by Jeet Thayil
*
When he came home three weeks later he was silent about what had occurred during his visit to the headquarters of the communists. If neighbours asked he replied that it had been an instructional stay and he would say nothing more. He took to smoking opium with new vigour. For as long as Lee could remember his father had smoked a pipe on rare occasions. He smoked in the disciplined way of a connoisseur, rarely taking more than one at a time. He bought good-quality opium and stretched a pipe over the course of an evening. This was different. With his wife confined to her room and his mind full of questions about his work, he dedicated himself to the pipe, smoking six to eight in the course of a single day, and in between he smoked cigarettes. He lit a cigarette, left it in the ashtray and lit another. When he took a break, he went to his writing desk and worked for an hour or two, no more, and in this way he finished the last of the Ah Chu stories, The Eruption of Ah Chu, which centred on an outbreak of psoriasis suffered by the unfortunate old man. There are long descriptions of the virulent nature of the disease, of the different kinds of scratching that Ah Chu resorts to in the vain hope of finding relief. Throughout the book’s two hundred or so pages, winter darkness prevails. There is rain and sleet and never a chance of sunshine, because Ah Chu, plunged into insomnia and irregularity by his complaint, leaves his bed only at night. At the end, reduced to a puddle of bile and pus on a pungent sickbed, Ah Chu hangs himself from the chandelier in his dining room. Minutes later, the sun rises, which is the only moment in the dense and claustrophobic narrative that light appears in the gloom. The Eruption of Ah Chu didn’t sell many copies and it brought some unwelcome official attention. The People’s Daily said Lee’s father had flirted too much with metaphor and as a result his book was full of confusion. However, since it was the work of a writer who had established his reputation as a critic of decadence, a single lapse was excusable. This appeared to be the official line because other publications echoed it, as did those cadres who were considered knowledgeable about party affairs. Lee’s father paid no attention to the criticism. He was busy working on a real book. With Ah Chu dead at long last, dead with no possibility of resurrection, he was free to concentrate on a new kind of writing, a long-pending project he had put off for many years. He worked in his usual offhand manner, writing in half-hour bursts, as if his only aim was to take a break from the opium pipe. And in this way he produced a slim volume titled Prophecy, which disappeared from the bookshelves almost as soon as it was published. It was 1957, the year of the first purge, and when booksellers realized the nature of the book’s contents, they either destroyed their copies or hid them or deliberately lost them. The official reaction was swift. Lee’s father was a revisionist, it was said, and he should be sent to the countryside for manual labour. He was an opium-smoking bandit. He would be made to wear a placard that said: I AM A MONSTER. One self-described ultra-leftist, a writer of short stories, said the book was the product of a diseased mind ‘fit only to be a maggot on the corpse of its putrefied revisionist masters’. He recommended that the author be sent to prison. The most sustained criticism came from a novelist who was known to be a Party favourite. All his books shared a similar plot and similar characters, though names were changed from story to story. The hero was always a handsome young peasant who was persecuted at work by a superior. The peasant was a student of the works of Chairman Mao. His superior was a former landlord or government official, a smooth-talker and seducer, in short, a lecher and villain who has sabotaged a cherished village project, the building of a dam, say, or a bridge, or a telegraph office. After much struggle, the hero succeeds in unmasking his superior as the cause of the sickness that has plagued the children of the village and the reason the region has not prospered despite its hard-working inhabitants. The older man is ousted from his job and the young worker takes his place. At the end, the young protagonist quotes an aphorism of Chairman Mao’s concerning the permanent nature of class struggle: ‘What was taken from the peasants must be returned to them. That is the law, today and for ever.’ Or: ‘Revolution must follow revolution without interruption.’ Or even: ‘People say they’re tense because vegetables and soap are in short supply. I’m tense before midnight but I take sleeping pills and feel better. Try pills.’ The formulaic nature of the novelist’s work had not reduced his sales; in fact, they’d risen steadily over the years. The novelist was the first to publish a long critique of Prophecy, saying, among other things, that Lee’s father deserved execution because his book celebrated decadence as a virtue. He was ‘a stinky dog who likes to defecate in the dark’ and he deserved to be punished for his failings. The novelist also took advantage of the turmoil in the capital to put up a big-character wall poster that denounced Lee’s father as a ‘counter-revolutionary parasite of the Khrushchev type’. It was one of more than a hundred thousand posters plastered on the walls of Peking at that time, but even so it was noticed and some lines were quoted in the People’s Daily: ‘A fly cannot topple a giant tree. What can a decadent daydreamer and bourgeoisie do? We will not let you pollute the socialist future of China!’ This appeared to be the verdict of the Party, for it was clear that the novelist was only echoing what his masters told him. Lee’s father’s career was at an end but before he could be taken to prison he fell ill.
CHAPTER FOUR
His Father, the Insect
One afternoon, Lee came home to find his parents sharing a bed for the first time in years. It was not because they had made up their differences but because the bed was the only item of furniture left in the house, other than the shrine and his father’s pipes. Money was short and his father had been selling things, small and not small, family heirlooms and clothes and furniture. In the newly spacious room his parents seemed to be strangers to each other and to him, damaged strangers with no claim to make and nothing to say. His father had placed a pipe on the bed. There was a tray with a lamp that tilted precariously on the lumpy mattress. When he took a drag his cheeks appeared to cave in. He had become very thin and it seemed to Lee that his father no longer resembled a human being. He was a pipe attached to a head with stick arms and legs. Or he was an inanimate object, a piece of knobbed wood, a walking stick or polished figurine. He was an insect, possibly a dangerous insect, a succubus with vertical eyes and internal antennae. Even the sounds he made were insect sounds, clicks and sucking noises. It was very interesting that the transformation which had overtaken his father had occurred so gradually that his family hadn’t noticed. When exactly had his father stopped being human? Was it a permanent transformation or would he return one day to his natural state? While his father smoked, his mother lay on her back with her eyes open, pinching the fingers of her left hand with her right. Though she said nothing she managed to convey a sense of immense dissatisfaction with her surroundings and with the man who lay beside her. Lee climbed into the bed and turned his back on his parents and went to sleep. He dreamed he was an orphan who lived on a mountain inhabited by dragons. There was no food or water and for his survival he depended on one of the dragons to bring him bits of meat and fruit. The years passed and he grew tall, but the bigger he grew the more his dragon protector seemed to diminish, until one day he realized that his friend, the dragon, had become a living skeleton, an intricate network of interlocked bones without flesh or blood or breath. He woke one morning and found a pile of broken bones beside him, and then he felt a rumble under his feet and he realized that the mountain was heating up from below, that there was smoke emanating from its crevices and the trees had dissolved into ash and the sun had disappeared. He resolved to walk off the mountain and keep walking until he found food or he died, but no sooner had he started to walk than a rain of cinders began to fall around him. He ran faster and faster until, exhausted, he lay down to mourn and die. He woke to the sound of drums. There was a fog so thick it was difficult to breathe. When his eyes adjusted he was in his parents’ house. He might as well have been outdoors because the weather had come inside. He heard someone kno
cking and he stumbled across the room, unable to see through the fog. His eyes were streaming and when he took a breath he coughed. He walked slowly in the direction of the knock and then he saw a shape coming towards him, a shape that pushed him back on the bed. His terror vanished when he recognized his mother and he wrestled her to the ground and opened the door. The fog thinned and many people rushed in. His uncle and another man poured pails of water on the smoking mattress. They took his father outside, where, sick with fever, he shivered uncontrollably in the warm sunshine. His uncle was overcome by a rush of emotion and he took off the silk jacket he was wearing and cut off the sleeves with a pair of scissors. He slipped the sleeves over Lee’s father’s legs. They took his father to a hospital, where he died the next day, not of asphyxiation but from malnutrition. Rich Uncle Lee came to the funeral with a two-storey house made of paper. As the house burned, Uncle said, Brother, I give you a big house. Lee laughed at his uncle. He said, Rich Uncle, you should have given my father a house when he was alive.
Lee and his mother went home after the funeral. Under the charred mattress on the bed he found a copy of his father’s last book and he read aloud the first sentence that caught his eye: ‘No remnants remained of the old ship except a splintered mast that the villagers planted in the sand, and so it happened that the rocky shores of the South China Sea became a deterrent to all but the most desperate of seafaring men.’ He turned back to the beginning and started to read the book through. What kind of story was it? It was presented like a biography but there were things in it that no biographer could know, for instance the things that men and women were thinking at important moments in their lives; and there was secret information as to how many years in the future one or the other important personage would die, and of which ailment; and there were wide pronouncements regarding the final outcome of Chinese history when unchecked enterprise would turn its cities into repositories of waste and poison; and there was a timeline for the world that charted how many years it would take for different parts of the planet to crack up and boil over into waste gas; and at the centre of it all was a character who was neither man nor woman, a charismatic autodidact who changed identity at will. Was it a kind of imagined autobiography? Or was it a historical novel, true fiction, because so much of the detail was accurate, no, more than accurate, it was indisputable? Lee read a page or two and then, overcome by sudden melancholy, he closed the book and put it under the mattress. Over the next few days he would pick it up and read as many pages as he could before sadness got the better of him and he put it away. It took him a long time to finish and when he got to the end he understood that the book had been his father’s true life’s work.
*
Prophecy begins a hundred years in the future, in 2056, when a young archaeologist, a Cherokee, fleeing an unnamed cataclysm in an unnamed city, arrives in a landscape that’s somehow familiar to him. He recognizes it from the remembered stories of his tribe, though the stories are no longer heard because the elders who knew them have died. He is in the land of his ancestors, the ancient place described in song and prayer. It is now an abandoned urban mesa. He wanders around for days. He is the only living thing. There are no coyotes or birds or insects. There is no running water. When he feels hunger or thirst he injects himself with vegetable extract, animal protein and sugar, and when tired he takes a four- or eight-hour sleep tablet that allows him to stay alert for as long as he needs to. One morning his belt pack emits a warning buzz followed by a mild siren. He starts to dig, reciting the names of the colours in his dye pack. Alice Blue, he says. He says, Mayan Sun. Then, very quickly, Electric Pink, Flesh Pink, True Pink. He says, No Colour Blue. He says, Medium Bastard Amber. When he runs out of colours he starts again, Alice Blue, Mayan Sun, and so on. Late in the afternoon he finds what he’s been digging for, the object that set off his siren, a cache of blue and white porcelain crockery in a rusted chest and a small brass medal with an inscription: Authorized and awarded by the Great Ming. He dates the medal to the late fourteenth century and then he makes another discovery. The porcelain was brought to the United States by the explorer Zheng He on the last of his seven voyages around the world. The first section ends abruptly at this point with the young Cherokee lifting the tiny brass medal to his eye in the fading light of the sun.
The second section is told from the point of view of an assistant to a Chinese shipbuilder. The assistant is one of thousands of men working in shifts to complete a flagship junk to the emperor’s specifications. There are pages of minutiae about shipbuilding, contentious passages as to the best wood, the ideal conditions for varnish and tung trees, the correct method of instruction for carpenters, how to make the lightest possible armour plating and how to make certain that the compartments below decks are watertight. There are knowledgeable references to the giant junk’s unique design and the exact dimensions of its enormous poop deck and cunningly placed storage cabins. The most revolutionary features are the masts, of which there are nine, a number considered wasteful by traditional shipbuilders. There is talk that the old builders are jealous but the emperor demands more junks, he wants a thousand in all and there’s no time for jealousy. Every shipbuilder in the land is called in to help build the new fleet. At the worst possible moment, after completing the design and some of the construction of the flagship, the master shipbuilder dies. The young assistant, who is never named, takes over. He works all day and sleeps in snatches and as the junk nears completion he begins to talk in a voice that is not his own. He talks with the authority of a seafaring man, or a man who knows the secret of ships at sea, who knows how to recognize the traits that make each vessel unique. The men look to him for instruction though his ideas are radical and not entirely feasible. The rumour spreads that the young assistant has been possessed by the spirit of the dead shipbuilder. How else would he know the things he does? The assistant does not address these whispers: he has no time. When the junk is completed it is four hundred and seventy-five feet long and a hundred and ninety feet wide. It is at this point in the story – that is, at the very end of the second section – that the author’s voice is heard, Lee’s father’s authentic voice, which tells the reader that the junk ‘was larger by far than the Santa Maria, which was a mere ninety feet by thirty, a dwarf in comparison’, and that ‘Zheng He commanded sixty such ships and many smaller ones, with more than twenty-seven thousand soldiers, shipwrights, poets and physicians, whereas Columbus commanded fewer than a hundred men’. Then the author makes a controversial suggestion: ‘I do not make the comparison with Columbus lightly, I make it deliberately and with forethought, for it is my contention that the voyager Zheng He discovered America seventy years before Columbus.’
The third and last section is the shortest and most problematic in political terms. It concerns the life of a young Muslim named Ma, who is born in a province on the south-western border. The boy is captured by the Ming, castrated, renamed, and made a servant to the prince. He is taken to the imperial court, where he is instructed in the ways of the Sons of Heaven. When the prince becomes emperor he decides to announce his ascension by beginning the sea voyages that have been planned for years but never attempted. He makes the Muslim eunuch (now called Zheng He) the admiral of his fleet and tells him to sail to the end of the horizon, beyond the known earth, to spread the glory of the Ming. The story is told in the third person but for long passages it dips into the head of the admiral, who is not above making political forecasts: ‘The Emperor believes China is the centre of the world and he is the centre of China therefore he is the centre of the world. Try as he might to disguise it, he suffers from the ailment peculiar to Chinese leaders – the delusion that they are the most important form of life in the universe and their struggles and idiosyncrasies are worthy not only of emulation but of reverence.’ But the admiral also composes poems of praise that are craven and banal:
Waves are high, the storm fierce, the sea’s valleys deep;
Preparing to die, brave men rush in every d
irection
Praying to the goddess. Who will keep them safe?
Who else but a valiant emperor, the great Ming?
The narrator of the third section is a young grand-nephew of Zheng He’s, a boy named Soporo Onar, who sets off to find his illustrious relative’s final resting place. The quest is ultimately unsuccessful and most of the last section is taken up, not by Zheng He’s triumphant early voyages, but by his desperate final one. It ends with his death in India and his burial at sea and Soporo’s decision to build a monument to him in the pages of a book. Where in India did Zheng He die? Somewhere on the west coast, possibly some spot that wasn’t too far from present-day Bombay, said Lee to Dimple, which may have influenced my own decision to live here. Then he said, I wish there was a translation of my father’s book, because if there’s anyone who would benefit from reading about the life of the eunuch admiral, it’s you.
