The Colour of Love. Preethi Nair
just to make sure I would keep on track. How I wish I had stopped there.
The next morning the Guru’s door was slightly ajar so I knocked on it and walked in. He had his back to me and was lighting his candles, humming away and swaying to Sting’s ‘Englishman in New York', which was playing loudly. It got to the alien bit when the Guru turned around. He looked startled when he saw me and immediately stopped the tape recorder, saying that he was sampling the music that was corrupting the youth of today, and promptly changed the cassette to a whinging sitar.
‘Sting is not a corrupting force,’ I said. ‘In fact, he’s against deforestation.’
The Guru glared at me when I said deforestation like he didn’t know what the word meant, but now I think about that look – eyes narrowing, brows furrowed – it was probably more that he remembered he had a job to do.
He signalled for me to sit on the floor and held my hands. They tingled with warmth again as he whispered kind words and then he began humming and chanting. Then the Guru asked me to lie down and he proceeded to touch me, moving slowly from my hands to other parts of my body, my neck, my feet; incantations and gods’ names being chanted all the while as he healed the negativity that shrouded me, asking me to let it go. As he unbuttoned my clothes and took off my top, his breath became rhythmic, his chanting louder, his beads pressed against my chest. I closed my eyes, wanting to believe that I was lost between the gods’ names and that none of this was really happening. It couldn’t happen; a holy man wouldn’t do this, he couldn’t do this, this wasn’t supposed to happen. His beard brushed against my skin, his fingers circled my mouth, I pretended that my trousers had not come down.
I have often asked myself why I didn’t get out of there sooner and how I had got myself into such a position. I didn’t want to believe what was really going on, because if I did, nothing whatsoever would make any sense – and the only thing at that point in time that I had left to hang on to was my belief. I didn’t want to believe what his dry, filthy hands were doing because I would have had to concede that whoever was responsible for sending me signs had sent this Guru, who was into an altogether different kind of spiritual feeling. Nobody could be that cruel.
As he placed his salivating mouth on my lips and pulled up his robe, I smelled him, and it was this that made something inside of me snap. He smelled of coffee. I kicked him, pushed him off me and managed to get out from under him before he used his magic wand.
‘No,’ I shouted.
‘You’re cursed,’ he screamed as I ran out of the door. ‘Cursed, and I will make sure of it.’
How I had sunk to such depths still remains a mystery but, essentially, that is where my journey began. I was confused and desperate, feeling wholly inadequate, riddled with self-doubt and dirty. I wanted to call Jean Michel and tell him but he would kill the Guru. So I tried to block it from my mind and pretend that nothing had happened.
The train I was on stopped. Some old man with the same rotten teeth as the Guru got on. It’s funny how that happens; reminders of the things you are trying most to forget. He smiled at me and I felt physically sick. My hands began to shake. ‘It didn’t happen,’ I kept saying to myself. ‘It’s all in the mind, it didn’t happen,’ and I reached into my handbag to get a mint. While I was fishing for it I found an envelope that was marked urgent.
It was a contract that I had looked over for a client, and which had been sitting in my handbag for the last two days. I had promised to send it back the next day and had completely forgotten. But today it was all going to change. I had to hold it together.
‘All change here,’ announced the driver. Although running late I was determined to buy a stamp, find a postbox, and personally post this letter. Posting it myself would be symbolic of my commitment to getting my life back on track. But, wouldn’t you know, there wasn’t a postbox in sight.
‘You’re cursed,’ I kept hearing, and the more I heard it, the more adamant I became that I would find a postbox and put everything behind me.
My boss, Simon, was slightly concerned when I arrived late. I was never late.
‘Is everything all right, Nina?’
‘Fine, just fine,’ I said, making my way to my desk.
I turned on the computer and looked out of the window. The buildings were grey and dreary and set against a grey winter sky. So many times I had sat looking out of this window, imagining the sky to be orange, wishing that I could soak up the rays of an orange sky, fly out of the window and have the courage to do something else, something that gave me meaning.
I had been working at Whitter and Lawson for the last three and a half years, representing all kinds of artists but mostly those who had issues over copyright or needed contractual agreements with galleries drawn up. I read somewhere that people work on the periphery of what they really want to do so that they don’t have to cope with rejection. So, someone who harboured desires to be a racing-car driver would be a mechanic on a racetrack but not actually drive the car. It was like this for me in a sense: I’d always wanted to be a painter and so I worked with artists. But my job wasn’t really about art, it was about making money, dealing with boosting egos. Feeling increasingly cynical and secretly thinking that I could do much better. But I couldn’t – it wasn’t really rejection I feared, it was disappointing my father and sabotaging his investment in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
I’d known I wanted to be a painter since the age of six. My brain had always had difficulty engaging with my mouth and I was unable to fully articulate any emotion except on paper. So anything I felt, I produced in a swirl of finger-painted colours that nobody could quite manage to understand. When I found out that my sister wasn’t coming back I did more of the same. My parents didn’t hang the pictures on the fridge door with a magnet – they didn’t know that that is what you were supposed to do with the nonsensical pictures that your children produced. They didn’t even lie and tell me how good they were. Instead, the pictures were folded up and binned while my father would sit with me and read me bits from the Encyclopaedia Britannica, extracts that even he didn’t understand. He was preparing me for a career in law, or ‘love’ as he mispronounced it.
His career choice for me was not based on any longstanding family tradition. He was a bus driver and I think he just wanted to give me the best possible start, and make sure I would not have to face the instability that he had suffered. That’s why when the encyclopaedia man came round when I was young and sensed the aspirations my father had for me, he blatantly incorporated me into his sales pitch by saying that the books would set me on course for a high-flying career. My dad bought the whole set, which he could clearly not afford, taking on extra jobs like mending television sets so he could buy the entire set and receive the latest volume, year after year.
At sixteen, when I expressed a desire to go to art college he went ballistic and didn’t speak to me for weeks. When he did it was to say, ‘Nina, I have not sacrificed the life so you can do the hobby, the lawyer is a good profession. Not that I am pressurising you, not that I came to the England to give you the good education and work every hour and make sacrifices.’
Put that way I could clearly see his point. So I did an art A level without him knowing about it – just in case, by some miracle, he changed his mind. He didn’t and so I went to university to study law.
Whitter and Lawson was where I did my training, and I worked incredibly hard so that they would give me a job after I had finished; at least that way I could be around artists and connect with their world. Everyone around me said it was impossible, there were hardly any Indian lawyers representing artists and it was a place where contacts mattered. People said that I would need a miracle to be taken on by the firm but I busted my gut and worked every single hour I could, going out of my way to prove everyone wrong.
I remember making promises that I would do a whole series of things if I got the job, like give away ten per cent of my future earnings to charity and buy a Big Issue weekly. To whom these promises were made I couldn’t really tell you; maybe just to myself. So I should have known that the first visible signs of wanting out was crossing the road, making out