‘I could never say: I love you’

It’s his first death anniversary today. Artists and gallerists will commemorate the memory of M.F. Husain who passed away at the age of 95 in London.

“But according to the Islamic calendar, I’ve turned 100,” he had beamed, at his home-in-exile in Qatar.
One Husain story which remains largely unknown is an epic one. Over 45 years after they had separated, Husain and his grand amour had come together, reminisced about the times that were and bid polite goodbyes — till she, Maria Zourkova, scripted a twist in the plot.
The artist’s abiding muse, whom he had romanced in Prague for six years way back in 1956, returned to him a collection of 80 paintings and sketches worth at least `100 crore. The shipment of canvases and frames was accompanied by a note, with the two-liner: “I would like to return the gift you once gave me. They do not belong to me, they belong to India.”
For long, the artist who had to leave Mumbai following accusations that some of his paintings were objectionable on religious grounds, had kept the love story to himself. “What’s the point?” he would say when badgered for an on-the-phone narration. “Some love stories are best stored in the heart.” However, after displaying the returned works in a new Dubai gallery, which he had set up and quixotically named The Red Light Museum, Husain agreed to an interview in a swishy London apartment. He was working there indefatigably on a series of tableaux inspired by the classic film Mughal-e-Azam.
Leaner but characteristically spirited, Husain hadn’t inquired about what’s-going-on in Mumbai. But he had asked for all the newspapers from every part of India to be brought to him. In the apartment, with an outstanding view of Regent’s Park, there was an enormous plasma screen which beamed Asian news channels. Right away, you had wanted to know why he had called the Dubai museum “Red Light”? A bit cheesy. To that he had laughed, “You want a name which draws attention? See, it does… and it’s at Dera… close to the airport… so it’s already drawing plenty of visitors.” A pause, a dry laugh and he had smiled boyishly, “But then, you know, I’ve always been a bestseller. I know how to market myself. If other artists criticise me for this, it’s their problem, but I know all of them wish they could be as media savvy as me.”
Feeling cooped up in the apartment, he suggested a late morning English breakfast. The Maria-Husain love story was narrated through a week of several-hour meetings. At the end, he wiped his paint-flecked spectacles to challenge me with near sadistic glee, “It’s a novel… a movie… it can’t be a newspaper article. Let’s see how you do it.”
Indeed, for a newspaper template the love story had a start, beginning but still no completely satisfying resolution. Clearly, Husain would have liked to stay in touch with the woman he had deeply loved. As for Maria, she had made no promises. Maybe she would keep in touch, maybe she wouldn’t.
“You journalists,” MF had said bitingly. “You want everything to have a cause and effect, something that the reader will accept without thinking. Don’t try that with this story… just the beginning and the middle will do… the intermission in this love story was when she married someone else and I returned home. Neither one of us had ever told each other, ‘I love you’. I can never say it — it sounds so artificial. I wish English had more convincing word for ishq… love is more in the temperament of pyaar and mohabbat.”
Indeed pyaar or mohabbat was in the air when Husain landed in Prague by an Air India flight in 1956. The upcoming artist, then, had been invited as part of a “cultural exchange”. Maria, his interpreter, met him at the airport. Before checking in at a hotel, he asked her to go for a walk… and they did for three hours. At the end of the evening she asked him to request the hosts to appoint her as his interpreter for the rest of his month-long visit. He did.
Later she was to tell him, “Actually that was all staged, they wanted to spy on you, find out about the culture of your country.” Husain kept returning to Prague for the next six years. He would visit her mother and brother who lived outside the city while Maria continued to live in a nunnery’s hostel. During his visits to Prague, writer Nirmal Varma had also tried to “date” her but she had kept a distance.
This does tax plausibility but Husain maintained that during the course of his six-year courtship of Maria, they spent many nights in bed “but platonically… she was Catholic and felt sex was immoral before marriage.”
“She may have been a brahmakumari… but I was no brahmachari,” Husain had said with bemusement. I proposed marriage although I was married with children,” he continued. “I was delirious with joy when she accepted. I bought a Beetle Volkswagen, hoping to drive her around the world.” He planned to divorce his wife Fazilabibi who had “accepted the inevitable”. After handling the tumult at home, the artist returned to Prague. Maria had left a note for him, cancelling the marriage: “She felt I was too much an Indian… and she too much a European. Although we had tried to understand our different worlds, she felt it would not work.”
Maria, in the note, reminded Husain of someone who had always been around in Prague — Johann, a reticent university professor of theology. She would marry him, it made more sense. Husain preserved that last note… but would not show it. Dramatically, he stated, “See, I keep the letter in my achkan pocket, next to my heart… the ink is fading… but please let it remain with me… it cannot be shared.”
The artist’s second feature film Meenaxi: A Tale of Three Cities presented Tabu in the role of Maria. The very first shot in Prague for the film was taken outside the nunnery in which his muse had once lived. About the return of the `100 crore bounty, the very gesture baffled Husain. When he had tracked her down to Melbourne, she invited him and his daughter Raeesa to lunch with Johann. The paintings were not mentioned. “She has preserved them with care… they are in perfect shape,” he said gently. “She just sent them back… which was like returning a part of my life to me.”
Did he regret the fact that he had never whispered the words “I love you” to Maria? For once the artist looked weak and vulnerable. And said almost inaudibly, “Yes.”
Just as the interview sessions were done, Husain bowled a googly: “But Maria didn’t return the six portraits I had done of hers. So, see, she returned my art, not my love.”
Postscript: Reports three months after Husain’s death claimed that a dispute was on between his children on the ownership of the Maria collection. Promptly the news was rubbished by his sons Shamshad and Owais. Shamshad said that the collection had already been sold during the artist’s lifetime. To end the love story, perhaps?