Blue Stains On A Painting Knife

I

“I love this smell. This is the smell of nature. We Mediterraneans love the sea more than any other sea-worthy people in the world, ” Lorenzo de Medici told me. The dirty Fort Cochin beach stank; the vaginal smell of nature that ever offended my nostrils. “Okay! Shakhtan Thampuran, tell me something about that conversation with the Sultan,” he asked me.
“Tipu Sultan has a topless Mahindra Classic. He drove through a well-lit tunnel, very high, the ceiling some sixty feet above, made of glass, I could see a Russian made military aircraft gliding slowly above the tunnel, silhouetted against the bright blue sky,” he listened to me, astounded rather than amused.
Crushed inside his powerful hand, my palm seemed to be feminine as we were strolling along the beach, the hairs on his fore-arm brushed on mine and tickled.
“Why did you go to…,” he was confused, “I mean, what is this whole affair with Tipu Sultan?”
“Don’t ask me. I’m really pestered by his behaviour,” I replied.
An air-craft carrier coasted along the beach, some 10 to 15 yards from the land. I don’t know why the warship is sailing through unchartered waters, breaking the convention of ships approaching the harbour along the outer channel. INS Viraat looked so small that she does not displace more water than a Vypeen-Ernakulam ferry.
The captain of the ship was a very good friend of mine, Vice Admiral (some name) AVSM…who cares about name! What matters is the rank and decorations! I commanded him to dive into the sea and swim all the way from the vessel to the beach. He was stunned. But he was obliged to do it. I exchanged a smile with Lorenzo de Medici.

II

I was home-sick. My vessel was approaching Cochin harbour. Cochin is my favourite port. No other port in this world gives you such a warm welcome. Chinese nets in platoons salute you from either side of the mouth.
The port-island’s intimacy with the palm-fringed mainland is stunning. The island is enclaved in between the mainland of Ernakulam ( where you can see short sky-scrapers springing up, where the sky-line changes every week) and tiny strip of land, Fort Cochin (as per navigational charts.) In the night, thousands of lamps stare at you innocently from all sides, its restless reflections gleaming in the kayal washes the hull of your ship.
It was nice to see the Prince of Cochin, Shakhtan Thampuran far over there in the brownish sandy beach of Cochin. Left to him stood, a tall handsome foreign prince, an Italian in appearance.
I waved my cap, the feathered peak-cap. He waved back, as a mark of respect. I jumped into the sea. Before splash down, my body banged twice onto the free-board of the ship.
My body immersed slowly absolutely weightless into the greenish grey waters of Cochin…greenish grey, that’s the colour of death in this locality. Camouflage of a strikingly handsome man…filaments of energy from the Sun, tried to pierce deep into the unknown depths of this terrific nasty space in our planet.
Swimming is fun…but it is like a Russian roulette between your pituitary gland and tens of billions of water molecules.

III

The handsome sea-farer emerged from the sea. He staggered towards us. Shakhtan Thampuran introduced him to me. His eyes were fastened upon my abdominal muscular cuts as we shook hands; forgetting rules. Naval officers are trained to look straight in the eye when they meet someone.
Fort Cochin is a place of historical importance. So many historical remains, relics…preserved shabbily. One of the anchors of the Scottish drudger *(* Lord Willingdon, Scottish drudger sank in the outer channel in 1979) was erected on a pedestal as a show-piece, under which there was an inscription, this drudger helped the natural harbour of Cochin to be an internationally known port. The admiral was visibly angry when he saw a boy sitting on the pedestal; his back comfortably leant onto the shank of the anchor.
“What are you doing here?” the admiral asked. “I’m painting,” he replied. “What? ” Admiral asked. “Chinese nets in the foreground,” he replied.
“Oh! You are an artist,” I showed surprise, “I’m Lorenzo de Medici from Italy. I’m an art-lover. I patronize art. If you were born in Italy, you would have been a mini-Leonardo da Vinci.”
“Oh! Really,” he responded, “ Lothar Matheus told me, if I were born in Argentina, I would’ve been Diego Maradona. ”
We laughed and I asked him, “Who taught you painting?”
He leered at me for a while. He had the kind of eyes that irritate monarchs.
“Painting cannot be taught,” he replied, “Jayram Sir is the man who told me that there is an art-form called painting. Before that I didn’t know.”
“Prof.C.S.Jayram!” Shakhthan Thampuran asked curiously, “Professor who lives near Hill Palace.” The boy was terrified seeing the local monarch.
“Well, I know this person,” Shakhthan Thampuran told me, “ When Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was teaching me to fly MiG-21 I saw this man walking down the streets of Tripunithura with a wet canvas under his arm.”
“Where do you study?” I asked him.
“Thevara college,” he told me.
“Oh! Thevara college,” Shakhthan Thampuran said, “There is a monastery facing this college.”
The boy-painter’s painting knife was stained with primary blue acrylic colour. The way he used French Ultramarine blue was disturbing. Painters born after Jean Paul Sartre think that a painting should not be sedative but an irritant.
“Monasticism…I killed an oracle who protested against my decision to up-root some woods of teak in Trichur,” Shakhtan Thampuran said pompously, “I cut him into two pieces…ha…ha…Thekkinkadu Maidani was wiped up in one day.”
Suddenly a trowel-painting knife plunged into the throat of Shakhtan Thampuran. The blue-blood splashed onto the boy’s face before he giggled and stammered, “…you…you killed my ancestor, you bloody anti-disestablishmentarianistic despotic murderer…”
The blue-faced baby looked up, smiled, sprinkled a couple of Michael Jacksonian flying kisses to the heavens and yelped, “Love you all…George Danton and friends…over there in the Orion belt…”
George Danton smiled and shouted back, “Don’t show his face to the public. It is not worthy to be shown.”

IV

Meanwhile, Venus de Edappally was fast asleep. She would get up early in the afternoon to study magnetism and statics. Study holidays were such a great bliss for the Dreamers…the amateurs of the ‘Art of Dreaming’.
“…handsome F-16 aviator told her, you’re selected as a crew in the space mission to Mercury; a space shuttle is to be launched into orbit using super-conducting propulsion system. She made lame excuses, No…I will get dark by the harsh radiations…I’m a female mammal, I’m not physically fit enough! He looked at her pelvic bone and said , No…you are fit, otherwise we’ll make you fit…she was filling liquid hydrogen in the violet fuel tank above the yellow oxidizer tank of the third stage of the rocket…the F-16 aviator came to tell her, You’re dropped , you’ve got attendance shortage in college…”
Venus de Edappally jolted. She switched on the TV and channel-surfed. The blue light from the TV lit up her scar-face. The scar on her right cheek shone like a diamond.
“Hello! Welcome to the BBC world news from London. I’m Stephen Cole… Shakhthan Thampuran is clinically dead. He is in life-supporting system. A college student from Thevara stabbed him, earlier in the after-noon, using a painting knife (!) at Fort Cochin beach…(the visuals of the boy-murderer being arrested by the fishermen)…the convict was ritualistically bowdlerized by the public…”

V

A violent mob dragged the boy to the court-yard. He knelt down in front of me, his eyes to the floor and the crotch was bleeding.
I asked the crowd, “What wrong did he do?” The mob answered in unison, “He stabbed his majesty.”
“He has got punishment for that. Anything else?” I asked.
After some time, the eldest woman in the crowd answered, “He drank Pepsi.”
Oh! Boy, Such an unpardonable offense of treason…you anti-xenophobiac unproductive consumer…anyway, I don’t want to punish you, little thing.
I addressed the crowd, “Those among you who has never drank Pepsi, let her throw the first stone.”
And it happened that the crowd dispersed. The boy crawled towards me, emptied a can of Pepsi onto my feet and wiped it with his bristly chin and said, “I’m so sorry…maine aapke saari pepsi giraa di…”
I ran my fingers through his hair and said, “Your sins are forgiven.”

                                                                             Fine.                                                                                                                                   July, 1999.