came to Mr Chinnery’s attention, for he had paid her to sit for him after attending one of her performances. On becoming pregnant with his child, Sundaree had stopped performing and taken with gusto to a life of indulgence, bedecking herself with expensive textiles and unusual kinds of jewellery. In her prime, she had had no compunctions about ma’aming it over Tantima, pitying her for her cramped quarters and cluck-clucking over the straitened circumstances of the Lambert household.
But all this had changed dramatically when it came to be known that the artist’s other family was soon to descend on Calcutta. As with many another bohemian, Chinnery was in some ways, extremely conventional – the possibility that his legal wife and children might learn about his Bengali ewe-mutton and her two kids, threw him into a panic. The delectable little butter-bun of the day before suddenly metamorphosed into a gravy-making gobble-prick: she and her two boys were summarily evicted from their quarters and packed off to a tenement in Kidderpore, where a khidmatgar would visit them occasionally to hand over a monthly tuncaw.
The arrangement deceived no one, of course, for amongst the sahibs of the city Mr Chinnery’s private life was a matter of almost as much interest as the fluctuation of prices at the Opium Exchange. Marianne Chinnery had found out about her husband’s other family soon enough, and to her great credit she had tried to ensure that they were provided for and that her husband did his duty by them. She had even arranged a church christening for the two little boys: known to their friends as Khoka and Robin, they were christened ‘Henry Collins Chinnery’ and ‘Edward Charles Chinnery’ respectively – which became a source of great hilarity to their playmates, who continued of course, to use their Bengali nicknames.
More usefully perhaps, Marianne Chinnery had also prevailed upon her husband to take the boys into his studio, so that they might learn his trade, and both of them had spent a few years working under their father’s tutelage. Unfortunately for them, this interlude in their lives was not to last long: they had not yet reached their teens when their father fled the city, abandoning both his families.
This was a double blow, for by that time Marianne Chinnery too had lost interest in Khoka and Robin: perhaps the death of her own son had made it more difficult for her to deal with them; perhaps her daughter, having married an English District Magistrate, had pressed her to sever a connection that might be an embarrassment to her husband; or perhaps it was merely that greater exposure to colonial society had coarsened her own sensibilities. In any event, after George Chinnery’s departure, Sundaree and the two boys were more or less abandoned to their fate: the little money the painter sent was not enough to live on, and Sundaree had had to supplement her income by cooking and cleaning for a succession of British families. But Sundaree was a formidable woman in her own right: despite all her difficulties, she had done what she could to ensure the continuation of her sons’ training in the arts – other than the paintbrush, she liked to say, there was nothing to keep them from sharing the lot of every other street-chokra in Kidderpore.
Of the the two Chinnery boys, Khoka, the older, was a strapping, swarthily handsome lad, with light brown hair and a personable manner: He was an easy-going sort of chuckeroo who had a certain facility with the brush even though he had no great interest in art – had he not happened to have a painter for a father, no lick of paint would ever have stained his fingers. His brother Robin could not have been more different, either in appearance or in disposition: with his rounded cheeks, prominent eyes, and coppery hair, Robin was said to closely resemble his father; like him, he was plump, and short in stature. Unlike his brother, Robin was endowed with a genuine passion for the arts – a love so fervent that it all but overwhelmed his own very considerable gifts as a draughtsman and painter. Feeling himself to be incapable of creating anything that would meet his own high standards, he directed most of his energies towards the study of the works of other artists, past and present, and was always looking around for prints, reproductions and etchings that he could examine and copy. Curios and unusual objects were another of his passions, and at one time he was a frequent visitor to the Lambert bungalow, where he had spent hours rummaging around in Pierre Lambert’s collection of botanical specimens and illustrations. Although he was several years older than Paulette, there was a childlike aspect to him that made the difference in age and sex seem immaterial: he kept her informed about the latest fashions, bringing her little odds and ends from his mother’s dwindling collection of clothes and trinkets – perhaps a payal to tie around her ankles, or bangles for her wrist. Paulette’s lack of interest in ornaments always amazed him, for his own pleasure in them was such that he would often string them around his own ankles and wrists and twirl around, admiring himself in the mirror. Sometimes they had both dressed up in his mother’s clothes and danced around the house.
Robin had also taken it on himself to further Paulette’s artistic education. He would often bring over books with detailed reproductions of European paintings – his father had left many of these behind and they were among his most treasured possessions. He never tired of poring over them, and being gifted with unusually strong powers of visual recollection, he was able to reproduce many of them from memory. On learning that Paulette was making illustrations for her father’s book, he had gone to some lengths to tutor her, showing her the tricks of mixing colours and drawing a clean line.
Paulette’s relationship with Robin was not an easy one: as a tutor he was often insufferably overbearing and the ferocity of his disapproval, when she erred with pencil or brush, was such that it led to many quarrels. But at the same time she was also hugely entertained by his gaudy clothes, his unpredictable shrieks of laughter and his love of scandal – and she was sometimes strangely touched by his attempts to wean her from her hoydenish ways and turn her into a lady.
For all these reasons, Robin Chinnery had, for a time, been a large presence in her life – but that had come to an abrupt end when she was about fifteen. Around that time he had developed a strange fixation on Jodu and had decided to launch upon a project – a painting – in which Jodu and Paulette were to feature as the principal figures. The composition was inspired, he said, by one of the great themes of European art, but when Paulette asked what this was he would not tell her. She didn’t need to know, he said, and it didn’t matter anyway because he was re- interpreting it, and giving it a new spirit.
Paulette and Jodu were not at all enthusiastic about the project and their reluctance to participate grew stronger still when they discovered that they would have to spend hours standing still. But Robin’s pleas were too heartfelt to be brushed aside – this, he declared, was his opportunity of creating a masterwork, of forging his own identity as an artist – so they had taken pity on him and relented. For a fortnight or so, they had obeyed his instructions, standing side by side while he laboured at his easel. Through this time he never once allowed them to look at what he was doing: if they asked he would say, wait, wait, it’s not time yet; you’ll see it when it’s ready to be seen. In these sessions both Jodu and Paulette had worn their usual clothes, a gamcha or langot in his case, and a calf-length sari in hers, and although, at his pleading, they had sometimes wrapped these coverings a little tighter than they might otherwise have done, they had never once gone without them – neither of them could have imagined such a thing.
This was why, when at last they managed to sneak a look at the unfinished picture, they were doubly outraged to discover that they had been painted stark naked, with not a thread of clothing on their bodies. Not only that, they had been made to look utterly ridiculous in other ways as well, and shameless too, for they were shown to be standing under an enormous banyan tree, staring directly at the viewer as if to flaunt their nakedness – as though they were Naga sadhus or something. What was more, Paulette’s skin was painted an ashy-white colour and she was shown to be holding a mango (under a banyan tree!), while Jodu was an inky shade of black and had a cobra rearing up above his head. Fortunately Paulette’s mango was so positioned as to conceal that part of her which she would least have wanted the world to see – but Jodu was not so lucky with his cobra: even though the snake had its tail wound around his waist it did not cover what it could so easily have done; that part of his body could not only be clearly seen, it was painted in such vivid detail that it gave the clear impression of being uncircumcised, which added in no little measure to Jodu’s sense of injury.
The whole thing was so shocking and outrageous that Jodu, who was always quick to anger, flew into a rage and snatched the canvas off the easel. Robin was not his match in strength and could do nothing except plead with Paulette to intervene. Stop him, I beg you, he had said; I’ve painted you as Adam and Eve, in all the beauty of your innocence and simplicity; no one will ever know that it is you – please, I beg you, stop him!
But Paulette was almost as incensed as Jodu was, and far from heeding Robin she had boxed his ears and then helped Jodu rip the canvas to shreds. Robin had watched silently, with tears running down his face, and at the end of it, he had said: You wait and see; you’ll pay for this, some day…
After this the visits had ceased and from then on, Paulette had not followed the Chinnery boys’ doings closely. The little she knew of their subsequent careers came from Tantima’s occasional asides: she remembered hearing, a couple of years later, that Sundaree had fallen ill and that Khoka, the older boy, had been sent off to England as the personal emissary of the Nawab of Murshidabad.
