Nirad Das Character Analysis

“Jummapur, Wednesday, April the second. Darling Nell, I arrived here on Saturday from Bombay after a day and a night and a day in a Ladies Only, stopping now and again to be revictualled through the window with pots of tea and proper meals on matinee trays, which, remarkably, you hand back through the window at the next station down the line where they do the washing up; and from the last stop I had the compartment to myself, with the lights coming on for me to make my entrance on the platform at Jummapur. The President of the Theosophical Society was waiting with several members of the committee drawn up at a respectful distance, not quite a red carpet and brass band but garlands of marigolds at the ready, and I thought there must be somebody important on the train—”

PIKE “Perhaps my soul will stay behind as a smudge of paint on paper, as if I’d always been here, like … Radha?”

MRS SWAN Radha.

PIKE “—the most beautiful of the herdswomen, undressed—”

MRS SWAN (Interrupting, briskly) Well, the portrait, as it happens, is on canvas and Flora is wearing her cornflower dress.

“Yes I am in heat like a bride in a bath,
without secrets, soaked in heated air
that liquifies to the touch and floods,
shortening the breath, yes
I am discovered, heat has found me out,
a stain that stops at nothing,
not the squeezed gates or soft gutters,
it slicks into the press
that prints me to the sheet
yes, think of a woman in a house of net
that strains the oxygen out of the air
thickening the night to Indian ink
or think if you prefer—”

DAS May I ask you a personal question?

FLORA That is a personal question.

DAS Oh my goodness, is it?

FLORA I always think so. It always feels like one. Carte blanche is what you’re asking, Mr Das. Am I to lay myself bare before you?

DAS (Panicking slightly) My question was only about your poem!

FLORA At least you knew it was personal.

DAS I will not ask it now, of course.

FLORA On that understanding I will answer it. My poem is about heat.

I did say that but I think what I meant was for you to be more Indian, or at any rate Indian, not Englished-up and all over me like a labrador and knocking things off tables with your tail—so waggish of you, Mr Das, to compare my mind to a vacuum. You only do it with us, I don’t believe that left to yourself you can’t have an ordinary conversation without jumping backwards through hoops of delight, with whoops of delight, I think I mean; actually, I do know what I mean, I want you to be with me as you would be if I were Indian.

ANISH Oh … yes. Yes, I am a painter like my father. Though not at all like my father, of course.

MRS SWAN Your father was an Indian painter, you mean?
ANISH An Indian painter? Well, I’m as Indian as he was. But yes. I suppose I am not a particularly Indian painter … not an Indian painter particularly, or rather …

MRS SWAN Not particularly an Indian painter.

ANISH Yes. But then, nor was he. Apart from being Indian.

MRS SWAN As you are.

ANISH Yes.

DAS My painting has no rasa today.

FLORA What is rasa?

DAS Rasa is juice. Its taste. Its essence. A painting must have its rasa … which is not in the painting exactly. Rasa is what you must feel when you see a painting, or hear music; it is the emotion which the artist must arouse in you.

FLORA And poetry? Does a poem have rasa?

DAS Oh yes! Poetry is a sentence whose soul is rasa. That is a famous dictum of Vishvanata, a great teacher of poetry, six hundred years ago.

FLORA Rasa … yes. My poem has no rasa.

DAS Or perhaps it has two rasa which are in conflict.

DAS (Unhesitatingly) The rasa of erotic love is called Shringara. Its god is Vishnu, and its colour is shyama, which is blue-black. Vishvanata in his book on poetics tells us: Shringara requires, naturally, a lover and his loved one, who may be a courtesan if she is sincerely enamoured, and it is aroused by, for example, the moon, the scent of sandalwood, or being in an empty house. Shringara goes harmoniously with all other rasa and their complementary emotions, with the exception of fear, cruelty, disgust and sloth.

FLORA That was the thing I was going to ask you.

DAS When?

FLORA The delicate question … whether you would prefer to paint me nude.

DAS Oh.

LORA I preferred it. I had more what-do-you-call it.

DAS Rasa.

FLORA (Laughs quietly) Yes, rasa.

ANISH My father abandoned this portrait.

MRS SWAN Why?

ANISH He began another one.

MRS SWAN How do you know, Mr Das?

ANISH Because I have it.

He opens his briefcase and withdraws the watercolour which is hardly larger than the page of a book, protected by stiff boards. He shows her the painting which is described in the text.

MRS SWAN Oh heavens! Oh … yes … of course. How like Flora.

ANISH More than a good likeness, Mrs Swan.

MRS SWAN No … I mean, how like Flora!

DAS Nazrul was delayed at the shops by a riot, he says. The police charged the mob with lathis, he could have easily been killed, but by heroism and inspired by his loyalty to the memsahib he managed to return only an hour late with all the food you gave him money for except two chickens which were torn from his grasp.

FLORA Oh dear … you thanked him, I hope.

DAS I struck him, of course. You should fine him for the chickens.

DAS Oh!—you’re not dying are you?!

FLORA I expect so, but I intend to take years and years about it. You’ll be dead too, one day, so let me be a lesson to you. Learn to take no notice. I said nothing about your painting, if you want to know, because I thought you’d be an Indian artist.

DAS An Indian artist?

FLORA Yes. You are an Indian artist, aren’t you? Stick up for yourself. Why do you like everything English?

DAS I do not like everything English.

FLORA Yes, you do. You’re enthralled. Chelsea, Bloomsbury, Oliver Twist, Gold Flake cigarettes, Winsor and Newton … even painting in oils, that’s not Indian. You’re trying to paint me from my point of view instead of yours—what you think is my point of view. You deserve the bloody Empire!

DAS The Empire will one day be gone like the Mughal Empire before it, and only their monuments remain—the visions of Shah Jahan!—of Sir Edwin Lutyens!

FLORA “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”

DAS (Delighted) Oh yes! Finally like the empire of Ozymandias! Entirely forgotten except in a poem by an English poet. You see how privileged we are, Miss Crewe. Only in art can empires cheat oblivion, because only the artist can say, “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”

FLORA If you don’t start learning to take you’ll never be shot of us. Who whom. Nothing else counts. Mr Chamberlain is bosh. Mr Coomaraswami is bosh. It’s your country, and we’ve got it. Everything else is bosh. When I was Modi’s model I might as well have been a table. When he was done, he got rid of me. There was no question who whom. You’d never change his colour on a map. But please light your Gold Flake.

The case was dismissed on a technicality, and the policemen were awfully sweet, they got me away through the crowd in a van. My sister was asked to leave school. But that was mostly my own fault—the magistrate asked me why all the poems seemed to be about sex, and I said. “Write what you know”—just showing off. I was practically a virgin, but it got me so thoroughly into the newspapers my name rings a bell even with the wife of a bloody jute planter or something in the middle of Rajputana, damn, damn, damn, no, let’s go inside.

DURANCE Would you marry me?

FLORA No.

DURANCE Would you think about it?

FLORA No. Thank you.

DURANCE Love at first sight, you see. Forgive me.

FLORA Oh, David.

PIKE Do you think he had a relationship with Flora Crewe?

DILIP But of course—a portrait is a relationship.

PIKE No, a relationship.

DILIP I don’t understand you.

PIKE He painted her nude.

DILIP I don’t think so.

PIKE Somebody did.

DILIP In 1930, an Englishwoman, an Indian painter … it is out of the question.

PIKE Not if they had a relationship.

DILIP Oh … a relationship? Is that what you say? (Amused) A relationship!

PIKE This is serious.

DILIP (Laughing) Oh, it’s very serious. What do you say for—well, for “relationship?”

PIKE Buddies. (Dilip almost falls off his chair with merriment.) Please, Dilip …

I went home. It was still “home.” I learned that my father had left me his tin trunk which had always stood at the foot of his bed. There was nothing of value in the trunk that I could see. It was full of paper, letters, certificates, school report cards … (He takes a newspaper clipping from his wallet and gives it to Mrs Swan.) There was a newspaper cutting, however—a report of a trial of three men accused of conspiring to cause a disturbance at the Empire Day celebrations in Jummapur in 1930. My father’s name was there.

Codswallop! Your “house within a house,” as anyone can see, is a mosquito net. And the book is Emily Eden, it was in her suitcase. Green with a brown spine. You should read the footnotes!

It is all bosh! The Theosophical Society is bosh! His Highness the Rajah is bosh! I must leave you, Miss Crewe. (He hesitates.) I think I will not be coming tomorrow.

FLORA There is enough light. Mr Coomaraswami was quite right about the moon. (Flora unwraps the paper.) It’s going to be a drawing, isn’t it? … Oh!

DAS (Nervous, bright) Yes! A good joke, is it not? A Rajput miniature, by Nirad Das!

FLORA (Not heeding him) Oh … it’s the most beautiful thing …

DAS (Brightly) I’m so pleased you like it! A quite witty pastiche—

FLORA (Heeding him now) Are you going to be Indian? Please don’t.

DAS (Heeding her) I … I am Indian.

FLORA An Indian artist.

“Heat collects and holds as a pearl at my throat,
lets go and slides like a tongue-tip down a Modigliani,
spills into the delta, now in the salt-lick,
lost in the mangroves and the airless moisture,
a seed-pearl returning to the oyster—
et nos cedamus amori …”

It’s no go the records of the Theosophical Society, it’s no go the newspaper files partitioned to ashes … All we want is the facts and to tell the truth in our fashion … Her knickers were made of crêpe-de-Chine, her poems were up in Bow Street, her list of friends laid end to end … weren’t in it for the poetry. But it’s no go the watercolour, it’s no go the Modigliani … The glass is falling hour by hour, and we’re back in the mulligatawny … But we will leave no Das unturned. He had a son.

DURANCE Where did you get such a thing?

FLORA His Highness gave it to me.

DURANCE Why?

FLORA Because I ate an apricot. Because he is a Rajah. Because he hoped I’d go to bed with him. I don’t know.

DURANCE But how could he … feel himself in such intimacy with you?

[…]

DURANCE … but I’m in a frightfully difficult position now.

FLORA Why?

DURANCE Did he visit you?

FLORA I visited him.

DURANCE I know. Did he visit you?

FLORA Mind your own business.

DURANCE But it is my business.

FLORA Because you think you love me?

DURANCE No, I … Keeping tabs on what His Highness is up to is one of my … I mean I write reports to Delhi.

FLORA (Amused) Oh heavens!

The terror of the Empire Day gymkhana, the thrower of mangoes at the Resident’s Daimler.

Quite possibly. Or with Captain Durance. Or His Highness the Rajah of Jummapur. Or someone else entirely. It hardly matters, looking back. Men were not really important to Flora. If they had been, they would have been fewer. She used them like batteries. When things went flat, she’d put in a new one … I’ll come to the gate with you. If you decide to tell Mr Pike about the watercolour, I’m sure Flora wouldn’t mind.

“Darling, that’s all from Jummapur, because how I’m packed, portrait and all, and Mr Coomaraswami is coming to take me to the station. I’ll post this in Jaipur as soon as I get there. I’m not going to post it here because I’m not. I feel fit as two lops this morning, and happy, too, because something good happened here which made me feel halfway better about Modi and getting back to Paris too late. That was a sin I’ll carry to my grave, but perhaps my soul will stay behind as a smudge of paint on paper, as if I’d always been here, like Radha who was the most beautiful of the herdswomen, undressed for love in an empty house.”

“Twenty years ago no European had ever been here, and there we were with a band playing, and observing that St Cloup’s Potage à la Julienne was perhaps better than his other soups, and so on, and all this in the face of those high hills, and we one hundred and five Europeans being surrounded by at least three thousand Indians, who looked on at what we call our polite amusements, and bowed to the ground if a European came near them. I sometimes wonder they do not cut all our heads off and say nothing more about it.”