those lines was such that noone could miss them. Rich in their music and sublime. There could be no doubt, the Muse had been absolutely indulgent. 

What followed, can now be stitched together with the advantage of looking back, but time, in which we are forced to live and joust and weep -- the first time over, does not allow the luxury of looking back. Hindsight doesn't teach us anything, it is child's play that we indulge in, a make-believe that we could be masters of what is to come -- that we can rise above time and be in command, as if history repeats itself with the dizzying regularity of church bells, as if whatever is planned will work out with clockwork precision. So I will try to stick to facts and hope these would shine some light through the treacherous mists of space-time.  

As the weeks passed, I found Greg getting less and less attached to his bookshop. He would open it late or wind up soon after lunch. The evening hours shortened and often he would be closing early in the afternoon. This was not good for the business of the Nescafé kiosk which had sprouted under the chinar tree with the hope of drawing some of Greg's buyers -- it's called positive externality by economists but jargon is of little interest to us. What is slightly important, is that the Nescafé man was getting unhappy as his business shrunk, the booklovers having left the Atlantis as its opening and closing time had become completely erratic. Often he would complain that sahib had been neglecting his shop and indirectly blaming me for this. He had a point there, he did. 

I visited Greg every other day now and then all days of the week. He had been writing in a frenzy. I would come in the evenings, he would make coffee and sit down to write. These days he spoke little and I began to bring over my books to read. "You have to be here on Sunday so that I can complete this long poem," he said one evening. Then he read out  five marvelous stanzas  and I was there on Sunday. He would ask me to wear my nose ring, saying, "I haven't seen you wear the nose ring again and so this work will never be finished." I obliged. 

He was working as if a genie had taken over . A major collection of his poems from the last five years, that was what kept him going. He called it The Sky Walkers. Two hundred and eight poems in all, half of those written since I had known him. The work was nearing its end and he hardly opened a window to his shop now. The students and the teachers all disappeared, the Nescafé man grew thinner. The Atlantis had hit rough weather. 

Most of the poems in the collection, were free verse with a couplet here a sonnet there and other forms sprinkled in between. He composed, he revised, he asked my opinion. "I will make you a small present when I finish this," he said. 

"But, why, what's the need for a present?"

When his creative spirits were high, he often did not hear what you had said. "I will give you a cat," he said.

"Ah! a cat, how did he know I love cats," I thought, but never asked. 

That day he asked me to come a bit late. I reached the shop a little after eight, planning to be there for a couple of hours. He had been revising the the last poem of the book, which was also titled, The Sky Walkers. I found the shop empty and went up the stairs. As I entered his study, the smell of candle smoke was heavy in the air. 

The fluorescent light of the study was switched off and three candles were burning in the room. But there was a change in their arrangement this time. There was a one  on his writing table as before, now reduced to a stub but burning fiercely. As if there was a spurt in the flow of paraffin to the flame, it burned with abrupt brightness. There was a small table  at the centre of the room, one I had never seen before and a chair with it. It was a mahogany table with an oval top and carved sea horse legs, with curled tails and long snouts. The two remaining candles burned on this sea-horse table which had glasses and things on it. Greg was nowhere around. 

I strained to see better and noticed that the door at the back of the room which led to his quarters, was open. I was making up my mind to go inside when I heard his voice from the room at the back.  "Thanks for coming, Nandini."

"Where are you?" I asked. 

"I am here, all right," he said, was there a slight tension in his voice? Perhaps.

"What are you doing back there in the dark, won't you be writing tonight?"

"Please come inside and sit at that table, I am fine back here, I can see you," he said.

"But I can't Greg! why don't you come out of that room, you are scaring me."

"I have finished my work Nandini, it's all there on that table."

I didn't know how to react, but went up to the sea-horse table and sat down on the chair, as he wished. 

"There, I can see you better now. There is some gin in the bottle there. Pour a drink for yourself if you like," he said, still invisible behind the darkness. I didn't feel like, but my nerves were fired up and I took a glass and poured some gin. I popped in a cube or two of ice from the icebox into a highball glass and added a little tonic water and mixed my drink with a stirrer. I took a sip.

"You have been there all the time through this work and now that it is over, we can say goodbye,"

I smiled, "what is this goodbye business, Greg, I am not getting you? I am honoured that my presence was useful, but what you are saying doesn't make much sense to me." I took another sip, the scent of juniper berries stirring up lost memories. 

His voice seemed to come from far away, "Let me look at you as I go. It had to be like this, I had to see you now." I tried to rise from the chair and rush into the back room but something kept me from moving. I had been pinned down by a great force that now hung thick in the air. It was silent but it had spoken. His voice grew faint but in that quiet room it still carried to me, "One needs a trance to create and I have been blessed by an endless trance. It now inspires me to put out the light.  So I told myself,  time to pack up boy."

"What are you doing there Greg, come outside or I will have to leave," I raised my voice but that shadowy darkness and the unknown that lurked in that room, sucked out the breath from my words. I spoke but couldn't hear what I had said, even if I had screamed it would be in a pantomime.  

"A few seconds ago I have taken a sugar-sweetened mixture which will put me off to sleep very soon. Pentobarbitol sodium, it never fails and it doesn't hurt. You need not worry, there is a note here, I have written everything down. When they come, you can tell them what happened, or you can leave now. Let me look at you for one last time," his voice was like a broken feather getting swept away by the wind. 

I sat staring into the darkness of the doorway knowing that he was watching me as he died. I was not scared any more.-- hemmed in among the audience of a downtown movie theatre, forced to watch a show that refused to get over. Every passing moment the invisible audience grew, their salty breath on my back and they pushed me from all sides. There was no way I could get up from my seat and leave the theatre. The gin glass icy in my hands, little streams  trickling down its sides. "There is  a box under the table with your gift. Open it and take it with you." 

I looked down and right at my feet was a large canework box. I tried to lift it but it was heavy and there was something moving inside. 

"It's Roger Mortimer, my mother's pet," then he tried to say something but his voice failed. An icy silence touched my cheeks and brushed past. The candle flames flickered  for a moment.

I lifted the lid and a fluffy white tom jumped out and climbed up my arm, right up to my shoulder. "Roger Mortimer?" I asked. The cat meowed. My gaze shifted to the portrait of Isabella. She was still there with her unblinking powder blue yes, watching over her dead son but the snow-white cat had vanished from her lap.

The two of us left the room. The candles were burning recklessly in Greg's empty study. 

Lately I had been kept busy by Roger Mortimer. He is old now and near blind in both eyes. We visit the vet often and he is now on an old man's diet. A few years ago I left north Delhi for a leafy middle-class neighbourhood on the other bank of the Yamuna, where I have set up a content-writing business that takes care of me and the cat. Even in his old age Roger Mortimer is my constant companion. I take him to office and he sleeps on a chair while I work. If he walks out of the room, my thoughts walk out after him and I can't work till he is back. In the evenings he watches TV with me, preferring History Channel to Music Television and goes to sleep on my bed curled tight against my chest.  

The other day on History Channel they had a programme about British royals. The show was about murder and intrigue in the royal family of England and there the characters of Edward, Isabella and Roger Mortimer all came to life. How could I have ever missed this story? Edward, Isabella and Roger Mortimer had been real people more than six hundred years ago just like the ones that had popped into my life through Greg's story. But Roger Mortimer -- Isabella's lover and alleged murderer of her husband Edward II, king of England, had been a nobleman while here I was stuck with this cat that came out of a picture. Something didn't quite add up. Nothing really ever does.