by Anosh Irani
When Tennessee Williams’s lover died of a brain tumour, Williams expressed it thus: “An awful flower grew in his brain.” As I stand by the window at night, and stare at the underwear again, I think of the first time I read that name. It was through the glass of Dr. Hansotia’s bookcase. I was in grade five or six, and I had gone over to his home to apologize to his son, Yezdi, for teasing him about a particular girl. All I had done was tell Yezdi that he was in love. That was all. And it had made him cry. It had terrified him, but I had no idea why. When I went to his house, he refused to come out of his room. His mother, Jaloo aunty as I called her, went to fetch him, and I was left seated with Dr. Hansotia in the living room. We sat in silence. It was then that I read the name Tennessee Williams. I must have tilted my head to read it along the book’s spine, because Dr. Hansotia asked me what I was looking at.
He then walked over to the bookcase, took the book out, and caressed its cover with so much care that I thought Williams must be a doctor. But his book didn’t look like a medical book. There was a plastic cover—to preserve the original—put on by Dr. Hansotia himself, I assumed; it looked like his work, so precise and surgical. He tried to explain what the book contained or what it meant to him, but I was too young to understand. I only remember the look on his face. There was such longing in it; there was admiration, envy perhaps, and a deep sadness. When I think about it now, it was as though he was touching Mr. Williams’s face, removing his glasses, cleaning them for him, performing some small duty that only a disciple could. I wonder if he still has that book. I wonder if he feels one way or the other about the fact that the love of his life, like Tennessee Williams’s love, died of that “awful flower.”
Tonight, I decide to translate another fragment.
A fragment from Canada. A year ago, I lost someone close to me, a person whom I had met not more than fifteen times in my entire life. And yet the hole, the one she has excavated within me, is so vast that I can only fill it with gratitude, nothing else. Perhaps that was her plan all along. Not just for me, but for all those she dug into.
Her name was Iris. And she was my dramaturge.
But Iris was no ordinary dramaturge. She could really see—the play itself, and the soul behind the play. After all, that was why she was named Iris. “Yes, asshole,” she would tell me. “But that’s not what the play’s about.” Then, through the haze of cigarette smoke that surrounded her, came this beautiful clarity. All those months spent in isolation, all those darkened rooms and doubts, were bathed in this light, thanks to her. Eventually, flowers grew in her too. But not in her brain.
Tonight, I light up in her honour. Oh, how she would have hated that word. “Just smoke. And get it over with!” would have been her advice. But I have nights to counter. I have the night to live through, inch by inch. I don’t lie still in bed. I crawl. I crawl like a worm from one end to the other, hoping to find something. The very thing that Iris found time and again, the thing behind the thing. From a young age, I’ve been after life itself: what’s behind you? You can’t be it. There has to be more. These balloons, picnics, jobs, salaries, exams, wars, riots, puppies, husbands, wives, partners—and more balloons. I mention balloons twice only because as a child I’d release them and watch them fly away and wonder where they went. What disturbed me was that no one else seemed concerned about their fate. Screw the cake; what happened to that poor balloon?
More fragments. I leave the house, walk down the stairs in the dark.
Where once there was plain grass in the rains and dry earth in the summer, there is now a children’s playground. It used to be a haven for us when we were kids: we played football, cricket, a game called hitty-kitty where you formed a human chain. There would be two teams of six or seven each. One guy would lean against a parked car or a wall for support, his back flat, his knees slightly bent, then another would stand behind him in that same position, his arms circling the waist of the guy in front, his head to the side, and another would stand behind him, and so on. The opposite team would take a long run, speeding towards the chain, thumping on his back the guy on the end, then flying into the air to land as far forward as possible, with a huge thud. The idea was to make the other team collapse under the weight. This was the whole point—and it was marvellous. I imagine playing it in Canada and chuckle. And I wonder how none of us, as children, got spinal cord injuries. Not one of us received a scratch. Sometimes we’d hear something crack, but we brushed it off, figuring it was a nearby twig, not someone’s vertebrae. It was all in a day’s play. Even back then, Yezdi would cry. Once, as he was standing with his back flat in the chain, the guy in front of him, his own teammate, farted in his face and the whole chain collapsed laughing. Now I wonder, was he crying for his mother who would die years later? Or for his father who was perhaps disappointed in him? Or for the fact that he hated India and his friends and always wanted to leave? Was the fart in his face life itself, that thing behind the thing, which trumpeted his future without warning?
I walk around in the dark, circle the playground of my past, the way I’ve always imagined Edward Albee circled his typewriter each morning before he started writing. There’s something about this playground that I need to write about. I haven’t found it yet. I look up at the surrounding buildings: C Block, D Block, E Block. A couple of lights are on, some air conditioners are whirring. I stare at the underwear again. I wonder if any pubic hair is still stuck to it. A fragment, nothing more. I wonder what would happen if I were to actually reveal this thought to someone, express it out loud. Would I ever get another Canada Council grant?
In your final report, please state the research you undertook for your short story collection.
Sure. I walked around in the dark and stared at a dead woman’s underwear.
Okay. We wish you the best in your future endeavours. Please do not contact us again.
This is what my MFA in creative writing has resulted in. I feel for my parents. My father had to sell off his old Jeep for my plane ticket. All I had when I arrived in Canada was enough money, barely, to survive for six months. A note to young people: Please think hard before pursuing a career in the fine arts. There’s nothing fine about it. All things fine—fine wine, fine food, fine homes, fine cars, fine art, especially fine art—are enjoyed by other people, people who listen to their parents and to society. Become doctors, lawyers, accountants, RMTs, bankers, politicians, whatever, and then keep Tennessee Williams in your bookcase, first editions, signed by the master himself.
Sometimes I think of suicide, but there’s always that next sentence. There’s always that next image. I’m being fed lines, like an IV drip over a hospital bed that prolongs suffering, not life. Something tickles my brain in the most tantalizing way, then disappears. And I know that my next book has begun.
There’s something about this playground. I keep circling.
I see something move, right above the underwear. It’s Dr. Hansotia. He’s by the window, three floors up, staring out into the sky. He hasn’t seen me. I know I shouldn’t wave. That would be too jarring. So I cough. The night is quiet, and maybe he’ll realize I’m here, just like him, trying to find something. But he does nothing. He’s as still as a bat now.
The next thing I know, I’m walking up the stairs again. His stairs. It’s 3 a.m., but who cares? He’s up, I’m up. I go to the third floor. It’s been more than twenty years since I’ve stood at this door. It’s still the same, with the same dull nameplate: Hansotia. I knock on the door with my knuckles. The doorbell would shatter the moment. It’s hardly audible, my knock. Even to me. I wait. Nothing. I wonder what I’m doing. I can see my apartment window from here. That window looks so pointless, like a rectangular hole in concrete, like a photograph, and I see what Dr. Hansotia must have seen from his window, a little boy who was once happy, played sports, studied, ate raw mangoes dipped in chili powder, then became a hormonal youth and started wearing tight clothing, followed by extra-loose clothing, then grew a strange moustache because he wa
s hairy, then shaved it for the first time, read only Amar Chitra Katha comics, Tintin, Asterix and Obelix, and could have cared less about the Hardy Boys and Enid Blyton—thought they were dull, so dull that he was forced to imagine a colour that didn’t exist—then fell ill, grew moody, irritable, stood at the window again, but was no longer the same boy who had once stood there, then left for Canada, came back intermittently, looked even more confused, went back, came back, continued this placement and displacement for two decades, and now, finally, all that was left was a rectangular hole in a four-storey concrete building, nothing more, in which a living ant, a miniature, insignificant insect, had played out some shitty short film, one that had some moments but lacked unity as a whole, and as the camera zooms back to take the landscape seventy-millimetre shot, I see thousands of windows, the whole city of Bombay, the whole of Mumbai, a city with two names and twenty million souls, all performing in the dark, only a fraction of them realizing they are nothing more than petty cash.
I knock again. This time, I put some weight behind it.
After a few seconds, I hear the slow shuffle of feet, the sound that old people make when they go to the toilet in the middle of the night, muscles not quite awake, feet unable to lift, or perhaps not lifting on purpose, staying close to the ground because they know that’s where they’re headed. The shuffle stops. I know Dr. Hansotia is on the other side.
He opens the door, just a crack. He says nothing.
“Hello, Doctor,” I say. “It’s me.”
He doesn’t look at my face. He looks at my chest for some reason. Still, silence.
“I just wanted to offer my condolences,” I continue. “I saw you were awake…”
More silence. Then he shuts the door on me. It’s not rude; it’s like a slow curtain closing. He’s allowed my condolences to enter, a whiff, but not me. I don’t even hear the door click. I stand there and stare at my feet. I wonder why humans do this, stare at their feet when things go wrong. Am I blaming my feet for bringing me here? Up these stairs? Then I should be blaming my hands too, for writing, for doing that most ridiculous of things, making me believe I was of value, had something special to offer. Shouldn’t I blame my hands for holding books, realizing their power, allowing their electricity to enter my body and brain? Why just the hands, though? The eyes as well, for seeing. For seeing things in a strange and wobbly light.
EAR, NOSE, AND THROAT
There is something to be said about the human body. From the time we are little, we are always being told that we need to look after it. Health is wealth. Without your health, you have nothing. And where does this health reside? In the human body.
The body is present everywhere, even in literature. We call a writer’s work a body of literature. One of the most beautiful pieces of writing that I have come across has to do with the body—the opening page of Marguerite Yourcenar’s novel Memoirs of Hadrian, written as a letter from Hadrian to his successor, Marcus Aurelius. Hadrian speaks of a visit to his physician Hermogenes, and how the latter was “alarmed” at the sight of the emperor’s body, and the “rapid decline” of his health. Hadrian writes:
It is difficult to remain an emperor in presence of a physician, and difficult even to keep one’s essential quality as a man…This morning it occurred to me for the first time that my body, my faithful companion and friend, truer and better known to me than my own soul, may be after all only a sly beast who will end by devouring his master.
Naked before his physician, Hadrian suddenly feels like a child, a slave, a patient, a worthless, weakened reptile. And his impending doom towers above him, just as I tower above the reptile that I have killed in my room tonight—a lizard. Again I am not able to sleep, and the white tube lights in my room give off a subway station glow, as if underground. For the past three nights a lizard had been gliding along my window, its belly pressed flat against the other side of the glass as it moved back and forth, sometimes slowly, sometimes rapidly.
At night, I keep the window closed. There are too many reptiles, insects, bugs—winged creatures that believe they have the right to enter my room just because they have wings. I would like to tell them that angels have wings too, and angels have been banished, sent into exile. But it’s hard for me to get through to the insects and reptiles. My father, on the other hand, does not believe in communication. He simply reaches for the cockroach-killing repellent and sprays the entire room with it. Bugs, mosquitoes, and lizards fall from the ceiling of my room like dead stars. My pillows smell of repellent, and I get hit by it, too, an extra surge of chemicals to keep me awake. The fan above me whirs, another winged creature, angrily spinning in the same cycle again and again. I sweat with anxiety and heat. It is on nights like these when I long for Canada. Not so much for its vast open spaces, but for a particular recreation centre in North Van, and its freshly minted pool, where I spend evenings doing laps and breathing hard: exile, exile.
As I lie in my Bombay bed, I start doing the butterfly stroke, I make the white sheets turn blue and sink into the water. I drop into another dimension and observe creatures like myself who think their bodies mean something. The pool is the best place to observe humiliation and decay, hubris and illusion.
Between laps, I look around and ask myself, “What are we?”
We are flesh on vertebrae. That’s about it. And yet we refuse to see that. Young men with rippling abs glide through the water like emperors, without the slightest clue that one day they too will meet their Hermogenes; then there are the old men—white, brown, hairy, scary—who feel power surge through their bank accounts even while they are one step away from using shit bags.
The water is trying to tell us the truth by shrivelling our skin, but no one pays attention. Water, that most truthful of things. We drink it, it keeps us clean, but we do not allow it to keep us honest. Swim for an hour. Look at your finger; those concentric shrivelled circles, that’s the truth circling around us, trying to find a way in. But all we do is dry off and put on a thick layer of cream.
I often watch one man—I think he is Iranian—who has a full mane of back hair. He swims beautifully, and his hair swims along with him, behind him, but almost separately, wavy strands creating a jazz riff through the water. I sometimes think I would like to buy him a pair of scissors or a razor, but then again, perhaps he is wiser than the rest of us—he is allowing himself to turn into a root, or the side of a hill; he is ready to return to the earth.
The lane to the extreme right is the slow lane. It should be renamed the bobbing lane—everyone in this lane bobs up and down in the water, following the instructions of a fitness expert who has promised them…something. Everyone tries so hard to maintain the body, to keep it going. Health is wealth. And apparently, judging from what can be seen at the pool, the exact place where health resides in the human body is in the butt.
Butts jut out of swimming costumes, restrained by fabric from falling to the floor. But I say they should fall to the floor and slide away from us entirely, where they will merge with other butts, and the collected mass of butt jelly will make its way past the reception area of the rec centre into the concrete parking lot, then cut across lawns, through a wedding ceremony whilst the couple is exchanging vows, then over concrete again, over buildings, over that ugly mass of unaffordable Vancouver housing, and finally into the beloved Pacific Ocean.
But no, we love our gluteus muscles more than we love our own children; we give them the care they so desperately need in order to keep them close to us, proud and shapely. We imprison them in our underwear, so that they stick to our bodies; we trap them in jeans and tights. In our next incarnation, I propose, we should all be born without arses. Nothing but flat skin, like the top of a butter block.
Dr. Hansotia’s wife had a butt too, and underwear once carried it, contained it. Now that container is the cynosure of all eyes. I’m done with my laps now. I’m done thinking about underwear. I beg for sleep, I pray for it the way a farmer prays for rain. I exhort the gods to pr
ovide me with it. I invoke them by closing my eyes, and I hear the ceiling fan cutting the air. Quincy Jones has said that he likes to compose music at night. That’s when it’s quiet, he said, and he always leaves room for the Lord to come in. That’s how the magic happens.
I don’t write music. But writing itself is musical, it’s about rhythm. It is contained in the body, essentially. The stories that I will tell ten years from now are already embedded in my DNA, and they will erupt when they need to. There it is again, the body. It is useful, but it needs to know its place, it cannot have so much power over me. Again, the body is keeping me awake, staying up when it needs to stay down. If sleep is so crucial for the body, shouldn’t there be a switch? Switch on, switch off. Simple. But perhaps the lack of a switch is the human struggle.
As a writer, I’m constantly trying to remember. As a human being, I’m trying to forget. Sleep is that in-between state, between remembering and forgetting, where water, the eternal truth-teller of which we are made, swims around within us, nudges our organs, and tells our bodies exactly what to remember and what to forget—so that my remembrances become fictions, and my forgetfulness makes me human, brings me peace. But I remember everything.
And so, like Quincy, I leave room for the Lord to come in.
I open the window. But there is no Lord; instead, a lizard enters. Perhaps she is looking for her son; a mother coming into my room and shuddering that her little one is gone.
LANGUAGE
Immigrants speak in fragments. This is their language of choice—or rather, this is the language that has been chosen for them. Incoherence. The inability to understand, to be understood. Ask immigrants where they are from, ask the question, “So what is home for you?” and you will see the agony on their faces. Of course, as a writer, I get asked that question all the time, and it is a valid one, and I answer it without missing a beat: I have two homes, and I have neither. That is what I say in interviews. But catch me off guard, catch me at a train station in Bombay, or when I am staring into someone else’s home from a bridge, and you will see the lines appear on my face.
