The Window Seller

1. The Boy with No View

Arif was a boy who lived in the center of a crowded city, where the buildings were standing as silent monotony guards. Twelve years old, skinny as a pencil, eyes too deep to be considered his age. His abode was a one-room apartment crammed into the centre of a grey, windowless alley. No birds beyond his walls, no sunshine streaming through the windows at dawn--only the smell of smoke out of the stoves, and the far-off murmur of the city which had never thought to take any interest in him. Arif was growing up with his father Iqbal who was a carpenter whose hands had been calloused by decades of chiseling wood into furniture that he could never dream of affording himself. Arif was a seven-year-old child whose mother died. The little room which they inhabited had since then become quiet. No laughter, no music, and above all no sight to the world outside. Arif had heard only what he overheard or noticed through gaps in his imagination the tales of the world that strangers on the street told passing by.

2. The Cracked Frame

Arif was walking along the shops one afternoon when he happened to see a broken window-frame lying alongside a junk-cart. He did not pass by it, like most others would have done. He paused, and felt the wood with the ends of his fingers, and looked into the empty frame. To him it was not a broken piece of furniture. It was a portal- a peek into what was more. Arif brought it home and cleaned it and then hung it on the only clear wall in their small room. It is a frame, Iqbal had said puzzled. But Arif grinned, saying, It is my window. That evening Arif put in a sky in the frame--a blue sky with cotton clouds floating along in it. The first room in which he slept was not, as it happened before, a room without a view, but in which his imagination saw beyond the alley. But day after day he painted in that same frame other worlds--one day a mountain with white snow caps, the next a green forest, another the deep ocean. Every painting was his outlet and that frame was not broken any more- it was his canvas of hope.

3. Dreams on Display

It did not take long before Arif neighbors saw his paintings. A two-story superior wanted to know whether she could purchase one. He was shocked--he had never dreamed that anyone would care to own what he made. She gave him 200 rupees in exchange of a cherry blossom painted frame. We had only to take two days of groceries. He was emboldened to begin hoarding thrown-away window frames and painting in the evenings after his homework. At first Iqbal, the skeptic, started watching him in silence, the edges of his lips trembling into a smile each time somebody came to purchase a piece. In a matter of months Arif painted windows turned into a local phenomenon. Neighbors on the adjacent streets would come by merely to see what kind of creation the boy had made. He painted scenes which he had never visited in real life--at sunset on the desert, flocks of birds soaring above a lake, old castles on the hill-top. When someone would ask him where he saw them he would say, I see them with the eyes that live in my heart.

4. The Day the Sun Came In

One morning, a school principal passed through the alley and he paused at the little exhibit of the frames of Arif leaned against the wall. She did not only pay attention to the paintings, but also to the boy behind them. She talked to Iqbal and gave Arif a full scholarship to a local art school which collaborated with her school. It was an invitation that seemed too large to their little world. Arif peered at his father, uncertain and his eyes said, I want to do this, please. Iqbal touched his son on the shoulder, and told him, a window does not hold in the light. It releases it. Hush and go and light your light, Arif.” This was the first day that Arif was wearing a clean uniform made especially for him. It was on this day that the sun also came to their house-not through an actual window, but through the eyes of a boy who at last knew that the world was not so far-off as he had once thought.

5. The Academy of Color

Art academy was an alternate universe. Arif paced its galleries in hushed wonder. Some of the students had drawn all their lives, since they were little toddlers; some of the teachers had studied art in other countries Arif had only painted about; and there were materials beyond anything he had ever used--pastels, charcoals, oils, brushes with bristles as soft as feathers. He was a weed among roses. But he recalled, what he had been saying to himself all these years: The view is yours should you but dare imagine it. He could spend hours in the library, landscapes, shadows-light, and he was learning new techniques no one thought he would pick up so quickly. He painted the memory of lullabies sung by his mother, of the smell of sawdust in his father workshop, of the hunger that he had experienced, and of the dreams that he had kept in a cracked frame.

6. Breaking the Frame

We had an art competition at the end of the school year and students could participate all over the city. It was on the subject of Freedom. This was the first time Arif had ever entered a contest, on this occasion he had registered without any hesitation. He returned home and he gazed at his ancient frame, the one that had triggered it all. And then something changed in him. He screwed the wood and broke it into small parts and made out of each different thing- a sculpture with a canvas in the middle. On that canvas he had drawn a child seated in a dark alley with a broken window, but in the glass reflection there was a whole world: sky, fields, rivers and stars. It was called by him The Window Seller. His work was not only beautiful, but unique on the day of the exhibition because of the story behind the art. The judges had declared a winner and it was the name of Arif that was resonating in the room. People were clapping at him--people who never clapped at him before--for the first time in his life people clapped at him, not out of sympathy, but because they believed in his brilliancy.

7. A World Beyond the Walls

Arif did not use the prize money to purchase fancy clothes or gadgets. He rather started a corner shop of art in his home area. He explained to children the way to paint their dreams, the way to turn empty frames into windows. Each Sunday ten to fifteen children were crammed into a small room with crumbling plaster walls with brushes in their hands dipped in hues they had never heard of. He did not even charge a rupee. His father had said, “The world gave me not much, but it gave me enough to give back.” In the next chair his father was mending broken-down stools and shelves, smiling at the children laughing, as Zeenat had used to laugh. Iqbal no longer carved furniture to order. He now would make wooden frames to Arif students. They did not rebuild windows only they rebuilt childhoods.

8. Painting with Purpose

Arif became more and more renowned over the years. He was invited to national galleries, spoke about creativity and resilience and his paintings sold in thousands. But he did not leave the alley in full. He thought that the location that used to present nothing to him was the location that taught him to see everything. He made their tiny room a collectivity art studio. A foreign museum bought one of his frames and a journalist once asked him, Why windows? Arif smiled back and said, “There is a view which every broken life deserves.” When when it was asked of him whether he ever regretted never pursuing more fame, he said, “I was never pursuing the world. I was attempting to create one that I had never had.”

9. The Last Frame

Iqbal died one winter evening with a feeling of peace in his sleep. Arif buried him in his shawl which he used to wear in the workshop. On this day, he spent hours in an empty room sitting on his own, with empty frames. He selected the first one--the oldest--and painted something which he had never dared to paint before: his father. At the door, having a small window in the hand, smiling. This frame is over the entrance to the studio now, and the words are carved underneath: To the man who taught me how to hold the world, even when I had nothing in my hands.

10. The View That Changed Lives

Arif got his story out to where he had never been to before. A film was created regarding his trip. The schools started to provide the so-called “Window Corners” in the classrooms where children could draw their dreams. His concept turned into a movement. But the best thing to Arif was the letter he got written by a boy in a distant village. Dear Arif Bhai, I had no window in my house. But to-day I painted one. I also made my first sight of the sun. I perceived a mountain. Thanks so much that you have given me my first sight.” Arif put the letter by the side of his initial painting. He had assisted hundreds of boys to see their view, who once could not see it at all. And in the tale of a frame and a brush and a dreamer, there lived the evidence that sometimes it needed only a window to see the entire world.