Anand - Book of Destruction

Why had he shown me the book again? Only this book and only this artist, that had been his stance last time. Today he had said nothing like that; in fact, he had said nothing. He had perhaps been asking the book what the role of an artist or a prophet, whose imagination or mission has ceased, should be. The headless and inert sherwani, on which he had closed the book, did not make any point to me, but it did leave me unsettled. I don’t know whether he felt it too, the way he had banged the book shut. But something he said remained in my mind and continued to puzzle me: that his life was now in their hands.

‘I will go now and search for the dresses made by you,’ I told him. ‘It is my mission now.’

The man sitting on the steps did not reply.

Why I foisted this mission on myself, I do not know. All the same, I walked through the streets looking for the dresses made by him. I was somehow sure that I would be able to recognize them among all the others. A kind of familiarity and closeness had developed between them and me.

Yes, there it was, one of his coats. It was floating in the air and, just as I spotted it, it jumped on to the shoulders of a man walking in the street. The man did not appear to notice and continued to walk as if nothing had happened. But something did happen, that too without his knowledge it seemed. He let go of the hand of the woman he was walking with and began to walk alone.

My surprise did not have enough time to die down. I spotted another dress, this time a Kashmiri phiran, beautifully embroidered. It draped the body of a woman and soon she too was walking alone, no longer with the man who seemed to be talking to her lovingly. The woman seemed unaware that this had happened.

There a long kurta with exquisite Lucknowi chikan work, the kind nawabs used to wear. I had admired it many a time in the showcase. The person on whom it fell was a short and frail factory worker who was walking holding his little son’s hand. The boy drifted away from him and the man straightened his shoulders, seemed to grow in stature and walked now as elegant as a tall nobleman. A double-breasted coat, which used to remind me of an advertisement slogan of a well-known textile company—‘for the perfect man in you’—seemed to sneak in from the side and captured its prey. It was a housewife. She instantly turned into a man, or became ‘the perfect man’. Coats, kurtas, jackets … the list went on.

Fear began to replace wonder in my mind. Is there a coat lurking somewhere, ready to devour me? To turn me into something else in a moment? The white cloak of a cleric or the saffron gown of a sanyasi? An army uniform, or something even more dreadful?

All those people I had watched being captured by the tailor’s clothes had lost their identity, become something else. They had forsaken their friends, spouses and children, to walk alone. They had traded their position in society, sex and, who knows, perhaps even their thoughts and their minds. In one stroke, they had become lone travellers walking on a new path.

I ducked instinctively whenever I felt a touch on my back. I kept looking behind me. I did not see any of the tailor’s clothes. But I also knew that I would not see them. For their modus operandi was to lurk in the shadows and jump on the victims unawares.

Yes, that is what the tailor had proclaimed. He wished to steer the people towards a home and path and purpose different from their present one. A ‘better’ existence from the one they had. He wanted to manipulate their desires, aspirations and passions … well, I was not ready to accept a path or home or aspiration not chosen by me. I was sure the people walking on the road would have agreed with me. Who was the tailor to decide their fate? And yet, the moment those deadly costumes fell on them, they went his way, casting away their dear ones without even a whimper of protest. Maybe they would eventually find new partners with new passions and new paths. This was perhaps the art he was boasting of, the art that would make them happier, according to him. I could not think of it without a shiver of horror. But his prey of course would not feel the horror because in one stroke they had been converted into new beings without a past. Is that the magic revolutionaries and prophets wield? To some extent, perhaps artists and writers too? Behind those seemingly happy persons, shall I say charged now with a mission, there were those whom they had left behind, alone.

I continued to nervously follow the newly born creatures, all the time with an eye on the coats and jackets possibly lurking nearby. Why was I doing this? Why didn’t I just give up this exercise, forget the thoughtless promise I had made to the mad tailor, and go back to my peaceful existence? I did not know. It was as if I too was caught in his web. But I was careful to keep a safe distance from them. I was scared of getting too close.

The new creatures created by the tailor’s dresses marched on. They didn’t seem to be communicating with each other, at least not talking to each other. But consciously or unconsciously they seemed to be heading in the same direction. It became clearer when at a junction all of them, without exception, left the main road and turned into a side street. The fact that there were not many ‘regular’ people on that street increased my unease. It dawned on me that I had only seen the creatures’ backs till now. What did they look like after being hijacked by their new garb? Did they even have faces? What if they were hollow men like the famous Invisible Man? While curiosity drew me towards them, fear pulled me back and kept me at a distance. For a moment I feared that, unbeknown to me, a coat had fallen on my shoulders and I had already turned into one of them. I checked my clothes and was reassured that they were my own. Thank God I had not lost the ability to judge.

Soon the flock — for that was how they began to appear to me — moved en masse into another side street, a quiet street lined by trees and slumbering houses. I realized that the flock had by now detached itself completely from the crowd; it was just they and I. If they had turned around and attacked me I would have had no means of escape. And yet I continued to follow them. Evening was setting in. Street lights were few and far between. Darkness descended from the trees and brought a chill with it.

As I had suspected, they all had the same destination. I saw them disappear through a gate at the end of the street. I was alone in the street with only the darkness and the cold as companions. Something inside me urged me on, and with heavy steps I moved towards the gate.

A board at the gate said: OUR PLACE. There were more words on the sign but they were in a script not known to me.

There was nothing to indicate if this ‘our place’ was a club or a restaurant or a private house. Perhaps the place was owned by a group. That, however, did not automatically imply that others were barred. A private place could still give admittance to others, but not a place that was exclusive. There is a difference between privacy and exclusiveness. With which of these descriptions can we qualify the condition of a man inside a coat, a borrowed one, for that matter? Perhaps the two long lines below the words OUR PLACE held the key to all such questions. But it was in an unknown language. If the objective was to deny entry to those who did not belong, it was foolish to use a language known only to the insiders. Come to think of it, the practice is not that uncommon to exclusivenesses. To deny and to do so in a language known only to the ‘included’.

In that moment, the tailor came to my mind with his language of metaphors. I realized that all along this journey my mind had been occupied with the dresses made by him and not his words, cryptic though they had been. To me, those dresses were no longer the beautiful objects I had admired earlier, but objects of fear. Thinking back on his words, they too appeared to have lost their poetry — they sounded merely ominous to me now. Those words and dresses had taken me to a place shrouded in darkness, silence and unknown languages. There was no way to relate the situation around me to art, a subject on which the man had had long discourses with me. The one concrete object before me at that moment was a gate and the tough question I faced was whether to enter or not. Perhaps it would be right to say that all kinds of philosophies, revelations, art and, who knows, literature too present such a gate before man at one time or another.