Chapter 05

Chapter 05

Nighthawks

Mashroor stepped down from the window ledge, having seen enough of the city’s night life from the perched bird’s nest that is his apartment. Perhaps it’s time that I should really dust down that Hopper painting now. Well, that’s what he’s been like all his adult life – thinking in one single track when suddenly like a blast his thoughts are heaved onto something entirely different. Perhaps it’s that hint of hyper ADD he has nurtured since his mid-20s. It happens in the most peculiar of ways – he would be engrossed into some business deal where things are not going his way or he doesn’t like, when that feeling of discomfort starts leading to dislike of his surrounding times and automatically leads him to wander in the thoughts of – oddly enough – her warm skin and terrifyingly electric touch. He has developed that recoil manoeuvre at the deepest pits of his subconscious mind. Works wonders for him. Or at least has, up till now.

With the pitcher of dates in his left hand and the 50-year old original Havana smouldering between his lips, he walked to the 5-feet-by-4 reproduction, hanging opposite to the French windows of his living room. In a city like this, the only way to get the moonlight come thorough your window was to be high above the competing floors around you; that’s guaranteed only by the floors in the upper 30s. Not that it doesn’t cost you an arm and a leg, still, it’s worth putting your entire life’s savings into a lofty apartment almost half a mile above the mere street-hugging mortals. Ah, Hopper, you’d have killed for the moonlight to shine on your piece in your time, just like it is now.

He stood there, slowly combing his eyes across the beautiful crevices of the dried colours from the brush strokes and colours of the four people getting busy with their sordid-and-not lives, as seen and immortalised by Edward Hopper almost a century ago now. He hardly dared touch it; he thought he’d leave an indelible mark on it, It that has frozen so much of a moment within the frames. So much of my life’s in here. So much of my life. He remembered the day he had it copied by David Anthem, one of the most prolific painters of his generation who, almost like James Dean, had an excruciatingly short life-span. While you are literally salsa dancing madly with your car instead of driving properly on the A-55 from Birmingham to Brighton, intoxicated with a cocktail of the enticing Jamaican origin on a strangely hot summer night, it’s most certain that you’d mistake a 100-feet lorry for a high fence on the road and crash head-on with it.

Such a brilliant, brilliant artist, that poor bastard. Wish I could set-up that studio in time for him.

Mashroor actually met David at a party in a club in Manchester, during his first visit to the UK around 10 years before. The host was their mutual friend Tareque who was already a big name in the arts and crafts business in the UK; more interestingly, from very humble beginnings in Chittagong, too. Mashroor liked David at first sight, because he saw him being very comfortable around strangers – especially women, just like him; not to mention he fancied David’s 6-feet tall brunette swashbuckling sister Cassandra at first sight. That was the beginning of his deep friendship with the artist that developed into a strong bond of professional interaction and mutual respect for the arts of painting and photography. They had both agreed, with Cassandra strongly supporting Mashroor’s point of view, that photography and easel-painting were becoming rare in the age of digitized easels and tablets, with all those image-editing software finally nailing it to the coffin. The three spent a lot of time travelling together in the British Isles, especially in the Isles of Skye and the Scottish highlands – sometimes accompanied by David’s girlfriend Ranya, who was as an adventure-junkie as one can find. During one of those trips the duo conjured the idea of redoing the masterpiece by Edward Hopper, the result of which was now hanging in Mashroor’s living room. The signature at the bottom, was actually Cassandra’s; she had decided to copy her brother’s and wanted to leave a mark on his gift, apart from the mark she’d already left on Mashroor’s poor soul. He remembered that it was finished on the night when David proposed to Ranya at a village restaurant and they two were out on a tryst in the valley that time. I haven’t forgotten you Cassey. I only really, deeply pray that you’ve been kind enough to forgive me.

The guy in the jacket and hat on the left of the painting almost felt like he was looking at Mashroor through the back of his head – like a spy out from the cold honing in on the enemy agent. And the lady in red had a strange resemblance to Cassey, specially the way she was holding onto the cigarette. Cassandra had that sultry, totally feminine way of holding on to the cigarette ever so lightly with both her fingers. David wanted to make some changes to the reproduction but Mashroor and Cassandra fought hard to make him change his mind. Mashroor wanted it just the way the original was, because it was an inspiration to him, a guide to him on his journey of photography; moreover, Cassandra has always been a fanatic when it came to authenticity.

David was more than just a good friend. He was almost his mentor in so many ways, in spite of being of almost the same age. Mashroor respected him for the way he struggled through his difficult childhood and early years of his career – having no money almost every week, especially when you have been put out on to the streets by your step-father and even more so when you haven’t been able to finish college properly is definitely very difficult, even by UK standards. His struggles resonated with Mashroor’s at so many levels. And it also framed him into the honest, hardworking, honourable international artist that he went on to become in his mid-20s. Tareque knew a fabulous piece of art when he saw one, and he didn’t delay a second when he saw David sitting in one corner of the Irish pub and painting, with the waitress being the centre of interest; the lights, the tone, the patterns adorning the walls materialising almost perfectly with each stroke of his brush. And as they say, the rest was the beginning of an endearing, iconic journey.

David’s death struck Mashroor like almost never before. He had buried his father when he was only 24. With university far out of sight and a family to care for, he had a job which only guaranteed his rent of Tk7500 every month and nothing else, and everything seemed slowly setting the launch-pad for him to rocket out of control and crash. Even at that time, Mashroor somehow managed to live through it all; he somehow survived and somehow crawled through every day. That was the time when he realised “what doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger”. Living like an animal and worrying about managing to work through the next day and after were the only thoughts in his head. There were his friends alright, who as usual were supportive of him and went out of their ways to help him whenever it was needed. And that was what probably kept him afloat, helped him survive through those tough years. But now, when David died, he felt this sickening, twisting emptiness in him, all over again, that he thought he would never feel again. David had become one of those few friends for whom he could walk right into Hell with his eyes wide open and laughing. He had become one of those friends who truly understood his psyche and even dropped whatever they were doing to drag him out of his miseries and turmoil, psychological and financial. The helplessness, the incurable pain, the anger with that tinge of temporary hatred towards everything divine, that gruelling hurt at the pit of his heart as if his entire chest would cave right in – were things that Mashroor felt for the first time since his parents passed away.