Red by Irwin A. Sealy

RED
by Irwin Allan Sealy
Picador India
344 pages Rs 465

It’s best to keep Matisse’s The Red Room and The Painter’s Family at hand while reading I. Allan Sealy’s fourth novel, Red, itself an object of great beauty with its deep red cover and embossed title in deeper red, balanced by a trochaic "Irwin Allan Sealy" on the back cover. Within lies even greater beauty.

There’s a plethora of books about painting recently, including Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red.

Many are popular histories, currently being called biographies. At first, Sealy’s Red seems to be about Henri Matisse, but like every novel Sealy has written, there are half-glimpsed shadows and depths, like figures in a dappled forest that tempt one into pursuit. Like the narrator, N, the painter is and is not in The Painter’s Family. Matisse’s wife and children are definitely there, but six slashes of red define his illegitimate daughter, who seems to Zach to leap out of the picture and turn into a visitor at the Hermitage, a thin red line of underwear visible as she leans forward to stare at the painting, the red fleetingly joined by the red of bricks and tractors in Dariya Dun, India.

N sees the world as colour, his friend and fellow Anglo-Indian Zach sees it as music. N divides his manuscript into 26 small bytes, corresponding to the letters of the alphabet, each byte beginning with the definition of a word or two, sometimes going no further, filling parts

Sealy gets a certain oddness of life exactly right. Our days are filled with shards of conversation and activity. Sealy looks for the colour and nocturnal rhythms that make comprehensible patterns out of these fragments with a dash of self-reflexive irony. Like Matisse, N seeks the safety of the frame. It makes problems easier to handle, but the aboriginal Gilgitan prefers life outside frames. Gilgitan’s modern equivalent is the Internet which tempts N out of the security of pen and paper into virtual virtuosity. Like the blue arabesques that crawl up the tablecloth and on to the wall in Matisse’s The Red Room, restraint and liberation spill through Sealy’s book, to become its main pattern. The Internet makes it easier than ever to discover the spaces of meaning between unexpected juxtapositions. Google for "red", link the information that pops up, and there’s your narrative. But the reverse happens to N. A virus programmed to delete every "red" infects his machine.

Colour is liberation, a painting is restraint, but it can be freed as Aline demonstrates by cutting a painting into fine strips to reveal that its patina of dots has a vertical history, like geological layers. Then there is Gilgitan. "The aborigines of India, treated as slaves by all later invaders except the British, outcastes for the last three millennia, settled on the worst land," were made to live by the most odious work of cleaning, but Gilgitan is more independent preferring the itinerant life of jobbers.

Red is like the Internet with its endless patterns, definitions, and meanings. N and his broken marriage; Z and his love for Aline; Gilgitan the snake worshipper and thief who loves black paint; music; paint; real and virtual journeys are held in Sealy’s beautiful prose. There aren’t too many writers whose next book one awaits to renew the joy of language and imagination, but Sealy is definitely one of them. Red has been worth waiting for.

Let me leave you with Sealy’s description of newly commercialised Dariya Dun: "Once upon a time the city, any city, meant light: now it means noise. Sound, young Z would say, not noise. Send peace in our time, O Lord is a good prayer.At night ambulances howl, a new noise; there were none a few years ago. You rented a taxi or a rickshaw; a few years ago I saw a concussion patient trundled through the streets on a trolley with castors. Today white vans prowl looking for custom, the word AMBULANCE painted backwards importantly under the windscreen, a proud theft from foreign TV. The jackals of my earliest childhood, whose yowling first set a horizon, have disappeared. Think of it: a presence older than Aesop vanished just the other day."

By SHOBHANA BHATTACHARJI,
Reader in English, Jesus & Mary College, Delhi University
(www.outlookindia.com)