by Jeet Thayil
The Book of
Chocolate Saints
JEET THAYIL
In memory of Dom Moraes (1938–2004)
What is the mark that distinguishes the good from the bad, in works as in men? Holiness is the only word for it.
Eric Gill
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Book One
From Those to Whom Much Is Given
Book Two
Adventures in Alleged Bias
Book Three
Of What Use Is a Poem that Cannot Pick Up a Gun?
Book Four
X, 66
Book Five
‘I Only Know Beautiful When I Paint It Nude’
Book Six
Alien of Extraordinary Ability
Book Seven
The Book of Chocolate Saints
Epilogue
About the Author
Also by the Author
Copyright
Prologue
Praise the broken world for it will vanish in a day and in a day be replaced by nothing. That was the city’s message for the rainy season. A fire truck raced somewhere, followed by police jeeps, their beacons flashing on the store windows of Electric House. In the hush that followed, a horse carriage clattered to the seafront and a bus went past and the conductor blew his whistle. Under the covered arcades of Colaba Causeway the pavement shops pulled their shutters for the night and the street sleepers prepared their bedding. The lamps glowed dull and gold among the skinny trees in their dented metal skirts. Then the rain came again, dropping like pebbles against the tin roof of the verandah. Inside the apartment a woman’s unceasing tirade rose to its usual pitch of anguish. It was his wife shouting at the neighbours as she did most evenings; but tonight Newton Francis Xavier heard his mother’s voice not his wife’s and he felt his skin prickle with fear.
He stood at the bookcase and found his notebook and made a quick pencil sketch of a young woman in an untidy hotel room. He worked roughly, from memory, using a Japanese marker with a fine 0.1 tip, listening all the while to the sound of his wife’s voice, Lula’s famous Swiss-schooled voice coarsened now by smoke and drink and Hindi curses. He was ready to hide the sketch if he heard her footsteps approach from the next room, but she did not come. The tirade continued. When he was finished he put the notebook away at the back of a shelf stocked with history and biography, books he knew his wife would not disturb. In the notebook were fifty pages of drawings of the young woman in different rooms and moods, in poses both explicit and demure.
Later that night after his wife had gone to sleep he would transfer the notebook to the drawer of her bedside table where household bills lay among manuals and warranties. The sketches were preliminary efforts at a painting he was working on; they were expendable. In a day or two, after he had gone, she would open the drawer to look for the month’s electricity and water bills. She would find the notebook and the sketches and understand: after eighteen years of marriage, after threatening to do so a hundred times, he had finally left her.
Early the next morning he will shower and dress and Kuthalingam will take his suitcase and typewriter to the waiting taxi. He will leave the books collected over decades and he will leave the paintings his friends the artists have presented to him. He will leave on the shelf in the bedroom the copies of his own books and the magazines, anthologies, and art journals that have featured his work. He will leave most of his clothes and his shoes, his shelf of bronze sculpture and his collection of Russian icons painted on wood. Before his wife is fully awake he will leave the house. He will not kiss her or take her leave. He does not trust himself to do this without mishap. He will shut the door and take the lift two floors down to the street and there he will tip Kuthalingam for the last time and step into the taxi that will take him on the first leg of his journey out of Bombay. His flight will land in Delhi in the afternoon and the young woman in the drawings will be waiting at the airport. They will drive into the city and check into an overpriced hotel with an unashamedly colonial past and name. Over the next few days they will discuss the immediate future as they have done off and on for a year. Again he will ask her to accompany him to New York where he owns an apartment and a reputation. She will agree.
But all of that is yet to happen. For now, Sunday night lies before him. As the voice falls silent in the next room he returns to the window and the blank rain that breaks on the dead street; and because the young woman’s name is a talisman that will get him through the night he says it to himself, very softly, and then he says it once more.
Goody Lol.
BOOK ONE
From Those to Whom Much Is Given
Saint Mummy
the Lonely; flew things from buildings,
her flightless birds; could not abide
people, for sin she smelled inside;
knew knives & loud forebodings;
her bird bones bundled in aspic;
dragged by doctors; immune to harms;
held at distance her husband’s charms;
holy woman preached Joan of Arc;
soul in extremis; hunter of devils
or flatly insane; maker of insane
son, whose company of brown saints
she rebuked; starved herself for thrills;
physician who could not heal herself;
poor memsahib who died in debt
one summer when the power died;
girl who wished she was someone else.
from The Book of Chocolate Saints: Poems (Unpublished)
Paulita Ribeiro, neighbour, interviewed by Dismas Bambai in Forgottem, Goa, February 2005
Until the day she went after him with a bread knife we thought his mother was the most ordinary woman in the world.
We called her Burial because she was always so cold and formal. My husband’s joke, her real name was Beryl. She thought she was better than the rest of us poor camponês because she was descended from a long line of doctors. She said her mother or maybe her grandmother was the first female doctor in the country. We didn’t know she was mad until much later. The first time I thought about it, about her sanity I mean, was when she force-fed the poor old cook, shoved a tube into her mouth and poured in a mixture of honey and mustard. She did it quietly so the neighbours, meaning me, wouldn’t hear. But Cook told the whole countryside. She said Burial would go from room to room, anything breakable she smashed to the ground or threw out the window. Cook said the servants locked themselves in the kitchen. After that bit of news nobody wanted to work at crazy Burial’s house, believe you me.
Karma bites you in the backside, doesn’t it? These Hindu chaps get it right sometimes.
We weren’t friends to begin with. I suppose we became friends without meaning to, accidentally, you might say. She called me when she needed help with the house, or the servants, or finding the right butcher or liquor supplier. Once she had rats in the eaves. I told my youngest and he went up with a stick. Goa’s old houses are like old people, there’s always something that needs taking care of. Sometimes she came over just to look at my floor, just sit with that long ago and faraway look on her face, counting her rosary. Or cry for no reason, endless tears, a reservoir of tears, and not a word of why.
She took lemonade with salt, not sugar. She’d sit on the bench at the kitchen table and sip her salt. Her eyes were the colour of very dark chocolate, and she had a birthmark on her neck that always reminded me of Australia or the United States or maybe the Black Sea.
I asked her once, “Ber, do you think we Indians are qualified to run the country? At least the British knew what they were doing. They were qualified t
o administer. Look at what-all they gave us.”
She was Portuguese so I knew it was safe to say such things. If she was some true blue Indian I would have kept my trap shut.
“What did they give us, Paulita?” she said. “My husband says they robbed us for two hundred years.”
“That’s when he’s in editor mode. He also has good things to say about them, no?”
“I’m not sure. Around guests he is so charming, so brilliant is the conversation. Otherwise it’s silence as unto the grave, just like his son.”
She was quiet for a time and then she tells me, “What did they give us, Paulita? The British?”
“So many things,” I tell her. “Tarred roads, the law, Victorian architecture, the steam engine, the watch, the language we speak.”
“Frank says these are double-edged swords. He says the question we should be asking is, what did they take from us?”
“But what do you say, Ber?”
“They took everything from us and Frank took everything from me.”
“Ber, we are in the midst of a war for independence. This is your war also. You are allowed to have an opinion.”
If she had one she kept it quiet. Some people are born secretive. Even when she went crazy she went crazy quietly. For example, when she punished the cook there was no shouting. She admonished the woman softly and held her down with those medical practitioner’s hands. The shouting was a later development in her life and once it started it didn’t stop. She would shout for hours, always at the same pitch, controlled but crazy. She’d shout at her son, at the cleaning woman, and also when she was alone at home. She’d stand at the window and shout. One day it came to me, who she was shouting at from the window. Me! The only one she didn’t shout at was her husband, Frank the Great. Some days she’d shout and some days she smashed things. Once I saw her in action at the top-floor window, throwing clothes, shoes, a cut-glass vase, framed photos, beautiful porcelain. I stood at my window and watched everything smash on the lawn. She didn’t shout then. She did the smashing silent.
What she did to the cook was terrible but what she did to her son was much worse, believe you me. Probably I should have done something or said something, but what?
What happens when a mother goes mad? I’ve thought about it a lot because of Burial and poor Newton. An only child grows up thinking his parents are the world. This is what it means to be an adult, he thinks. What he knows of reality he learns from them. But what if one of his parents is insane? And not his father who is mostly absent but the mother who gave birth to him, who fed him, who never smiled or laughed whole-heartedly, who never relaxed because she didn’t trust anyone, not even her own son. What does that do to a boy?
Fr Joseph Pereira, former principal of Saint Britto High School, interviewed by Dismas Bambai in Mapusa, Goa, February 2005
In my experience it’s always the brightest that you have to watch. They cause the most trouble. As you must know, my experience is vast. Incredibly vast. I retired as principal after fifty years. I served through Partition and Independence and the terrible years that followed, and through the time of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency, which in my opinion was a brave and necessary measure, and through the years of regulated liberalisation introduced by her son. Half a century of experience! So I think I can safely say that when it comes to young students my judgement is simply impeccable.
He was a scholarship boy who arrived directly from the village of Forgottem. We published a few of his poems in the school magazine. He called them sixteen-line sonnets, strange formal inventions that featured wizards and damsels and swords. In other words they were the kind of English poems that the English no longer wrote. I tried to tell him that India also was a fit subject for poetry, that Indian birds, the crow, for instance, or the kite, or the saddest bird in the world, the grief-stricken monsoon koel, these birds were as worthy of poems as robins and doves. But it was no use. His imagination was soaked in English literature. He couldn’t hear me, not then. Years later, he heard loud and clear. I found him a far more interesting poet after he dropped the Englishness and turned to India as the source of his torment and material. It gave him a second wind. I’d say it brought him back to life.
When he came to us he was about ten or nine, already such a serious boy. I don’t think I ever heard him laugh or smile in a natural way. His presence was ghostly but also photogenic, as if he was smiling for a camera hidden behind the bushes, as if he was already in apprenticeship to the future. The only inkling of his later career was the poem about his mother, ‘Saint Mummy’, which, as it turned out, was the last of his poems to be published in The Brittoan. I was gratified to see that there were no elves or kestrels or gratuitous Merlin references. Do you know that a koel makes an appearance in one of the later poems? For this important development I must take a modicum of credit.
Beryl Xavier, mother, interviewed by Dismas Bambai at the Bangalore Institute of Mental Health, Bangalore, June 1998
I remember everything. Believe me it’s a catastrophic condition. You develop the long view whether you like it or not. You see the future as one side of a coin and the past as the other, a coin in which both sides are heads, or tails if you prefer – the past and the future, the same! In between, separating them and holding them together, is the narrow edge of the present. For example, you see me here and now, a woman well past her prime in a questionable institution in the shallow south of India, but I am at the same time a young doctor and mother and wife in Bombay and Delhi, and my knowledge and experience are all of a piece. Do you see? Good, it’s such a relief to speak to one’s equals. Some of the people here, goodness me, I have no idea what kind of accreditation process they underwent. Were they vetted at all? It’s a mystery willed by the Good Lord in his inscrutable wisdom. The Virgin Mother herself would be hard put to keep her patience! In my hospital they would have been dismissed for incompetence, if not prosecuted for malpractice. Things here are a little different, as you will see. Look at the personnel. The boys are like inadequately tamed animals, and the girls, goodness, just look at the girls! Let me tell you something about this so-called Institute of Mental Health. Every girl here says she likes Audrey. They say: I’m so Audrey! Let them say what they want about Audrey, it doesn’t matter. But the minute someone says, I’m so Holly! I say, oh no you’re not. They love Holly because they love Audrey. Do they even know that Holly was a prostitute?
When I first got here they called it a lunatic asylum. I thought it was a good enough name for a place where lunatics are given asylum from the world. I didn’t see anything wrong with it. Neither did any of the other lunatics. But they changed lunatic asylum to mental hospital. In those days there were no bars on the windows and the doors were always left open. The driveway was a dirt path. You could leave the building and walk through the dirt and slip right out of the gates if you felt like it. I didn’t feel like it then. I liked Dr Feroze who used to see me on Tuesdays and Fridays. He lent me detective stories. That’s what I like to read, thrillers, the bloodier the better. Dr Feroze liked them too. Sometimes he’d lend me a book I had already read and I’d remember some of it, but the whodunit I would forget. I think that’s one of my gifts. I am able to remember everything and forget some things but only if I put some work into it. Especially the forgetting part! For example, I borrowed Gaudy Night from Dr Feroze, which was one of the first Dorothy Sayers books I’d ever read. That was the book that made me want to read everything she’d written, including the poetry. And I am no fan of poetry, I can tell you. I saw how miserable it made my son. In any case I read it again, Gaudy Night, and I made myself not remember the mechanics of the plot. Not remembering is an art and I’m a master of it. Sometimes Dr Feroze and I discussed the books he lent me. What do you think, Beryl, he said. What do you think of Gaudy Night, is it any good? It’s better than good, Dr Feroze, I replied. In fact I do believe it may be the first feminist detective story ever written. And then Dr Feroze looked at me as if I had said something terr
ible and the Fear came to me. I thought I had exposed myself to a mortal enemy who would use the information to kill me. Instead of murdering me, he said, I see why you would come to that conclusion, Beryl, and I think you’re absolutely right.
When he told me he was leaving I wrote my address on a piece of notepaper. Of course he knew the address. That isn’t why I did it. It was a way of asking him to write to me if he felt like it. He never did. Psychiatrists are not allowed to write to their patients, did you know that? It’s unfortunate, yes?
Paulita Ribeiro, neighbour, interviewed by Dismas Bambai in Forgottem, Goa, February 2005
She was outnumbered. Her husband was a writer and so was her son. Two writers versus a doctor, do you see what I mean? They excluded her. If you keep treating a woman like an alien, soon she’ll begin to act like one. They’d talk about some writer or painter, some Delhi artist whose lovers numbered in the hundreds, whose affairs were common knowledge but only to people like them. And they would leave her out of it. She read a lot of crime novels, which was the only thing she and her son had in common other than God. But they would discuss things she knew nothing about. As a woman I understood. Women know what it means to be silent. We know what it means to be cancelled, to not exist.
Not long before she was sent to the asylum she asked me to accompany her to Fontainhas in the old part of Panjim. There was some sort of gallery in a church there that she liked to visit but she didn’t want to go alone. It was a good day for a drive, hazy, one of those rare days when the sun wasn’t blazing in your eyes. Still, I put on sunglasses and a scarf on my head. I like to wear sunglasses and a scarf when I’m going for a drive. We got into her Premier Padmini, sky blue it was, with tan leather seats that stuck to your skin. As soon as we set off I knew I had made a mistake. She drove so fast. There wasn’t much traffic but there are always animals wandering around the roads of Goa. You don’t see them until it’s too late and then you’re upside down.
