Miss New India - Bharati Mukherjee [17]
"You ask what I'm doing here? I'm having fun. When you're taking pictures, every place is interesting ... every face is beautiful ... every day's incredible and every night's an adventure ... When you're looking through a camera, Gauripur's amazing. When I put my eye to the viewfinder, everything changes. I only see things, really see them, when I'm looking through the camera. They rave about painterly light in southern France ... Ha! It's feeble compared to India. What is that thing called—Pinky Mahal? Just look at it! It's magnificent! Better than the Taj! It's your own Rouen cathedral. Monet would go crazy for it."
Normally she would have nodded and smiled, afraid to show her ignorance. But she trusted the boy; he wouldn't laugh at her. He was the first person, with the slight exception of Peter Champion, who after all was still a teacher and her superior, to understand, even blunder into, her nascent yearning to be respected. "Moray?" she asked. "That's a fish." A fish painted a ruined cathedral?
"Claude Mo-nay, M-O-N-E-T, the father of impressionism." His tone was offhand, conversational, as though Claude Monet and his weird cathedral in a town in France were the subject of everyone's light-hearted conversation. "I'd call him the father of photography too. He painted the Rouen cathedral at various times of the day, just to show the effect of different angles of light."
Angles of light! And he's only my age! she thought.
The pace of his speech was picking up. "Monet changed everything. He ended the tyranny of the subject. The medium became the subject, and the medium was light." Faster, faster.
Slow down, please, she thought. I can't follow—you speak too fast. Tyranny of the subject? What does that mean? The medium becomes the subject; the medium is light? You walk too fast. You get too excited. You don't know how ignorant I am. "He did the same thing with haystacks in different seasons. Usually I don't work in color, but I came out here yesterday at seven in the morning, then at noon, then at three, and finally at six, and each time the pink was different and the angle of light brought out different fractures and shadows ... it was beautiful. Bihar is beautiful. Nothing in the world is as it seems—it's all a matter of light and angles. Anyway, even if it is a prison, there are lots of good pictures you can take from inside."
"Not if you're a prisoner," she said. Not if you don't have a camera and no one's ever taught you how to use one. "What were you doing at Shaky's?"
"Is that what he's called? Shaky? That's cruel. But funny." He had a broad smile, a lilting laugh. "I was learning studio technique, putting in the dimples and taking out the frowns. It's very retro, but there's an art to it: setups, lights and reflectors. And those pull-downs are so cool, I wouldn't mind having a few. I gotta be prepared for anything, right? Maybe I'll end up doing weddings and baby portraits— not. Anyway, I'll be moving on in three days."
She didn't understand a word, but the news of his leaving cut her like a slap. She was already imagining an inquiry to his parents, his visit to her house. "That's very disappointing"—a bold thing to say. "Why not stay? Why not keep the prisoners happy?"
"The rest of India's calling. There's Mumbai. There's Bangalore. I came to Gauripur because I heard there was an expat here. I met him, and I shot him—sorry, took his picture. I'm doing India's new expats—not the old Brits—and the gays, and the prostitutes and the druggies. And the villages. And the slums."
"My teacher is American."
"Yes, I know. We're everywhere, Anjali."
"Angie," she said.
They took a few more steps, Angie deep in consternation. What kind of boy was this? Why would an American want to be anywhere near the kind of awful people he shoots? Just thinking about them made her skin crawl.
"Let me show you something. Would you like to see a picture of the most beautiful woman in Gauripur?"
"Of course," she