The Impressionist by Hari Kunzru

Author:Hari Kunzru [Kunzru, Hari]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Contemporary, Adult, Historical, Modern
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2001-12-31T23:00:00+00:00

One morning Bobby strolls out of the Mission on his way to pick up a new suit. He is full of anticipation, though disturbed to see that someone has daubed red paint over the church door. A hammer and sickle. Reverend Macfarlane will not be pleased. He already suspects that his wife has Bolshevist sympathies, and believes that the new unions springing up across the city are satanically inspired. Bobby shrugs. Not his problem. Today is a good day, too good to be spoilt by one of the old man’s moods. Later he will call at the Red House to show Shuchi how he looks. Perhaps he will even take her out for a promenade. He imagines her dressed like an Englishwoman in a long embroidered dress with a big straw hat on her head. And a parasol. Amused by the idea, he bounds up the step into Shahid Khan’s shop, stepping past the apprentices hunched over their sewing machines and calling out to the tailor, who is drinking tea in the back.

The suit is a delight. Shahid Khan has lined the cream-coloured linen with yellow silk, and done so at half the price he initially said was the minimum necessary to subsist for a single day in this debased age. The jacket is tight and double-breasted, its flap pockets fashionably angled down. The trousers end in generous turn-ups that break on Bobby’s leather shoes just so. Full of praise, Bobby pays up, and Shahid Khan tells him he is taking food from his children’s mouths but looks pleased all the same, in the way that a tailor always looks pleased when his work is being worn by someone who shows it off well.

Bobby decides to take a stroll down the Hornby Road, to look in the glass windows of the European shops. He slides down the street, feeling (with some justification) that he looks a thousand times better than all the sweating English and scruffy Indians he shoulders past on the busy thoroughfare. He is looking at a display of portable typewriters (light and sturdy enough for travel and camp use’) when the shop door opens and an elderly white man in the uniform of an infantry officer steps out, carrying a wrapped parcel.

‘Good morning,’ he says.

‘Good morning,’ replies Bobby, surprised to be addressed.

‘Hell of a day,’ says the officer. ‘You sure you should be out without a hat? Terribly fierce sun, you know. Pays to be careful.’

Bobby is about to speak, but the man has already started off down the road, whistling tunelessly. He is puzzled. That oddly complicit tone. One man to another. No distance. No reserve. A hat? Then he realizes. The man thought he was English. Two Englishmen, talking about the weather. An hour later, Bobby goes into Laidlaws and buys an enormous Curzon topi, which sits on his head like a minor classical monument. Instead of going to see Shuchi he spends the afternoon walking around, tipping it to English people. Sometimes they tip their hats back.

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