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1999/Vishie
'Kerstein' Pastel, crayon, ink© Amruta Patil '02
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Right
now, her hand was in a plaster cast, but Kerstein refused to let Vishie
give her a sponge bath. "This is the kind of thing you'd write about.
You'd make a droll episode of me,' She had yet to forgive him for the
depravity in 'Bubblemaker Commeth'. Or be convinced that Bubblemaker's
Winnie wasn't Kerstein with thick eyebrows. 'You'd put me in your book." ~ 'His book', she called it. Vishie did not think of it as such. Everyone else had so much faith in it. If not in its literary merit, at least in the eventuality of its completion. "When you finish the book...' they said. Or, "So, where have you reached?' Deposited in his lap, kittens of faith. They crawled around mewling blindly, leaving scratch welts on his thigh from claws they hadn't learnt to retract yet. ~ The problem with writing was the investment it took. Bubblemaker was eight years of his life. Eight years of relentlessly culling every significant thought, joke, person who had walked in and out. The option, of course, was to write real fiction that was fictitious and did not steal pieces of people he knew. Was that even possible? Or he could write descriptive books about places and landscapes, clouds, crows or self-help. Having lived one life didn't seem to make for compelling enough fiction. ~ Which is why he wondered about John Steinbeck. Vishie had a mind picture of him all these years. Pre-Google naivete. He imagined a sixty-year old man in dusty Central America. In a soiled wife-beater, face of crows feet that would cloud over now and then with malevolent anger. Vishie imagined he'd have a wife called Cathy or Betsy that he married when he was twenty-one. She'd be a thin woman worked to the sinews; face faded in the desert. Vishie had left room for a mistress on the side. Fresh-faced mindless girl who could not understand him and would not try to. Betsy would be the only woman that remained. In the newspaper photo that announced his death, Vishie decided, she'd be the haggard figure in black. For a man like that, where was the cauldron that simmered? From where did those dozens of books emerge? None of them would've been better off unwritten. ~ Kerstein got him 'A Life in Letters' for his birthday. It was an anthology of the letters John Steinbeck wrote. On the cover was a man with a face like Clark Gable. In the letters, places and people moved by at dizzying speed. Salinas turned into Hollywood. Friends, children, changing wives, lovers. Some mentioned in passing, others lovingly dwelt upon. The only constant was his writing, his ceaseless documentation of life. Nothing and no one else mattered as much as the writing did. He was no farmsy man. John Steinbeck had lived. ~ Vishie
lived too. In sin, in Vagator, with Kerstein Andruk. Technically, in
Goa, that qualified as a bit of a scandal. But you only had to see Kerstein
around the house with a white beard of bleach to know that living in
sin wasn't all glamour and heavy breathing. About a minute or two of
that at the most.
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