Portrait of an Artist

Amit Chaudhuri

The house was in a lane in a middle-middle class area which curved at a right angle at one end, and, at the other, led to the main road. During the Durga Puja, the balconies of the neighbouring houses would be lit with green and blue neon lights, and families would walk towards the end of the lane that curved to the right, and join the crowd that was either coming from or walking towards the goddess. Bank clerks, schoolteachers, small businessmen, with their wives and children, the boys in shorts and the girls in frocks, looking like the pictures of children on the covers of exercise books, formed that tireless crowd. On the other side of the lane, after one had crossed the main road, one came to a lake with spacious adjoining walks where couples strolled in the evening, and children, accompanied by maidservants, came to play. Binoy and I would walk past the lake in the afternoon, when women washed saris or scoured utensils with ash on its steps, and the heat had just ebbed into a cloudy, dream-like vacancy.