My tragic encounter with MF Husain’s horses

My forays into art are touched with genteel tragedy.

I would’ve been one of the top collectors if I had the foresight. Today, I watch my wife arrange her art shows and hold profound conversations on form, colour, depth and meaning and I yearn to say, does anyone want to hear about my saga, steeped as it is in irony?

Let me tell you since you have begun to read: you will seek the solace of a tissue as I bring you to tears.

The year is 1970 and we are part of the Khushwant Singh ratpack in the Illustrated Weekly of India, literally the Rolls of the magazine world in those days. We were the chosen ones. Every now and then this barefoot man would walk into our offices and Khushwant would greet him effusively and then ask Jiggs Kalra (now famous expert on Indian cuisine) and myself to take this man out to lunch.

At that time the Samovar restaurant linked to the Jahangir art gallery was the ‘in’ place to go to in Mumbai and easy to access from our offices in The

Times of India. This man would clamber onto our Vespas and we would zip to the restaurant and order their iconic katti kebabs with cokes.

The man would then pull out a pen and begin to draw these geometric horses on the paper napkins and they were always frozen in a prance or simply standing there. We would enthuse until that ‘pretence’ (what did we know of artistic talent?) wore thin and fell into diminishing returns.

This went on for some time and while we were the staple hosts other staffers like Badshah Sen and Ramesh Chandran (later to be editors of The Times of

India) and MJ Akbar (currently an Indian Minister) were pressed into service.

One day we were both busy. Emeff whose surname was Husain fetched up and Jiggs and I decided through eye signals to duck the duty lunch. Khushwant was a bit miffed and so was MF. Finally, we were roped in and at Samovar this not very wellknown artist began filling in several paper napkins with his horses and other figures including dancers and signing these with a flourish. “Keep these,” he said, “One day they’ll be worth a lot of money.”

When you are 21 years old and your byline appears in the papers and you are doing a TV show regularly and emceeing beauty contests and fashion shows, a bearded man without shoes drawing sticklike designs on crumpled paper napkins with curry stains isn’t your top drawer idea of an investment.

Fling into the wpb. Several years later, we all parted company and went our different ways. MF Husain became famous and I developed nightmares where he is smiling at me and saying, see, you would have had 200 of my paintings, you would have been so rich, you could have said what you pleased to anybody… and then he grins again.

The other day I woke up with a start and my wife said, ‘What, the same dream again?’ I said, ‘No, a nightmare, Emeff is drawing a lifesize horse on a huge napkin the size of a house and as he finishes, it begins to rain chutney and the horse melts in a deluge of green.

I do not carry this scar lightly. In our home today, we have a Degas ballerina which I am convinced is genuine though we’re afraid to check in case it is a poster, but it is fifty years old and is spotty and stained and looks like a relic and we have no idea where it came from. Since we do not have an attic, it was unlikely to have been discovered there.

We also have four Padmasees bought when he was ‘Padamsee’ and two of them I call Jinnah and Nehru, and if someone buys them (my wife says no way), we could pay Dewa and Etisalat bills on time not to mention our credit cards, which actually should be called discredit cards, but I digress.

Ambika deals with newcomers and established artists with grand panache. The nice thing is our walls are covered with eclectic but pretty talented expressions of art and they give one a sense of warmth and visual security.

We have art from Cuba on a full wall, daughter Priyanka’s abstracts, a Guljee (probably not ours), several Seemita Roys and with four grandkids into painting (the furniture) I might just get over the katti

kebab massacre of the pack of horses. On a more serious note, I can only quote a former marketing doyen of Khaleej Times, Burjor Patel, who said the arts must be patronised by the affluent and the powerful. It is their duty to promote music, poetry, theatre, art and even cinema, every form of human expression. To do less is to betray one’s civilisation and allow creativity to wither on the vine.

That Dubai and the UAE have lifted art to a new high is gratifying. Come tomorrow, if someone is scribbling on a napkin, keep it. You never know.