Tariq Ali - Night of the Golden Butterfly

‘One day a Punjabi boy, a Sikh who used to leave early for work and buy a Mirror from me every morning suggested he could find me a better job as a bus conductor. So I thanked my employer and handed in my notice. After a week of learning I became a bus conductor. That’s when I really got to see this city. No time for sketching, but much better wages and a strong trade union. The Sikh boy was a driver, and we became good friends. He would tell me not to get too worked up by racist abuse unless it was a passenger. Then I should stop the bus and we would throw him off. We did this sometimes, but got no support from any other passengers. They looked out of the window, pretending not to notice.

‘I began to look out of the window as well and ignore the abuse. I noticed there was always a long queue in one place on Charing Cross Road, and that some very beautiful young girls and handsome boys always got off the bus to join it. One day I asked one of the boys, and he explained they were art students queuing to paint nudes every Thursday, which is when the queue was longest. I asked if it was free. He looked at me strangely and nodded. This was a real discovery. In Soho they charged ten shillings to see nude women. On Charing Cross Road, just next door, it was free.

‘I was owed my holiday, so I took two weeks. On Thursday of the first week I bought a pair of denims and a nice jumper and joined the queue. Nobody questioned me. I walked behind a cute girl with a ponytail and sat at a desk just behind her. In front of me there stood an easel and a small tray full of pastels. As the naked model walked in, my heart started beating so fast I thought the others must be able to hear it. The model came to the front of the room and stood there, taking up different poses. Finally she lay down with her arms outstretched and the beard between her legs glistening. That was how she stayed, stark naked and in that pose for most of the two hours, with small breaks to stretch and drink tea that aroused me even more. I was the only person who appeared excited by the sight of her. She seemed so natural, unlike the naked women I’d seen in Soho. The others started painting. The teacher was looking at me looking at the model and I hurriedly picked up the pastels and began to sketch without thinking. After ten minutes there was a tap on my shoulder. It was the teacher.

‘“You have a very good eye for colour.”

‘This surprised me since the only colour I had used till then was grey, but I smiled and thanked her and hurriedly added other colours. That finished work is still at home. My first real piece of work. The teacher praised it. The other students congratulated me. That is how I became an artist. I forgot to say that the first time I saw that model’s body hair I imagined a mullah’s beard. And I saw the mullah’s face, but that is what I painted at home. My tiny bedroom was now also a studio. I carried on working on the buses for a few more years, but worked overtime at weekends and took Thursdays off till the teacher told me to go home and paint. I did not need a teacher anymore. One of the girls in my class had become a critic. We became lovers for a short time and some of the women in the mullah paintings are based on her. Another friend of hers is some big editor on the magazine that rang you. What are you going to write? Whatever you do, please don’t blow it up too much. No embroidery on the cloth. Just pure and simple; that’s usually more effective if you have something to say. If they need advertising copy they’ll hire someone.’

‘I’m useless at all that, Plato. I’ll just write what I feel. I hope it works for you. But there are some good critics here and I hope one of them likes it.’

He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Believe me, Dara. I don’t care. There are five other people whose judgement I value. If they like my work, that’s enough for me.’

‘You have to make a living, Plato.’

‘That is a disgusting sentence. At our table in Lahore you would have been asked to leave for a few days. Please withdraw it immediately.’

I did, but I was worried about him. At the time he was working as a security guard for a warehouse, and that meant a night shift and wearing a uniform, but all this amused him. When I asked why he had changed his name, he smiled.

‘I was told by the girls that Plato sounded ridiculous and pretentious in the West.’

I disagreed. Why not Aflatun in that case? But he had made up his mind, and it was as Shah Pervaiz Shah that I wrote of him and introduced him to a documentary filmmaker. She wanted to take him back to Lahore and Ludhiana, whence he had made the bus journey etched in his psyche, but Plato wasn’t agreeable to returning anywhere. He refused. Flummoxed by his obstinacy, she ended up making a twenty-minute documentary based on a brief interview and his paintings. A serious art critic reviewed them for the film and it was shown on a well-established arts programme. Plato may have bound himself by the strongest possible vows to resist the passions of the marketplace, but I think even he was pleased by the impact of his first exhibition. The etchings and the mullah paintings all went quickly, and Plato, for the first time in his life, found himself with a healthy bank balance.

With the help of his new friends and admirers, he found an artist’s apartment near Hogarth’s roundabout on the busy road to the airport in West London. Now he felt oppressed by too much space. It was too grand for him. He paced up and down all the time, watching the traffic go by, but he couldn’t work. He moved back to North London and bought a ground-floor three-room flat in Kilburn. One of the rooms was huge and had French windows that opened into a garden with a crumbling wall and a few apple trees. All this became precious to Plato. He seemed happy whenever I saw him but far from any illusions of being successful in the traditional sense and still prone to fits of a melancholy that went so deep that it frightened me. He really had been carefree in Lahore. The past had been repressed in those early years. He never talked about it, but it had returned to haunt him in middle age. Or had there been something back then, too, that I had completely missed? He was surrounded by women these days, and that was certainly a step forward. In Lahore he had always been lonely and had rebuffed all questions referring to his sexuality, unusual in a city where different parts of one’s anatomy were proudly worn on one’s sleeve.

He had three more exhibitions over the next few years. I went and bought some of his work. His style had changed. The mullah with exposed genitals and a nude on either arm had given way to imagined landscapes with surreal beasts and mermaids. Always mermaids. I didn’t like them at all. What was going on his head? I might never have known had I not received a phone call from Alice Stepford, a feminist art critic and painter who loathed being referred to as a feminist painter. There is no such thing, she would say. I had met her with Plato and assumed they were together in the way people were without actually sharing the same accommodations. I never questioned him about her. It was obvious he adored her. What she said about his work mattered a great deal to him, and even when she was scathing he tended to agree with her and dump the work. I warned him once, gently, against becoming too dependent on her whims. That she didn’t like all of his paintings was no reason to destroy any of them.

In return for this unwanted and unwelcome advice he gifted me with one of his old exercise books containing a slightly boring sex story set in ancient Egypt that he had written himself and illustrated with paintings of ancient males with multiple penises engaged in endeavours of various kinds. It did make me smile, but Alice Stepford hated it, and, to be fair, I could understand her reasoning. He could not bring himself to destroy the book, which is why it remains in my possession. On hearing that I was slightly mystified by the present, he said.