The Godling of Greater Kailash II
Summertime, New Delhi, scorching: Britons of yore would have scampered off to hill stations, and picked apples and nibbled gritty German pastries under scraggled pine. My contemporaries – the other English, American and Indian schoolboys stationed in India’s capital – had long since left for cooler climes on other continents. Not I. Father was on assignment in Kashmir. Things were deteriorating up there. Our travel plans were scuttled, summer school at the American School had already begun, and there was nothing better for me to do than get a summer job, my first ever. The question was, what to do? Everyone agreed I had tremendous potential, but my skills had not caught up. So what to pay me was a concern. In a country of nearly a billion people, earning an average wage of less than a thousand dollars, paying me fair market value would not only be all but meaningless to me, it would be downright cruel to deprive a job to an Indian someone, who might have a family to feed, or might otherwise be forced to work for a less humane employer than a Western journalist. My job would have to be unique to my abilities, or sensibilities as it turned out, to justify earning a Western wage.
A photographer friend of ours came to the rescue, as he often did with matters technical and trans-cultural – he was Indian, but a South Indian, a Christian from the former Portuguese colony of Goa with a Western name (Bartholomew Paul), educated in Bern and sophisticated enough to recognize why I would need a summer job at Western wage. India is awash with Western ideas, but they are unevenly distributed. A certain base amount of technical knowledge one might depend on finding in an American, even a dull American, is absolutely unpredictable in an Indian. Our housekeeper would innocently balance a novelty magnet on top of a pile of computer disks, for example, or there was the time our chowkidar interrupted our evening tiffin to waggle the mangled remains of a plastic monitor lizard my brother had forgotten in our garden. Certainly I have committed heinous faux pas in the houses of my parents’ more Indian friends, and even after seven years the country’s customs remain alien and threatening to me, but my failures have never quite been so spectacular.
My valuable skill was recognizing value. Bartholomew hired me as his studio errand boy, but unlike his studio assistant Pinky, a refugee from SLORC’s predations in Bhutan, I was trusted with preparing his slides, cataloguing his images and occasionally delivering slides to the offices of Western media outfits downtown for scanning. Pinky prepared tea, carried equipment and received a $950 a month stipend from the United Nations, he had allegedly escaped the SLORC by hijacking a domestic airliner with a clay Buddha head attached to two flashing LED lights. Air India was afraid it was a bomb. He did not yet come to recognize why some images printed on tiny strips of celluloid were so much more valuable than others.
Bartholomew lived in his studio, an apartment in a concrete three-story on the outskirts of South Delhi, an annex to an older colony, Greater Kilash II. It was morning. Mornings can be quite bucolic, as Delhi is a city of parks, and for slim sliver of time before 9am, when it is still cool, after the toxic cooking fire fog has burned off but before the petrol fumes and red clay dust has had a chance to set in, the air was almost pleasant. Unlike our compound, Bartholomew’s house was close to the street, and quite modern – stilted blocks of whitewashed, water-stained concrete over a garage. He drove a white Maruti Gypsy, a small Jeep-like 4×4, a domestically produced Suzuki Samurai. Driver lingered until the door opened.
“Ahoy there young man,” Bartholomew said. He wore a photographer’s vest; beige, its many pockets bulging with batteries, film canisters, and his wiry, oily coils of hair gleamed over his gruff, pitted brown face. It was the first time I had seen him without my parents present. He didn’t shake my hand, but did tip his cigarette at me. “Ready for a long day of hard work?”
“Yes, I suppose I am, Mr. Paul.” I was hoping his expression might soften slightly.
“It’s Bartholomew,” he said, sputtering grey smoke as he spoke. “Come.”
Photographer’s studios are likely the same all over the world, but this was the first I had ever seen. The first room: high ceilings slightly neglected, lots of light, wrinkled aluminum umbrellas and blazing lights. Black expensive bits of Japanese branded optics and machinery. Velcro strips, nylon straps, webbing, the acrid tang of photo-chemicals and cigarette smoke drifting in the air. Deeper in: magazines neatly stacked, grey flat-file portfolios, washing line with metal clips and dangling, drying strips of celluloid film, and beyond that was a door.
“Pinky? Get in here.”
The door opened and a stooped twenty-something in ill-fitting photographer’s garb hurried into the room: “Yes, Mister Bartholomew?”
“You remember Gordon’s son?”
He nodded.
“Shake his hand hello.”
We both approached one another. Pinky’s palm was warm, wet and felt fragile and fluttery like a wounded humming bird.
“You like football? Or cricket?” He asked me, pronouncing the words very carefully.
“No. Neither,” I said.
“You two will be working together,” Bartholomew said. “Pinky, some tea for us three.”
“And biscuits?”
“Only for you and me. None for him.”
Pinky jutted his lip out, pondered his orders, then scuttled off into the kitchen.
“He’s very smart,” Bartholomew said.
“I can tell.”
“And I didn’t want you spilling crumbs on my slides.”
“I’ve already eaten.”
“That’s good.”
He took me to a workbench in the darkest corner of the second room. A small glowing square of light sat next to an intimidating steel machine about the size of an outboard motor, a single rod protruding like a one-armed bandit.
“You snip the slide. Check it. Drop it into a mount. Check it again. Heat it, squash it…count of three… stick it in a sleeve? Got it?”
“Yeah,” I picked up a pair of scissors and slipped the film between the shears.
Bartholomew plucked them out of my hand. “Let me demonstrate.”
I picked it up quickly enough and spent the morning crouched over the slide machine, sniping, mounting and pressing each little image and setting aside the duplicates, handily foreshortened to “dupes.” After the initial panic of not wanting to destroy the slides wore off, I began to pay attention to his work. These were photos, taken over the course of a decade, of a young child identified as a deity, more than that I couldn’t tell you. She was ten years old when the series began. An apparently normal child dressed in rags brought to tall, narrow temple. She was anointed with oil, garlanded high with orange marigold flowers and finally closed inside the temple. The subsequent shots were all from below, when the goddess would appear on the balcony, an otherwise normal girl, growing, aging, filling her sari, her nose jabbed with piercings, or peeking over the edge of a windowsill, trapped inside.
Bartholomew interrupted me. He frowned at my work, peering through each square for flaws. “You’re going too slow. Go get me some lunch.”
New Delhi’s better suburbs are planned, arranged in enclaves, a small commercial district anchoring a community of perhaps two or three hundred residencies (arranged in an alpha-numeric system). Several dozen of these enclaves are in turn arranged around a larger market district. The Bartholomew Paul residence was close to its nameless local market. But the streets were rough, pitted from a dozen monsoon minifloods and a meager budget for road works. The smell of morning jasmine had given way to boiling grease stinks and rubbish off-gassings that felt as if though were spackling over my pores. Outside the conditioned bubble of Barotholomew’s studio the air was ferociously hot, wobbling with heat, the clarity of the morning had gone and in its place was haze, reddish from the dust in the surrounding hills and veiling everything in a pinkish, grubby haze like socks after a clay court tennis match. The trees lining the roads, meager leaved things offer sparse shade, were all lime green and greedy and alive; beyond the crude wire fences, in the parks beside me, cricket players were blinding flashes of white. Tiny insects nipped my ankles and rubbish and sewage bubbled and frothed in a drainage canal running alongside. The market was at the end of the road, about a half-kilometer down, consisting of an electrical substation, a post office annex, an open-air VHS video shop, an open-air tobacconist, an open-air pharmacy piled high with pillboxes, a drink wallah, a pan wallah, and, anchoring this Indian interpretation of a suburban strip mall, a narrow corner store equipped with a scorched, grease spattered kerosene stove, a battered pan, and above its huffing gusts of incinerated grease and sizzling spice innards, a hideously fat cook wearing a stained undershirt and little else.
I collected Bartholomew’s lunch – an oversized savory pancake wadded with coconut goo, wrapped in discarded newspaper – and fetched his mail and a milky lemon-lime soft drink from one of the wallahs.
The walk back was quicker, though the density of flies had increased, perhaps lured by the reeking dosa. In the distance, looming over Bartholomew’s house, I could see the concrete slabs and commercial signage of Nehru Place, a frequent destination of my father, Bartholomew and I, when he helped repair our computers in exchange for a belt or two of our duty free whiskey. At the ground level it was little more than hundreds upon hundreds of computer repair stores and office supplies for sale.
Pinky was waiting for me, I think, I could see his soft Asiatic face peering over the balcony at me, or maybe he was watching the cricket game, but in any case he waved at me, and I returned the wave, and for an instant I couldn’t feel the flies, or feel the heat or the dread I felt at having to sit over a burning hot slide machine for another four hours, and I caught my mouth creeping into a smile and he grinned back, the little goon, and I shook it off and prepared to present the filthy pancake thing to my boss.
The rich fecal smell of cannabis hit me as I walked into his studio again. Bartholomew was sitting at his desk, under a large Tibetan mandala, a black finger of resin and shreds of tobacco and deconstructed cigarette paper littering his area. A small glassine baggie of caramel powder I could not identify rested beside it. He looked up as I came over, tapping the cigarette on his desk, and gestured toward a small serving table beside him.
“Sit,” he said. “Set it down there. Don’t spill. Do you know what this is?”
“Yes.”
“I smoke it to relax.”
“That’s fine… cool with me.”
“Would you like some?”
“No, thank you.”
“You still have time on your lunch break, you can go… go get something if you like.”
I nodded, left him, and walked out on the balcony beside Pinky. He smiled again but said nothing, and we both gazed into the vast, shitty pink city we were stuck in. The summer passed by without incident, although Bartholomew never paid me, and Father thought it pointless to pursue as he relied on Bartholomew for his work, and his enormous skill as an interlocutor.
~JAMES MCGIRK
