This is a drawing of one of the two people I know named George. There are certain remarkable similarities about both of them. They live in the Cantonment area, have long fraying grey hair and straggly beard, are misfits and are blessed with the "gift of the gab" - They have the ability to pass of their many failures as wisdom just by making their words do charming acrobatics like pierrots in a side show.
This post is about the George who used to sit under a tree at DaCosta square where I used to go for my walks. I once asked him for a cutting of a creeper growing on his mango tree. He gave me the plant and said in hushed tones, eyes wide open as if he was handing me a magic wand, "These are cephalophytes!" I didn't engage him, I took the cuttings and scooted. What is a cephalophyte anyway, try Googling it.
One night George was sitting at his usual place and I took a hazy picture of him during my walk. In an attempt to engage me in conversation he asked to see the picture. "You compose very well" said George, "not a lot of people do that!"
I think any woman who has lived long enough in India knows that when a man praises her it is more about him than about her. I had to wait for about 3 minutes and that inevitability happened.
"I appreciate beauty" said George, "I am a lover of nature. That is why I can appreciate how nicely you've taken this photograph,see? I appreciate the curve of this tree trunk here, I appreciate the flowers overhead, see that dead tree? I watched it die!"
And then George said, "God speaks directly to me through these trees." I backed away and fled.
My story accompanying this picture could so easily have cast a benevolent light on the friendly neighbourhood eccentric, it could have been a story in Reader's Digest or a church magazine,or even a children's book, with a colourful illustration accompanying it, safe, non-committal,un-opinionated reinforcing in its gentle readers the goodness that they want this world to be about, Sweet George giving Priya a creeper and telling her that the trees spoke to him. But I am not a children's book maker and my one stint long ago with a church magazine committee left me with an eternal sense of horror.
But irrespective of my story, there is the fact that George makes a great composition sitting in the dark with the streetlight on him and his doggy friends scattered around. It took 4 hours non-stop to finish this in my Canson sketchbook and I am happy with it.
My childhood in a cult
