Jonaki
Ray

             That was the first time you made people laugh with you. You were twenty after all, and just arrived in Paris, with a circle of new friends you were eager to keep. On the way back from the Paris Salon, all of you laughed at the Grand Prize winner’s classical style. ‘I know … I’ll create a parody of the painting!’, you announced. ‘Do it!’, agreed your friends. Perhaps it was the alcohol, but their gaze reminded you of your father’s taunts. That was the night you painted your version of The Sacred Grove.

                Except, on the portal, you painted a clock, with the hands showing 09—for the nine muses—and 05 for the fleeting minutes that they stay. A winged couple held a tube of paint instead of a lyre—mocking the classical painters still using pig bladders for storing their paints. You added Louis—a fellow painter; Édouard—the critic; Maurice, arguing with a moustache; and the man behind it—your first teacher, Léon. A loaf of bread replaced the crown in the original—for those artists who sell out. And you painted yourself, back turned and pissing, between these friends.

          Little did you know that one day your paintings would be handed to a new tenant, a doctor. Who will let his housekeeper break the frames of some for kindling, and use their canvases to mop the floor. And take the rest of the paintings for stuffing the cracks in her home. Even the single painting left with the doctor will be sold off by him in exchange for another. One day the doctor will realize he had been fooled; that the exchange had cost him a priceless painting.

                 But like always, it didn’t matter to you. You were dead by then.