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I am thirteen when Jesse comes to live with her
grandmother in the apartment next door to ours. But we have known
each other for years before Jesse moved permanently to Bombay because
she and her younger sister had spent every summer with their
grandmother. Our apartment and her grandmother's flat shared a
connecting door at the balcony. Jesse's sister, Perin, was only
two years older than me and we spent most of our summer holidays
being shunted from one apartment to another while the older
girls—Jesse, Roshan and the third floor neighbours—ganged
up against the two of us and avoided us as if we had leprosy.

It is Lust for Life that makes us friends.

A few months after she has moved to Bombay, I run
into Jesse at the bakery across the street from our apartment
building. She waits until I purchase the bread and we stroll home
together. It has rained earlier and the streets are slick and orange
from the twilight evening. ‘It's a beautiful evening,'

I say, almost under my breath.

I shake my head no and Jesse begins to sing
softly, in a beautiful, wistful voice that runs through me like a
chill.

Bluebird, flying high

Tell me what you sing

If you could talk to me

What news would you bring?

I suddenly feel absurdly, insanely happy. The song
and Jesse's sorrow-tinged voice echo perfectly the liquidy,
lone-wolf feeling that has gripped me at dusk for as long as I can
remember.

We have reached the front entrance to my side of
the building. Jesse stops singing and stares at me for a second. Then
she says, ‘I notice when I come home from college each evening,
you're usually on that rocking chair on the balcony. What do
you do? Homework or something?'

‘I write,' I mumble.

‘Beg pardon?' she says, with her fake
South Indian accent.

‘I write…poetry,' I say,
feeling my face flush.

But Jesse doesn't do anything cringe-making,
like calling me a poet or asking me to show her some of my poems.
Instead, she says, ‘I just bought a 45 that I think you may
like. Would you like to stop by after dinner this evening and listen
to it?'

There are some raised eyebrows at home when I say
I am going over to Jesse's apartment for a few minutes. I
notice that Roshan looks startled, as if the closeness in their age
makes it much more logical that she should be the one invited over. I
pretend not to notice the hurt and embarrassment on her face.

The song is Don McLean's
Vincent
. I
know who he is because
American Pie
is one of Sister Hillary's
favourite songs but I've never heard
Vincent
. From the
first, ‘Starry, starry night,' I am hooked, mesmerized by
Don McLean's clean, silky voice, the stark melody and the
impressionistic, powerful lyrics.
Framelessheads on nameless walls
…how can someone come up with a line like that? In that
moment, my own pathetic poems shrivel and die anonymous deaths,
buried in the notebooks they have been born in.

The record ends. ‘Again,' I say in a
choked voice. ‘Can you play it again?' It is my intention
to memorize the lyrics before I leave this evening. Despite the
dark—Jesse has turned off all the lights in the living room, so
that we can listen to the record in total peace—I think I see a
look of approval on Jesse's face.

We play the song seven times in a row. When the
last note dies away, I say in my usual, overly dramatic way, ‘I
pray to God that someday before I die I write a poem half as good as
this song.'

To my surprise, Jesse snickers. ‘Don't
pray to God about it.

If you want to write a good poem, read some great
poets.

What's God going to do, write the poem for
you?'

‘Don't you…believe in God?'
I ask, not wanting to hear the answer.

‘No,' Jesse answeres shortly. ‘And
I don't believe in all the Lord Zoroaster this and Jesus Christ
that, mumbo-jumbo either.'

I gulp hard. The pink jeans I can defend Jesse
for. Not believing in God is a different story.

But then I think of how Jesse had sung
Voices In
the Sky
earlier in the evening, purely, achingly, and how she has
sat with her eyes closed while Don McLean sang
Vincent
, an
expression on her face like she was in church, and I know that
although she is an atheist, Jesse still believes in something large
and beautiful. I realize for the first time that it is possible to
pray without believing in God, that it is possible to be so in love
with the heartbreaking beauty of the world that that alone becomes
some kind of a religion.

‘You know, Van Gogh didn't believe in
God either,' Jesse is saying and I make my way back to the
present.

‘Van Gogh? He's the painter that he's
singing about inVincent . Haven't you heard of the
Impressionists?'

I shake my head mutely, despair climbing up my
limbs like a fever. I had never realized how much there is to know in
the world and how little I knew of it. I had not even considered that
Don McLean was singing about a real person. I am sure Jesse will now
turn away from me in disgust.

Instead, she goes leaping out of the room and
returns with a heavy, glossy book. It is a book of paintings
titled
Vincent
.

She hands it to me and I turn the pages as
reverently as any Pope ever handled a Bible.

These are the paintings of a madman. This much is
obvious to me as soon as I start turning the pages. A laugh of
shocked delight escapes my lips. I gasp in pleasure as I turn each
page, feeling a whirling, crazy joy as I take in the enormous, fiery
suns, the swirling skies, the crazy crooked lines, the mad,
passionate brush strokes.

Jesse sits next to me while I look, pulling on her
eyebrows.

Her face is expectant as she searches mine and it
occurs to me that she is willing me to love this book as much as she
does, that she is seeking me out, just as I am seeking out her
friendship. The thought surprises, scares and delights me.

‘The mark of Cain,' she murmurs, after
she has stopped scanning my face.

‘Oh, sorry. Nothing. Just a line from a book
I love, called
Damien
. It's by a German writer called
Hermann Hesse.'

I nod. I have given up trying to keep up with this
strange, brilliant girl, who is this unexpected blend of loudmouthed
confidence and vulnerable sensitivity.

The next evening, I am sitting on my rocking chair
on the balcony, trying to write a poem that will capture the gold of
the evening sky, when Jesse pounds on the connecting door.

‘Open up,' she yells, when I look up
from my notebook.

She has two gifts for me, the first in a long row
of gifts. The first is a copy of the art book I had looked at
yesterday. The second is a book called
Lust for Life
. It is a
thick book, serious looking, the kind of book a grown-up would read
and Jesse explains that it is a biography of Van Gogh. My heart drops
at the word ‘biography'. I am mostly reading Mills and
Boon romance novels. I am not sure that I can handle a book like
this.

But after making the usual protestations that nice
Parsi girls from good families make each time someone gives them a
gift, (‘Oh, you shouldn't have wasted your hard-earned
money on me, really') I accept the two books.

Later, it hits me that I have never before
received a book as a gift. I am used to getting gifts of clothes and
shoes from my family.

Equally unfamiliar is the fact that Jesse has
written an inscription inside the book. I know that if I were ever to
give a friend a book, mummy or Mehroo would ask me to leave it blank,
in case my friend wanted to return the book.

The fact that Jesse has written in the book and
made it unre-turnable, is an act of such bold self-confidence that it
adds to the novelty of the whole experience.

I read the inscription:To Thrity , it says.For the
love of colourand light .

So the game is up. This strange, brash, eccentric
girl knows me better than my own parents. We are going to be friends,
after all. I am doomed to defend her, protect her, fight for her
right to wear pink jeans. I know this friendship will exact a price,
that I will no longer be able to pretend to be the nice, quiet good
girl whom all the neighbours love. Jesse will require me to choose
sides.

For the love of colour and light
. But there
is no real choice, is there? Jesse has seen through me, seen through
my humble, goody-two-shoes act, to a soul that is as restless and
defiant as her own. For years now, I have secretly divided all the
people I knew into two camps—the earth-dwellers and the
sky-dwellers. Jesse is definitely a sky-dweller.

Lust for Life. That's what I suddenly have,
all right.

I read Van Gogh's biography in two days.

And learn more about the mysteries of my own life
than about his. All the things that have never made sense to me
before—why I never feel comfortable when I'm with the
‘in'

crowd, why I always stick up for the underdog, why
I don't lust after the things that make most of my friends
happy, why the evening sky has made me feel melancholy and lonely for
as long as I can remember, why certain songs have a heart-tearing
effect on me—all of these suddenly become clearer.

I have been a misfit for a long time. Now I have a
companion in a crazy Dutch painter who was dead long before I was
born.
Lust for Life
affects me in peculiar ways. I suddenly
develop a slight stutter when I speak and tear my hands through my
hair in what I imagine is an eccentric, erratic gesture. I begin to
eye family functions and glittery events like weddings with great
suspicion, holding myself apart from the gaiety and superficiality
that such occasions demand. For a brief while, I carry a notebook at
all times, pretending to write poems even when no poem suggests
itself. I refuse to accept rides to school from my father, preferring
to walk or ride the bus, trying to reject the small privileges of
affluence, in much the same way the young Vincent turned his back on
his wealthy family of art dealers.

If Jesse notices these changes, she does not say.
Instead, she plies me with other books, until the words, Monet, Dali,
Turner and Degas roll off my tongue as effortlessly as the names of
classmates. On weekends, we visit the booksellers who have set up
shop on the pavement at Flora Fountain and I dig into my own pockets
to buy art books. Someday, I hope to have a collection to rival
Jesse's.

These books give way to other books. Jesse
introduces me to Shaw, Dostoevsky, Hesse, Chekov, Steinbeck. I lose
myself in the world of books, revel in Shaw's biting wit, the
morality of the Russians, the brash confidence of the Americans. I
read so much that at times I have a hard time concentrating on and
remembering my own life. My head swims with words and dialogues and
the names of characters. At night, I dream strange dreams in which
waterfalls of words pour out of me, an endless, easy stream of
beautiful language, held together like beads on a string. I get up
the next day and I write. I write poems, stories, essays. At times I
feel as if I have no body, no knit of flesh and bones that holds me
together. Instead, I am held together by words, a phantom body that
will disappear if the words do, like a line drawing that can be
erased.

I give up wearing pink, printed blouses for white
kurtas and refuse to smile in photographs, assuming instead a
serious, studious look. But some of my posturing is genuine—Jesse
has unleashed in me a desire for knowledge that no teacher, nun or
textbook was ever able to do. For the first time in my life, I don't
want to take the easy, lazy way out.

Every evening Jesse and I stand on our respective
apartments, lean on the railing of the balcony and talk until the sky
turns orange and then indigo and then black. We talk about music and
art and books and comment often on the changing light of the day. I
feel completely fulfilled and energized by these conversations, as if
they fill a void that I hadn't even known existed. I hunger
after every morsel of knowledge that Jesse drops, storing it away
like a dog his bone. Mehroo comes out repeatedly and calls me to
dinner but I ignore her calls.

The hunger for the world is bigger than the world
itself and no dinner of mutton cutlets and okra is going to feed it.
Often times, I wonder where my life would've led if Jesse
hadn't moved next door to me when she did and then I could weep
with gratitude at this twist of fate. I ask myself if I would've
ended up being one of the countless bland, docile, conventional girls
that the neighbourhood is filled with and once I even suggest this to
Jesse but she shakes her head impatiently. ‘What bloody rot,'
she says. ‘You would've discovered all this whether I was
here or not. You have too much intelligence to have ended up like
Dolly Dollhouse or Polly Pollyanna.'

I laugh at that but I'm not so sure.

Things have been different for me at school since
the last few years. Now, I am one of the undisputed group leaders,
known for my outrageous stunts, defiance of authority and general
extrovertishness.

It was not always so.

Years ago, I was the kid who was the butt of other
children's jokes, the silly, amiable, star-struck kid who
tagged along behind the other, more popular girls, who were faster,
louder, bolder. Handicapped by my wretched sensitivity, I would
pretend to laugh at jokes that had me as the punch line even while I
was dying from inside. I would read the Charles Atlas ads on the back
pages of the Archie comic books, would identify with the
ninety-nine-pound weakling who had sand thrown in his face, and would
fantasize about the day when I would turn into somebody confident and
assertive. But in the meantime, I laughed as loudly as the rest of
them when somebody cracked a joke at my expense.