by Jeet Thayil
This is the new America. Except it isn’t America at all. This is Post America, After America, the dream of equality curdled into race paranoia. Rights if you’re white, otherwise you take your chances.
He weighs his course of action. He thinks of Philomena Debris and the way she moves through the world, self-contained, graced, a black sailing ship, black dignity intact in the face of whiteness, accommodation without servility. And he’s thinking of a story Sukh told him about a young software engineer waiting for a flight to Boston, detained at the airport because he was speaking Tamil to his wife on his cell phone. The story ended with the software engineer in tears, saying he wouldn’t do it again, would not speak to his wife in any language other than English.
Amrik apologises and puts his shoes back on.
*
The small shop is wedged between a florist and Joe’s Pizza and the only thing that marks it is the candy stripe.
He’s putting on a little weight. He hasn’t been running for a few weeks and already he can feel the difference on his belly. His legs are still skinny but his stomach mirrors every questionable decision about food.
In America weight is readable and quantifiable, a system of classification.
He is wearing his navy linen suit and walking east on Twenty-Third Street toward the Flatiron. Near the Chelsea Hotel he falls into step beside a blonde woman in faded overalls and floppy hat, oversize tote hanging off her shoulder. She is immediately familiar as a figure from Somewhere, the movies or the tabloids, and she has the hipster fray and druggy sidestep waver. At the pedestrian crossing on Eighth he remembers her name is Love and just then she looks at him and he smiles.
And that is all he does, he smiles, but the effect is immediate and perilous. It cannot be taken back. It’s as if he has spat on her or said something unforgivable, the way she flinches and dives into her bag. She steps off the sidewalk into the street and punches numbers into a cell phone. She is asking for assistance, for some solid buffer against the man who’s probably maybe following her. A man in a turban.
He hurries on and he won’t turn around to look at her. He wonders if her reaction, her rage, is purely because of his skin colour and turban in combination. His foreignness. If he had been a black man or a white man or a turbanless brown man, what would she have done with his smile?
He is on his lunch break, in search of a smoothie, no sugar, and maybe a tuna ciabatta at Zoop Soups. But he walks past Zoop to the shop at the end of the street with the revolving candy stripe. Inside he looks around as if he’s never seen a barbershop in his life, and it’s true, he has not.
He tells the hairdresser, short back and sides, and the entire shop watches as he unwinds the turban. There’s a discussion in Russian between the hairdresser, a tall blonde in a black leather coat, and an older man working with scissors and comb on a customer. The man leaves his station and comes to stand beside the woman, his arms crossed, angling sideways to examine Amrik’s hair. He and the woman speak at some length and the man offers what may be technical advice if only Amrik could follow the flat uninflected monotone. The woman shrugs extravagantly and says a single breathy word and smiles at Amrik in the mirror.
She picks up a comb and a pair of scissors and gets to work.
Just then Amrik’s phone begins to ring. He checks the name on the display and holds up a finger to the blonde. For a moment, as Goody reminds him about the opening, he thinks, I forgot. Wahe guru, I forgot.
“I know it’s tomorrow,” he tells her. “Of course I’ll be there.”
4.
66 opened in Chelsea at the Gallery K. Hardesh with a party that came to be remembered as the night Xavier fell off the wagon after three and a half years of unhappy sobriety. There were girls in striped leggings and boys in short shorts and oversize sunglasses. There was a small army of older men and women in black and a contingent of Indians unique to North America, who called themselves desis and seemed out of place with their straightened hair and pressed office clothes and leather satchels. The deracinated desis were office-bearers of the South Asian Journalists Affiliation. They asked Xavier if he would appear at a panel discussion in an Indian restaurant the following week where the topic would be the emerging profile, or not, of Indian art in the United States; and meanwhile would he consent to a quick interview for the website? He agreed to everything because he’d got quickly drunk and in the photographs taken of the event he could be seen holding various drinks, some with umbrellas and some without, a rum cocktail in a long-stemmed glass, two shots of tequila (one in each hand), a short bottle of beer, and a glowing bottle of absinthe that someone had given him, possibly for promotional purposes. He had not planned to drink; that evil thought had not crossed his mind. He hadn’t planned it but in the evening after some last-minute points had been cleared up with Clare – no, there was no need for a microphone or a stand because Xavier would not be making a speech; no, he would not be giving interviews; yes, it would be nice if Clare and her staff were at the door to welcome guests; no, the photographer did not have to stay all evening – after some clarity had been achieved, Goody went home to change and Xavier stepped out to smoke just as the setting sun turned the neighbourhood orange. For just one moment he felt as if he were in place, not out of it, and that was when someone from the catering staff asked if he would like a glass of champagne. Xavier had been asked the question and questions like it many times over the years since he had quit drinking, and he had always declined; saying no had become automatic. But this evening for the first time he heard and considered the question the young woman had asked. Would he like a glass of champagne? At the entrance to the gallery was a poster, a graphic modernist interpretation of the numerals 66, and it occurred to him that 66 might be the last show of his life, and he looked at the sunset glowing like it was the last sunset on earth, and he saw that the guests had begun to arrive with smiles on their faces and hope in their hearts, and he knew the answer to the question was yes, he wanted a glass of champagne more than anything. He picked up a flute from the tray held smilingly toward him and toasted the server and took a small deadly delicious sip.
Later in the evening because the toilet was occupied (possibly by anxiously primping desi journalists) he went out of the gallery and around the corner and urinated in an alley. When he returned the doorman wouldn’t allow him in. Xavier had a cigarette in his mouth and a glass in his hand and he was fiddling with the zipper on his vintage zoot suit trousers.
“No,” said the doorman.
“Is it because I’m brown and this is a respectable Caucasian gallery?”
“Sir, because you’re drunk.”
“My good man, do try and pay attention. If you take the Asian out of Caucasian all you’re left with is cock.”
And that was when the young woman who had offered him a glass in the first place – the glass that would send him spiralling toward a place he knew too well, the padded anteroom some called rock bottom – that was when the young shaman turned up at his side and took his arm and told the doorman he was the artist Newton Xavier whose work was being celebrated that evening. He let her take him up and deliver him to the Goods, who did not make a scene because she was on the phone. The scene would occur later when they were alone. For now she said something about India and passed the phone to Xavier.
“National Gallery, Delhi,” said Amrik. “Confirming that they will host a retrospective three-month run with shows to follow in Bombay and Calcutta.”
“Indeed,” said Xavier, “but we’ll fly into Bangalore and we’ll travel economy. I want the difference added to my fee. First stop of the 66 tour: Delhi. Then we take Bombay, Calcutta, Madras. I want a final blowout before I retire.”
“Wait a minute,” said Goody, grabbing the phone. “He hates to fly and he really hates to fly economy. This is a long flight.”
“He wants … to India,” said Amrik, his voice dropping and restarting mid-word, as if he were inside a wind tunnel. “… ing to go there and this way
he doesn’t … to pay for it … you?”
“You’re breaking up,” said Goody.
“On my way,” Amrik said, suddenly clear.
But when he got to the gallery Goody had disappeared and Xavier was at the bar drinking methodically from a bottle of champagne. The journalist Dismas was there and so was Clare from the gallery.
“It’s me,” said Amrik. “Back from the wilderness. With a haircut.”
“Rather extreme, don’t you think?” said Xavier. “You cut the hair but you left the beard. A job half done, I’d say. Alas, the …” He didn’t finish.
Clare’s words were for Xavier but she was looking at Amrik: “We’ve been following the reviews. There was something in the New York Observer this morning. The reviewer says your relationship with colour is ‘contention without revelation’ and some other things I honestly couldn’t understand.”
Xavier said, “When people comment about art they’re only citing themselves, they’re making, you know, allusions to their own crisis. Colour is irrelevant. Talk about terror, laugh or weep or be silent, this is when you get it right.”
Clare said, “Terror.”
Xavier said, “Or holiness. If neither is on offer all you’re left with is boredom and that is the world of art in one good word.”
He placed the half-empty bottle of champagne on the counter.
Amrik held Clare’s gaze. He noticed a slight frown and laugh lines.
He said, “Newton says if the artist isn’t ready to pick up a weapon he has no place in the modern world.”
Clare smiled; the frown disappeared.
“Now that’s the kind of news newspapers should carry,” she said.
“We aligned ourselves against the Romantics,” said Xavier, “against the early nineteenth century, against Shelley, ‘I fall on the thorns, I bleed!’ We called them effete because they were lost to ideology. We denounced their daffodils and clouds. We congratulated ourselves for not getting caught up in causes, but look at us now. After all, where has it brought us?”
Dismas watched him reach for the bottle. His fingers grazed the label but he did not pick it up.
Dismas said, “Where’s Goody? I thought she’d be here.”
Xavier stared at the matt wall behind him.
“She was. She isn’t any more,” he said.
Then he took his champagne and disappeared into the inner room.
“Do you think I could talk to you for a minute?” Dismas said. “I’m compiling an oral history of Newton and the Bombay poets and I’d love to get some input.”
“What does that mean, input? One of those words,” Amrik said, “I can never understand. If you ask, I’ll answer, sure I will.”
Dismas noticed that his suit and shirt and tie were all the same colour, charcoal grey.
“Excuse me,” Amrik told Clare, “my guest has arrived.”
It was Cassie Bird, resplendent in a scarlet and green cheongsam.
They had business to discuss but first things first.
“Amrik, Amrik, thanks for the photos. One minute. What happened to your hair?”
“I took some advice, I guess, went to the barber.”
“You look like ten years younger.”
“That’s good, right? This is usually considered a good thing.”
“I don’t know. I have a weakness for curls. You kept the beard, I’m glad. Why trim it, though?”
“Hair grows back, Cassie.”
“Not for months and years.”
She checked him out, circled him and came back around and stood with her arms crossed. Given a push or a gentle nudge he thought he could fall for the way her sentences dropped into inaudibility – and the swell of her hips under the silk.
“I printed the photos and showed them to my boss and we want to run them. But we don’t have a name. We don’t have a thing about her.”
“I didn’t get a chance. I told you, she gave me the camera to hold and next thing she was gone.”
“You tried to reach her.”
“I tried to reach her. I put an ad in the Voice and in the Times. Nothing, not a bite, and the thing is, if she were to walk in the door I don’t even know if I’d recognise her.”
“We’ll tell the story just the way you told it to me. The images are addictive, almost pornographic. The stalled traffic, people running for their lives, panicked cyclists and tourists and behind them that mountainous white cloud. Not everybody’s running though, some people are frozen in place, talking or staring and there she is in the middle of it all, taking pictures.”
“I wonder what she was looking for in the bag.”
“When you look at the photos serially? There’s a kind of a charge, like documentary footage, war photography, something.”
“The day the twentieth century ended.”
“Do you think it’s true that the first year tells you what the rest of the century will be like?”
“Let’s see, mass murder as national narrative, earthquakes, the global rise of the racist right. What else?”
“Violence as performance art, the Chinese revolution and the Russian, technology that will help us know everything and live for ever.”
They heard an aeroplane, too close, the ocean paying a visit. Amrik examined the scuffed panels of the floor, intently listening.
“We’ll run the pictures and make an appeal. You could try talking to a sketch artist. Try and remember what she looked like. We’ll run a portrait of her too.”
“What I remember, she was there and then she was gone.”
“The lost photographer of September Eleven.”
“The loss photographer. And listen, since you’re here.”
He gestured at the profusion of styles around them – mixed media nudes, self-portraits, landscapes, cityscapes, line drawings, colour field abstracts, heads, still lifes, crucifixion studies, portraits of saints – and led her to the wall he loved the most, taken up by a single oil on canvas, Man and Woman Dreaming, the faces like giant African wood masks, the bodies flat planes of colour against a sky of blue rust, the necks punctured by ornate daggers plunged to the hilt; but there was something in the way the palette knife and the brush had been used that pulled away from the violence of the painting toward serenity or understanding, something he could not put a name to and would never speak of with Xavier.
“Always working, right?” Cassie said. “That’s me too. Now tell me something, how does a lady get a drink around here?”
*
He could not move or speak or place his glass on the floor or ask someone to help him to a chair. His bones felt loose and his thoughts were ponderous and blurry and pleasurable. This was the point of drink, to be a two-legged ape leaning against a wall, all faculties lost except the mixed blessing of hearing. And because he was unable to move out of earshot he was captive to a conversation among the desis. A woman with a pair of chopsticks in her hair said it all came down to the silly question of us versus them. South Asians did not try hard enough to be us and so they stayed them. It was the permanent foreigner syndrome, she said, drawing quotes in the air. It was their mistake; they needed to make sure they were on the right side of history. A tall woman with animal print horn-rims said there was a hierarchy of belonging among Asian-Americans. Even if we’re not bigots we all of us attach scripts to people, she said. It’s true, someone else said, like if I’ve had a good meal at a Chinese restaurant I’ll tell my Chinese friends about it. The woman with the chopsticks said, what I hate is when some fresh-off-the-boater asks where I’m really from. From here, where else? I’m from Brooklyn or the Bronx or Queens. I’m from Jackson Heights, that’s my answer. You mean Jaikishen Heights, said the woman with the horn-rims. That’s the oldest one in the book, said a white man with eyebrow piercings, but seriously, immigration shaped this country. We should welcome immigrants with open arms. Not always, the woman with the chopsticks said. Some people shouldn’t be allowed into your home or your country. They don’t integrate. They don’t ass
imilate. There is a hierarchy of belonging even among immigrants. The question is, do you as an immigrant know your responsibility to your host country? Your host country has responsibilities too, said the man with the piercings. Did you know South Asian prisoners are the fastest-growing community in American prisons? The Patriot Act is racist legislation at its most overt. What has it done, other than the masculinisation of Giuliani and Bush? What will the Coalition do in Baghdad, other than the masculinisation of Cheney and Bush? Oh, said the woman with the horn-rims, you finally said the four-letter word. I was wondering how long it would take. The man said, this is a critical moment. It’s not an adequate defence to say I’m not Indian, I’m Caribbean, don’t shoot me. Or to say, I’m not Muslim, I’m Hindu. But, said the woman with the chopsticks in her hair, I am Hindu. I’m not Muslim. I have nothing against blacks or Muslims but the fact remains that I am neither. Check who you’re shooting at before you shoot. The man said, I can’t believe you just said that. And they all started to speak at once.
Much later he sat at a table in the gallery’s private office. People went in and out of the room. Someone had put a plate of pasta in front of him and a glass of red wine and when he took a sip he felt every drink he’d taken that evening settle like metal in his legs. He would have trouble getting up. In for a centime, in for a franc, he said aloud, and drank the wine and asked for another. Goody was nowhere to be seen and neither was Amrik or Clare or even Dismas. At the table were people he didn’t know, among them a blond man in a blue blazer and a woman with a veil. Although the veil was sheer Xavier could make out little of her features, other than the fact that she was pretty or had been pretty. When she started to speak the room fell silent. She was from an Emirate in the Gulf, a society lady whose charity events were reported widely in the local press. When she mentioned the name of her father’s scandal-ridden bank some of the people on the table looked at her carefully because they had heard that it would soon close down. Her sister had married a sheikh, she said, a man whose passions were falconry and racing, a man who already had six wives. The lady’s sister became the seventh and youngest. The wedding was held at a fashionable London hotel, the grounds of which the sheikh had transformed into an Arabian desert with sand trucked in from Cornwall. Here he raced camels imported to London and jockeyed by Bombay street boys, also imported. Before the wedding the sheikh’s wives and wife-to-be were prepared by a hair-and-make-up man whose two female assistants were expert manicurists. The make-up man was a Pakistani, London born. He touched the lady’s sister’s hair and lips and cheeks. He looked in the lady’s sister’s face, though he didn’t see her true image but her reflection in the make-up mirror and when their eyes met, he flinched. During the ceremony the young Pakistani stood in the front row with his arms crossed. He stared at the sheikh’s seventh bride with such an imploring look that she left the celebration early and told her husband she was tired and she would wait for him in their suite. Late that night the sheikh’s second wife came to the lady’s sister’s room and escorted her through the service section of the hotel to a suite she had never before seen, where the fittings and furniture were similar to the items in her own suite but soiled somehow. The older wife was a Bahraini woman in her fifties and she motioned to the lady’s sister to be quiet. They were in a kind of anteroom and by parting the heavy drapes they could see into the suite, which was full of the sheikh’s security staff who took turns to sodomise the make-up man. The Pakistani lay across the arm of a couch while the men waited in line to rape him. After each man was done, he wiped off, zipped up and left the room. The Pakistani’s shoulders were pinned to the couch and he was stained with blood and semen and he seemed to be unconscious. The lady’s sister watched the rape of the only man to look into her eyes other than her father and her husband and she felt a terrible stirring that she did not recognise. It was late by then, the celebrations were over and the guests had left. The lady’s sister thought about her room at home and wondered what her sisters were doing, whether they had eaten, whether her father was silent and anxious as usual, or in a happy mood and optimistic about the future, as he had been when she was a small girl and her father had seemed to her like a god capable of anything. Then the Bahraini wife took the lady’s sister back through the hotel’s secret inner passageways, unventilated corridors that the guests never saw, where the walls were scarred unpainted concrete and the light was dim, by the service elevator to the top floor and from a service entrance into another suite, her husband’s bedroom, where the older wife left the new wife alone. When the sheikh arrived the lady’s sister was waiting for him on the bed and they made love until dawn, when, exhausted, he fell asleep. There was blood on the sheets and her husband’s penis was smeared with blood and semen and she thought of the men who had raped the Pakistani and she woke up her husband so he would take her again.
