Sunil Sethi: The M F Husain I knew

In April 2003 I had a call from art gallery owner Arun Vadehra. “Are you free this afternoon?” he asked. “Can you please drop by? Husain Sahib is here and would like to see you.” In an acquaintance of more than 30 years, it was often like that with M F Husain: someone calling on his behalf, out of the blue, to set up a meeting. Even if he called, it was either to pass on a message or arrange an appointment — there was always the risk of being stood up. Spontaneous, changeable, notorious for sudden appearances and non-appearances, an air of the unexpected hovered about him. He enjoyed turning encounters into assignations.

He had commandeered a corner of the gallery that day, and had been painting all morning; paints and canvases littered the floor on newspaper sheets. Unwinding his tall frame, rubbing his fingers with a rag, he settled down to chat in his soft drawl, before coming to the point. “I saw your article on my Iraq War paintings. I liked it very much.” The images, or large digital prints, had perplexed viewers with their mix of brutality (drones and machine guns), romantic film imagery (Rudolph Valentino in The Sheik) and religious symbolism (the martyrdom of Hussain at Karbala denoted by his rearing, dying horse Dul Dul). If this isn’t the magic realism of an artist’s eye, I argued, what is?

He picked up a newspaper parcel; inside was a small canvas, two-feet-by-two, of a horse in a vivid palette of cobalt, red, yellow and black. “For you,” he said, “with my appreciation.” I was touched and embarrassed. He laughed off my hesitation in throaty chuckles. Flipping the canvas over, he said, “And this is the best part.” Mere sahafi dost Sunil Sethi ke naam (To my writer friend Sunil Sethi) ran the inscription in elegant Urdu calligraphy; below it a carefully-drawn cartouche with a stirring couplet by poet Jigar Moradabadi.

M F Husain’s generosity, like his boundless energy and originality, or the miasma of controversy, the stream of admirers, detractors, girlfriends and hangers-on that surrounded him, made his life the biggest artwork. The late hotel tycoon T R S “Tiki” Oberoi told me that his splendid Husains were a trade-off for a free room he gave the neither very well-known nor well-off artist at the Maidens Hotel in the 1960s. A former picture framer of his became a millionaire from the number of Husains he sold, real or fake.

Arab emir or Paris grande dame, struggling gallerist or entrepreneur, he carried the whole shebang on his hunched, but never stooping, shoulders. For someone who preferred to walk barefoot, he appreciated the comfort of being well-shod. In the late 1970s he introduced me to the only shoe shop in the Taj Mahal hotel for which he designed a smart logo. “Chalo kabab roti khayen,” he said afterwards, shepherding me to Bade Miyan’s stall. I seldom pass up an opportunity in Mumbai to visit both.

The vandalising of his art and reviling of his reputation that led to his exile in 2006 is a blot that the modern, secular republic cannot erase. No Indian government, despite the honey-tongued political hypocrisy on display at his death, was willing to guarantee the safety of its most famous and decorated artist at home (as the British did for Salman Rushdie). In this column, when he accepted Qatar nationality (“Husain: The misery and the mystery”, March 6, 2010), I noted that it was a tragic failure of democratic consensus that a 95-year-old man could not return for the incipient fear of being swamped by harassment, litigation and bodyguards. “Maybe Bharat Mata has found in him an unwarranted martyr.”

I had spent time with Husain in London some months earlier. He insisted that he could return to India any time he wanted. But it was bravado, an old man seeking peace. He quoted Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s famous verse: “Aur bhi gham hain zamaane mein mohabbat ke siwa.” Surely the sorrow was his unconditional love of India?