Paria Shahir (9) | STAFF REPORTER
He was headed for downtown.
As the old man stepped out of the bus, he placed his hat back on his head, adjusted his coat, and set off down the simmering pavement with his leather loafers. After a few minutes of walking through the overwhelming commotion of the streets, he arrived at the art store. He opened the door to chime the bell hung from the ceiling, and entered the dim shop redolent of wood and paint.
He was looking for watercolours, and paper suitable for the medium. His paintings were intended to adorn the walls of his daughter’s new apartment. The vibrant aisles of art supplies confounded him; he was better acquainted with modest, understated shops tucked away on the stormy main street of his small hometown.
Finally, having purchased the necessary materials, he left the shop, once again striking the bell above the door. On the way back home, swaying with the motion of the bus, he glanced at the reference pictures—close-ups of dandelions, deep purple lotuses, and delicate white lilies that his daughter had printed out for him. It had been a long time since he had taken on such a major project; his eyes and back had grown weaker, and his hands had begun to tremble. This style of art was not his strong suit either—he was far more accustomed to using oil paints to create landscapes.
He stepped off the bus onto the street where his daughter’s new and spacious apartment stood; a place she and her husband had worked hard to afford. As he climbed uphill, carrying the art supplies, he pondered how profoundly proud he was of his daughter. Even so, this pride contradicted his long-held beliefs and the expectations he had set for his children; he couldn’t possibly bring himself to utter a single word of it.
The journey was starting to take its toll; the man’s stomach growled with hunger.
The kitchen was imbued with the aroma of the home-made, special meal the man’s daughter had prepared. A sprightly girl darted through the hall to greet his grandfather. The man embraced his eldest grandchild lovingly, humming nostalgic rhymes as he twirled her around.
Having had lunch and feeling well rested, the man placed his supplies on the desk in the guest room. He carefully observed the picture of a white lily in the scorching afternoon sunlight streaming through the window. He dipped his paintbrush in water, and then in blue watercolour. If a regular individual were to inspect the man’s colour choices and their placement, they would be deeply baffled. Through his artistic vision and technique, he perceived the flower in the picture not as a lily, but as a composition of colours.
His brush strokes resembled those of his teacher. Though he never had anyone to directly tutor him, his eagerness to learn and his curiosity were wild and irrepressible. As a child, he would press his hands and nose against the storefront glass of an art studio every day, intently absorbing the manner in which the shop’s owner struck his brush against the canvas.
As he was painting and gradually getting plunged into his childhood memories and nostalgia, his granddaughter entered the room. She sat on a chair close by, and began to incessantly ask questions. The man was abstracted, his mind consumed by memories and the lily in front of him, yet he still managed to respond to all the girl’s naive questions.
His love for the girl was unparalleled. Perhaps, she reminded him that there was still hope; hope of going back to where he was born, to a time when his mind was not yet contaminated with guilt and unwanted prejudice. He harboured those extremist convictions of his so devoutly on the outside, while on the inside, something of his own cried out for freedom.
He could distinctly recall his mother being alive, the heart of an overcrowded family. He could recall being capable of speaking of his love for all his brothers and sisters, as the youngest child of the family, without turning flustered. His mother died when he was fifteen. That was the last time his innocent smile graced his face with youthful joy; any trace of unguarded trust and unaffected pride gradually disappeared with every step he took towards adulthood thereafter.
Enmeshed in the uproar of a tumultuous youth and a heart driven with restless dreams, he turned to dissipated and indulgent habits as his chosen pastime. Once he was marching in the dreary murkiness of the night, his chest swelling in pride and his head roaming in fantasies, when an officer approached him, having an inquisitive look about him. A mob had plundered a storage facility earlier that night, and noticing the man’s suspicious behaviour, the officer deemed him a person of interest.
The officer regarded the man with a pitiful gaze, as though looking upon a meager creature. They exchanged a few words railing at the gloominess of the weather. The officer expressed his curiosity about what the man was doing at such a late hour. The man, reluctant to engage in any sort of conversation in the first place, was suddenly aggravated. Raised in an underprivileged household, he despised the government above all else. He struggled to make peace with the fact that the officer, hailing from the most oppressive and self-satisfied segment of society, had been granted the right to strike people with such words as “what are you doing on the streets at this late hour?”— all while enjoying a notably high salary.
The man retaliated with a punch to the officer’s eye. The police had apprehended the perpetrators of the robbery by the next morning, and though the man had been arrested, the situation was resolvable. His father agreed to post bail for his release, and he was escorted back home, still hungover from the indulgences of the previous night.
His relationship with his father made him change and leave his decadent lifestyle behind. To his father, he was like the pulse of his own heart, thudding in his chest. He kept him close, protected him, guided him, but never truly heard him. Naturally, the father admonished him after each encounter with debauchery. The man, having developed a peculiar sense of logic by that time, was intent on satisfying his father. Not only did he abandon his vices, he also adopted an entirely different mindset. This was a foundation where his fanatic persuasions began to flourish. By the time the man had attuned himself to the society in line with his father’s wishes, society decided to take an entirely different shape.
During these rebellious years, he pursued literature and became a teacher. He taught literacy and art to high school students, but he never felt a connection or empathy for any of his students. Before the devastating shift of the economical and political state of the country, which he had a special and rather strange connection to, marking it the greatest event that could happen to the country despite all its evidently problematic consequences, his salary sufficed to keep his family content, and be able to live in a highly respectable part of the town. Yet, the government stripped it all away.
Now he was a middle-aged man, shunned from his family and colleagues, and immersed into anxiety. His children stared at him as he suffered through painful anxiety attacks, wondering to themselves, “why is Dad so angry?”
His painting of a lily is now hung from the wall of the living room in his daughter’s apartment. His granddaughter, now grown up, sees the painting every day, rekindling memories of him—the many times they had climbed the steep road to the apartment hand in hand, or when they drew a landscape using coloured pencils lying down on the floor of her room. As she gazed at the painting, she thought of the man whose love for her had been undeniable.
Though the man spared no effort in concealing the memories of his youth, inflicting all the more painful wounds on himself than before, the granddaughter could detect his sorrow in his kind eyes, dewy with brimming tears.
Despite all his challenges, he was always happily painting; his granddaughter could vividly discern that. While painting, he experienced a state of rapture, where he was not restricted by any precepts, whether posed by his own mind or surroundings. He cried as he created art, his heart touched by his own brush strokes; that’s what made him an artist in his granddaughter’s imagination.
In her pure conception, the ingenuous, inexperienced boy continued to exist in the old man’s eyes; in her mind, he was an artist who sought to escape the confines of his body until his last breath.
