Fiction: It’s 1941, the world is at war, and Calcutta witnesses the moments before disasters strike

If he looks down, he can fool himself that his feet have released a lake of blood. No, not blood, the floor is both too beautiful and too normal for that. A rich, dark red, stretching away, gleaming with forty years of constant footfalls, it’s too calm, and the black border too neat. It’s too much a part of his sanctuary, his home, to have anything to do with something as crude and as fresh as blood.

The garden doesn’t aid thoughts of bleeding cuts and scars either. The grass is now an intense green, a green loaded by rain and, in this coy evening light, made even more gaudy by the white pillars which frame it at regular intervals. Paul Gauguin is the only one he can think of, among them all, who could approach it. And Gauguin did not, strictly speaking, even belong to that particular “them”, but he is the one who would have come closest. Perhaps Van Gogh, too. And after the two of them, Matisse, Picasso, et cetera, but none of the main people. Not Monet, not Pissarro, not even his favourite, Cézanne. From what he knows of it, none of them except Gauguin ever saw…

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