There's More to the Picture than Meets the Eye

The fragrance of slow cooked meat wafted through the darkening street and stopped short at Joya’s nose. Dinner was still hours away and even then, her mom would serve up boiled beans and carrots and say ‘Eat your vegetables Joya. Today is a vegetarian night’. Six nights of the week were now ‘vegetarian’. Her mom had recently started listening to a podcast by a health ‘expert’ who had explained that animal protein causes cancer and kidney disease. ‘Plant protein is best dear’, she said. So now the daily meals, which had already been ‘healthy’ were now fit only for a vegetarian grasshopper. Joya resentfully stared at up at the shop selling the biriyani. Glaring lights spilled onto the street in a frenzy of good spirit. Raucous, well-fed people floated around inside, flaunting their good luck. Sullenly, she turned away. Her gaze fell on the house standing beside the shop. Joya caught her breath. Just next door to the eatery, but it may well have been a house on the moon. Its façade, with its towering glass window, revealed a staircase that curved with wispy grace into the silent sky. The balcony on an upper floor melted into its lines like butter seeping into a hunk of bread. Joya stared at its sweeping symmetry. Wrapped gently by the evening darkness, something flickered on that balcony. Was it a clothesline, with fluttering washing on it? Or was someone standing there? Was someone calling her? Calling her! Joya yelled out loud as she tried to walk away. Something had caught her foot. No matter, it was just a plastic bag. These streets were littered. They were also busy. People stared at her as she started to run. She thought of her mom’s vegetables and instantly calmed down. In a short while, she and her brother and parents would sit down to a warm, wholesome meal and exchange the day’s news. Whatever had summoned her from the balcony wouldn’t be answered. In a few minutes, she was laughing. How silly, being frightened of a trick of the evening light and a plastic bag. Joya was visiting her parents in Kolkata for a few weeks in the summer. She had never lived in this city, her family had moved here after she had left to study Performing Arts at a private college. She loved the tree lined streets of the neighbourhood, with their beautiful homes brooding on the busy streets. The owners had probably died long ago, leaving behind children who now lived elsewhere with property that they didn’t want. She thought again of her mom’s colourful plates of beans and carrots on their old dining table, and once more, felt safe and warm. Within the hour, the four of them would be sitting within the welcoming glow of the lighted lamp and her brother would begin the nightly whine about the vegetables. She wouldn’t join in. She thought for a moment, as she strolled home, that neither of them appreciated their mother enough. The next day dawned blazing hot. Joya was out early, before anyone else was awake. She would return before the sun rose too high. She would go and take a look at that house again, this time in the daylight. The street was quiet now and the biriyani shop was tightly shuttered. Joya found that the house was abandoned. She could see through the tall glass windows that the front room was full of rubble. Strangely though, it wore a look of being loved and lived-in. But that was impossible. There was a name-plate next to the door. ‘Bijan Roy, Advocate’, it said. Where was he now? His house looked like it was waiting for him, fresh as a daisy, just in case he returned. The staircase window, sweeping up to the roof, looked down at her like a single widened eye. ‘Would you like to come in?’ it asked her quietly. This was the call she had heard last night, which had frightened her so much. Well, it was daylight now and she was desperate to answer. Joya tried the front door. It opened! The exposed brick peered through the crumbling cement on the stairs. It might have been a minimalist café, or the décor of a museum of modern art, housed in a converted warehouse with exposed pipes. ‘My private Tate Modern’, she thought, with glee. Up she went. Something on the first landing made her pause. There it was again. That perfectly silent call, that thickening of the light just above her. Irrelevantly, some long-forgotten lines popped into her head. “But only a host of phantom listeners That dwelt in the lone house then Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight To that voice from the world of men:” Joya hesitated. She wanted more than anything to run back downstairs and into the sunny street. She was trespassing. What if Bijon Roy popped out of the upstairs bedroom? But her feet moved automatically upward, falling dully on the silence of the Listeners. A few more steps up and she stopped dead. She was staring into a face. And that face was screaming. A perfectly silent scream. Its hands were raised to its ears. It stood on a bridge, and behind it, a raw, sore sky throbbed with a blood-orange sunset. Beneath, the sea swirled with tongues of blue fire. Its eyes, starting above the shrieking mouth and the slender body, were staring into the distance behind Joya. A memory seared across her mind. ‘I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.’ Edvard Munch, the Norwegian painter, had said that, as he stood by a blue-black fjord near Oslo and watched the sunset painting the sky. And he had gone home and painted ‘The Scream’. And this was ‘The Scream.’ Yes, of course it was. She couldn’t be mistaken. Joya remembered that the painting had been stolen from that gallery in Oslo. The thieves had left behind a rude note, something like ‘Thanks for the poor security’. She had read it on Wikipedia. And here it was now, in this abandoned house in Kolkata, having crossed the ocean and these borders. She had to get out of here. And right now. Whoever was storing this piece of art wouldn’t be thrilled that she had seen it. But why had this screaming face called her last night? Called her with seductive gleams from a shadowy balcony? Called her with the grace of the abandoned staircase in this lonely house in the hours of an early morning? Did it not know it would put her in real danger. Another warning hammered through her mind. Something, soft as silk, had rustled behind her. But there was no time to turn around. A tremendous blow descended on her head. And in that instant, the throes of death howled through her being. She fell to the floor of Bijon Roy, Advocate, blood orange sweeping around her. In the shadows that gathered inside her head, she saw her family. They would be waiting for her at their lamp-lit table this evening, staring at the vegetables. She knew for what sad reason they wouldn’t be able to eat. Not tonight. Nor for many nights now. Because she would never be home again. ‘Oh God’, she thought as her thoughts faded away into eternity. ‘What a silly way to die’.