Silk and Secrets – Part 1: The Portrait

The house on Ballygunge Circular Road had shuttered windows, a courtyard full of jasmine, and a silence that felt older than the city. Edmund Hale had been sent to paint the widow who lived there, a commission from a family of merchants who wanted a portrait for the hall of their new office.

He arrived on a humid afternoon in March, carrying his easel and a box of paints, and was shown into a small room at the back of the house by a serious servant with grey hair.

Leela was waiting for him by the window. She was thirty, perhaps, in a white sari edged with silver, her hair pinned back simply and her hands folded in her lap. She had dark, watchful eyes, and she did not smile.

"You are the English painter," she said.

"Yes, Mrs. Ghosh. Edmund Hale."

"My husband's family wants a portrait of me," she said, quite calmly. "They think I am a suitable widow to hang in their hall. Dignified. Quiet. Grateful."

"And are you?"

She looked at him, sharply. "I am none of those things," said Leela. "But I am very good at pretending."

Edmund set down his easel. He was not used to being spoken to so frankly by a client, and he found that he liked it.

"Then tell me what you are," he said. "And I'll paint that instead."

She was silent for a long time. Then she said, very softly, "I am a woman who reads poetry in secret, and writes to a friend in Paris, and sometimes sits up all night with a lamp and a sketchbook, drawing the river."

"Show me the sketchbook."

"I can't. It's hidden."

"Then I'll wait," said Edmund, "until you trust me enough to show me."

She looked at him with something close to surprise, and then, slowly, a small, sad smile touched her mouth.

"You're very patient, Mr. Hale," she said.

"I'm very curious," said Edmund. "It's a worse vice."

They worked together over the following weeks. Mornings in the courtyard, with the jasmine scent drifting in and the birds calling from the mango trees. Afternoons in the small back room, where Edmund sketched Leela with the light falling across her face. She talked to him while he painted: about her late husband, a kind man twenty years older, who had taught her to play chess and had been dead for three years. About the Paris friend, a poet named Claire, who wrote to her every month in a looping, scandalous hand.

"Does she write about love?" asked Edmund.

"She writes about everything," said Leela. "Including love, and including the men she refused."

"Did you ever want to be one of the men she refused?"

Leela laughed, quietly, and the sound was warm. "Only when I was very young," she said. "And very foolish."

One afternoon, when the portrait was half done and the room was thick with heat, she set down her fan and looked at him directly.

"Mr. Hale," she said. "Would you like to see my sketchbook now?"

"Yes."

"Then come with me," said Leela, and rose, and led him through a narrow door and up a flight of dim stairs to a room at the top of the house, where the windows opened onto the river and the air smelled of rain.

On the table, under the window, lay a sketchbook bound in faded blue cloth.

Edmund opened it. Inside were pages and pages of river scenes: boats at dusk, the bridge at Howrah, the slow brown water under a sky full of cloud. And in the corners, small and private, dozens of sketches of a man's hands, and a woman's, and two figures standing close together on a balcony.

"These are beautiful," he said quietly.

"They're foolish," said Leela. "I drew them while my husband was alive, when I didn't know what I wanted. And then I drew them after he died, when I wanted everything."

Edmund looked up. She was standing very close to him, her face in shadow, her eyes bright.

"Can I ask you something?" he said.

"Yes."

"Would you like me to paint you as you were in these sketches? Not as the grateful widow, but as the woman who draws the river at night?"

"Yes," said Leela, very softly. "And I'd like you to kiss me first, Mr. Hale, if you're going to keep calling me Mrs. Ghosh in that tone."

"Edmund," he said. "Please."

"Then kiss me, Edmund. And if I want you to stop, I'll say so."

He kissed her, carefully, her hand coming up to rest against his chest, the rain beginning to patter on the roof above them, and the river wind moving the silk of her sari like water.