by Jeet Thayil
We sped off on that road crowded with buses and trucks and bikes and bullock carts and every once in a while she would turn to say something to me and I would see her black eyes focused on a spot above my shoulder. Those were the worst moments. Eyes on the road, Ber, I’d say, not that it made a difference. At first she wanted to talk about prayer. She said it helped her cope with almost every kind of situation in life. She said it calmed her down to talk to God when she was confused. I told her she was lucky. Nothing calmed me down when I was in a tizzy, not even God. Then we talked about the rainy season in Goa, which is not easy to adjust to even for people who have lived here their whole lives. She asked how I got bed sheets dry in the rain. Nobody can dry bed sheets in the Goa rains, I told her, give them to the dry cleaners. But keep your eyes on the road, Ber, I said. Then I told her the story of my nephew, Mario, a wonderful singer who had formed his own a cappella band. He was riding home one night and a cow crossed the road and he didn’t see the tether. The motorbike landed on his head. He was in hospital for a year. He forgot how to sing.
I said all this but she didn’t slow down and after a while I decided to trust her and let the day unfold as it would. Then something came to me, an insight, you might call it. I saw a system in the way she accelerated into clusters of traffic. I decided her style of driving was similar to the technique of Zen meditation, which I once tried. She drives in a state of no mind, I thought, which she achieves by minimum use of the brake and horn. Instead of slowing down, she speeds into turns even with traffic approaching and then somehow she finds an opening and pushes the small car into it and out the other side.
The usual scenery flew past, the dusty brown trees and people of Goa. We kept overtaking State Transport buses, which you should never do if you are a woman driver. But there was no point telling Burial these things. She was silent, lost in her Zen meditation. And then she said, I think it’s important that family members have fun with each other. Don’t you think so, Paulita? No, I really don’t, Ber, I replied. Families are there to help each other. Burial shook her head. You don’t understand anything, Paulita. Your husband will support you whether you are wrong or right. There’s someone on your side no matter what. Do you see, Paulita? This is why you don’t understand a thing, said Burial. I was about to say, look, Beryl, you may be right or I may be right but whatever is the truth of it, do you mind keeping your eyes on the godforsaken road? But then another thought occurred to me. What if saying this made things worse? I held my peace.
She slowed down when we neared the old city. She had no choice, no? The streets are too narrow for fancy driving. We took the old Patto Bridge over the Querem creek and she parked in a shaded spot near a church and then we stepped out of the car and stretched our legs. Burial led the way to a room above the main building and when my eyes adjusted to the darkness I picked out life-size figures of wooden saints with smudged pieces of paper stuck to their arms and legs. A female saint stood guard near the door. She wore a cape and she was bleeding from terrible wounds in her neck. A note was pinned to her sleeve, “Saint Catherine TORTURED on the wheel & DECAPITATED.” A thin-faced man was slumped against the wall with his torn head in his hands. Two children knelt on the floor and reached for their missing eyes. Francis Xavier was in the back of the room where he regarded the wreck of his body that was missing toes and fingers and whatnot. In his one remaining hand he held the earth. As we watched, people came up to the wooden saint and touched him and kissed their fingers to their lips. They left small pieces of lined notepaper on a makeshift shrine. Burial unfolded one and passed it to me:
Tell me, O Lord, how does the penitent child pass?
Only on his knees.
Why, dear O Lord? Why must he pass on his knees?
For if he pass on his feet he surely must be decapitated.
I could make no sense of it but Burial gazed at the note for a long time. By now I was ready to leave and I wondered how long this mad adventure would take. I had to get home and attend to life. Come on, Ber, I said, some of us have work to do. She didn’t say a thing. She didn’t even smile, just kept staring at a painting of Saint Xavier on his back with a bottle of whisky between his feet. The painter had made his skin bright yellow and the eyes were lit red. There was not an ounce of extra flesh to be seen. The face was like a mask of one who had suffered the terrors of hell. Beside it was a painting titled The Last Journey, in which a sickly Saint Xavier clutched at a cross that was beyond his grasp. A small boy massaged his feet and a Chinese monk held a candle and cried a single tear. A sticker on the painting said, “I am watching night and day for the return of the merchant who has agreed for 20 pices to convey me to Canton.”
Poor Burial looked as if she too had become a statue, except for her hands, which were always moving. What was she looking at? I was about to rouse her when she said, what do you think pices are, Paulita? Do you think it is a misspelling of pesos or a misspelling of pieces? I don’t know, I replied, and I had never said a truer thing. I had no clue. How could I? Those paintings were like nothing I had ever seen. I wondered who had painted them and how had he got away with depicting the patron saint of Goa as a homeless fellow and alcoholic? Burial examined the canvases from every angle, lost in her own thoughts. In the car, we sat in our seats and neither of us said a thing. When she turned the key in the ignition I steeled myself.
But the return trip was better. She wasn’t driving so fast. We stopped at a courtyard restaurant in Candolim where we ordered tea and sugar biscuits. I balanced my sunglasses on top of my head. The air had turned balmy and it was almost enjoyable to be sitting there sipping tea like two leisurely ladies. We talked about the Congress Party, about Jinnah, about what India would be like after Independence. My husband and I were thinking of moving to Portugal, I said, though most likely we would stay right there in Goa. And what about you, Beryl, I asked. She sipped her tea and nodded. She didn’t know what she would do, she said, or where she would go. She said she liked Berlin because the weather was so terrible that you could stay home and never feel like you were missing out on life. And then she talked about the cemeteries of Montparnasse and Père Lachaise and Montmartre, and how they were like miniature cities. She mentioned the trees of New York and in passing she described the dirt and noise of Rome, which she found more welcoming than the clean streets of Geneva. These were cities she had visited with her husband when they were young and childless, when they were newly and happily married. She knew the names of the streets and the names of the rivers and central stations and she even listed some of the restaurants and hotels they had visited. She was an encyclopaedia. Beryl, I said, you’re better than a travel book. I was going to tell her how lucky she was to have travelled the world but I noticed that her black eyes were wet. Never mind, I said, everything will be fine. She shook her head. Nothing would be fine again, she said, the tears streaming down her face. She pulled the note out of her pocket then and smoothed it on the table, the wretched note about the penitent child and decapitation. This is for Newton, she said through her sobs. He used to love visiting churches with me. We had a game. Whenever we saw a brown saint, not a white saint but a brown one, and there are several if you know where to look, then the one who saw it first would give the other a pinch. He’s forgotten the game now that he’s growing up and away from his mother. She smoothed the horrid typewritten note. I’ll give it to him for his ninth birthday, she said. I saw her wet black eyes and I saw the black birthmark on her neck and right there and then I knew something terrible would happen, and the hair on my arms, I’m not joking, my hair stood on end.
Fr Joseph Pereira, former principal of Saint Britto High School, interviewed by Dismas Bambai in Mapusa, Goa, February 2005
Frank Xavier was well known for his peppery editorials during the Independence movement. We used to quote them verbatim! The boy would have been about ten at the time, or less, nine maybe. Ten years later after the Annexation of Goa he too would make peppery statements in the press that made him
unwelcome in his own country. His grandmother was famous, the first female surgeon of the state. His mother too was a well-known doctor. To me she did not seem disturbed but withdrawn. We had no inkling. Not then. The boy was bright, as I say, among the best I’ve taught but also the worst, a natural ringleader. Even at the age of nine he married his talent to negativity. In my mind he was a boy nihilist. I had no choice but to do what I did.
We started as the Sacred Heart School for boys and girls. When the school was handed over to the Jesuits Goa was still under Portuguese rule. The Jesuits renamed it Saint Britto High School and made it exclusively for boys. Good thing it wasn’t co-ed when Xavier got here, if you follow me. He would have imploded in a worse fashion than he did. Of course I did not know then that his mother was going through her troubles. I thought he was a natural born ruffian and nuisance.
In his first week, during the morning recess, Vic Menezes was laughing about something, excited to be talking to a group of the older boys. Menezes was telling a story or a joke and nodding at Xavier. At lunch Xavier cornered Trev Coutinho in the hall and asked what Menezes had been saying.
“I don’t know,” Coutinho said.
“You were laughing and you don’t know why?”
Poor Coutinho had already begun to sweat.
“Tell or I shall kick you.”
Coutinho was a crier, a delicate child. When anxious he’d hold his breath until he turned blue. Xavier grabbed him by the collar and out it all came, that Menezes had said Xavier’s mother was as funny as a three-cornered jam tin. She acted like a great aristo but actually she was an upstart bag lady. Xavier went directly to Menezes and called him a filthy bugger and banged the older boy’s head against the wall. They were on him in a minute, Menezes and his friends. They roughed him up and I think they would have caused some damage if I hadn’t put a stop to it. The strangest thing was that Xavier was having the best time. He was egging them on. He wanted them to hit him. Go on, is that the best you can do, a big fellow like you? Are you a sissy boy? I should mention that Menezes was a senior at the time. He was two years and a few months older than the Xavier boy and bigger in every way.
The drawing appeared a month or so later, a line drawing on the wall of the boys’ toilet, the outer wall, mind you. So perfectly detailed, such an accurate anatomical study I knew immediately who had done it. He was the best draughtsman in the school. The drawing was art, of course, but explicit in a way that was decidedly vulgar, if not pornographic: a red-haired giantess with red nipples and red eyes and a black phallus-shape in her belly.
He didn’t deny it. If anything he took some pride in the work.
“Where did you get the paint?” I asked him.
“From the workroom. I had to make do with black and red because there were no other colours.”
“Are you quite pleased with yourself?”
“No, Father,” he said. “I think there is far too much red. I should have been more sparing with the colour.”
I would have let it go. We whitewashed the wall and forgot about the incident and one morning there was a new drawing, a woman in a hat and a sundress through which you could see her naked figure. I took Xavier to the scene and asked him if he had done it. He said someone else had done it and he had tried to correct it. He pointed out which lines were his. He said he hated bad drawing.
How could I have allowed it? I had to do something. It was a calculated slap in the face of our authority and it didn’t end there. Certain members of the faculty had no hesitation in expressing their grievances in writing. In short I had no alternative but to expel him. I wrote a discreet recommendation and I made a call to a former student of mine at Saint Mary’s in Bombay. I suppose I should mention that the caption to the pornographic drawing was something I taught him, a saying of Saint Francis’s that the body is a cell and the soul a hermit who lives therein. The rascal had the nerve to sign it with the school motto, Facta non Verba, followed by a single letter that announced the culprit’s name. X.
I don’t mean to brag but I think I may be able to take some credit for the religious nature of his art. I may deserve a footnote in the story of his life. Do you remember the epigram that accompanied his Chocolate Jesus exhibition? Thirty boys in the class were told the quote and it registered only with one. I remember it well. I’ve always had a photographic memory for those moments in which I have felt myself inspired or moved by the highest calling, if you will. The summer months in Goa are the schoolmaster’s nightmare. The fans are clicking overhead and not a thing moves in the room, certainly not their brains. I told them the quote and I watched the twitch of thirty hands. I heard thirty pens scratching on paper and I knew exactly what the writing was worth. I looked at their hands and for a moment I thought of the tiny fishes that swim together in the wake of bigger fish. I looked at their eyes and I saw ghastly fish eyes, glassy undersea minnow eyes, spherical eyes without feeling or intelligence.
What was the quote? Good, that is the correct question. Revelation, Chapter Ten, Verse Ten, such a lovely symmetry, ten colon ten: “And I took the little book out of the Angel’s hand, and ate it up; and it was in my mouth sweet as honey; and as soon as I had eaten it, my belly was bitter.” It was a game I played against myself. Throw a thought among them and see what happens. Would one of the minnows bite? Or would they toddle on without a thought in their heads? I hoped for the former and expected the latter. I recited the quote and told them it was not the only instance in the Book in which a prophet ate the words of the Lord and reported a taste in his mouth as of honey for sweetness, a sweetness that cannot last. What I hoped to communicate to the boys was that success in this world is a passing thing. Only Newton heard.
Beryl Xavier, mother, interviewed by Dismas Bambai at the Bangalore Institute of Mental Health, Bangalore, June 1998
He didn’t listen. The taller he got the less he heard. I had information that might have lifted his life into the blessed radiance if only he had listened. I was forced to resort to drastic measures. What else could I do? I am a mother and I did what mothers must, I entreated the Virgin. I spent the days in my room and on my knees I prayed to the Virgin Mother. I asked for guidance and I begged and after many hours of pain and entreaty I found my answer. Raise your voice, she told me, raise your voice without anger and then he will hear you. One morning when I went to wake him for school I stood at the doorway and addressed him in a loud even tone. I said, wake up, Newton, I wish to tell you about your ancestors. I thought I’d got the tone exactly right but he continued to lie there with his eyes closed, pretending to be asleep. If only he had listened. I told him about Joan of Arc, our direct ancestor, about the links between the Goddess Kali and the Black Madonna of Byzantium. I told him to pay no mind to the pale scientists who speculate that the Black Madonna and Black Child had turned that colour from the accumulated grime of votive candles. If that were the case why were the vestments not black as well? My Black Madonna is the true Madonna, I told him. Was she not a woman from the east? I told him and he did not listen and then I did not speak any more. But I am a mother and I cannot give up. I gave him other opportunities to correct himself. For example, the following Sunday after church we had lunch at a restaurant in Panjim, just he and I. His father was travelling. I told him about a recurring dream in which God came in disguise to give me secret information about the origins of man and his likely demise. When I told him this he looked at me the way he looked at his father when they discussed poetry, that is to say he looked at me with great interest. But then he went back to his chorise and pau. He didn’t say a word. I remember I had dressed him in a white shirt and bow tie, with pressed long shorts and shined black shoes. I like to dress up for church and I like my son to dress up too. He was drawing in the margins of a book, faces, always faces and busts, knights and maidens, dragons and wizards. He drew our cook and a schoolmate of his from Saint Britto’s and his Sunday school teacher (a horrible woman I had never liked) and a portrait of his father in a suit and a portra
it of Nehru; in other words, anybody and everybody, except for me. He had never painted a portrait of his mother. I was cutting my roast beef and suddenly it came to me that he had never tried to be a proper son. At least I had tried to be a mother. I looked at the meat leaking on my plate and I put down my knife and fork. I thought of Nehru and his daughter, his clever daughter who had always resented me. She had a soft spot for Frank and she was exceedingly kind to my son. I was nothing more than the fly in her ointment. When we got home I told Newton to draw a picture of me, his one mother. What kind of a picture, he asked. Draw me the way you see me, darling, I said.
Paulita Ribeiro, neighbour, interviewed by Dismas Bambai in Forgottem, Goa, February 2005
We all know the story of his expulsion. How did he know to draw a picture like that at such a young age? He was eight years old when his mother came after him with the knife, and she’s a doctor, you getting me? She knows how to use a knife. Then he watched her being dragged off to the asylum. It was the best asylum in India of course, goes without saying. My kids say I should call it a mental institution. I say, call it what you want and it’s still a loony bin. Personally? I think his mother traumatised him into art. I’m not saying artists need trauma but it helps, believe you me.
Even after they put her in the bin, sorry, mental institution, she was swanning around saying she was a doctor and her fellow inmates were her patients. Imagine! I felt sorry for her, no? By then I thought of her as my friend. But one thing, it’s true what they say about doctors. They have no feelings. When they look at us they don’t see a friend or husband or son. They see case histories, contagions, ailments. His mother was that kind of doctor.
