by Jeet Thayil
The lady looked around the table for a few minutes. Then she said, the question I wish to ask you is why my sister stayed with the sheikh. Why didn’t she escape? After all, her father was an important man who would have protected her at any cost. At this the man in the blazer said the lady’s sister was biding her time because she wanted to wait until she had accumulated the resources she would need to escape her powerful husband. The lady said nothing. She looked at Xavier who sat motionless, the pasta untouched on his plate, a thin sheen of sweat on his upper lip. His eyes had not strayed from a portrait of a woman in a burkha on the floor of a room lit only by oil lamps, D_____ , Bombay, 1982. It had not been offered for sale. The woman in the picture was smoking a pipe that was also her penis.
Why didn’t she leave? the lady asked again.
Because, Xavier said, even if by some slim chance you escaped your husband and went to a country where nobody knew you, your father, who lost everything in the crash of his bank, would offer your sisters to the sheikh in your place. But that isn’t the only reason you stayed. The real reason, the important one, is this. When your husband came into the room and took off your clothes you understood that the thing you felt when you watched the rape of the Pakistani was desire, not for the Pakistani but for your husband, for the power he held and for the way he desired you, and you wanted him to do to you what you had watched his men do to the Pakistani. That is the reason you stayed and continue to stay.
The lady laughed and gathered her things but the blond man in the blazer was too angry to move. He said Xavier treated the world as if it was insane because he saw himself in everything and he was undoubtedly out of his mind. For the first time since the lady had begun to speak Xavier’s eyes slid off the picture on the wall and came to rest on her.
He said, “If you ever want your portrait painted, do let me know.”
Of the forty-one pictures exhibited at the opening thirty-six were sold, said Amrik on the phone the following day. Xavier was subdued, nursing a hangover that had left him mute and susceptible to religious trembling. It was good that the paintings sold quickly, Amrik said, because the reviews had started to come in and they were uniformly negative except for the desi papers whose articles weren’t reviews as much as ecstatic notices of ‘South Asian’ achievement. The blond man in the blazer, it turned out, was the art critic of the New York Times. His review, titled Portrait of the Artist as an Old Skell, accused Xavier of engaging in the kind of street-corner hustle that had become obsolete in Rudy Giuliani’s New York, the kind of hustle New Yorkers had devised multiple strategies to identify and bypass. The critic ended his three-paragraph report by saying Xavier’s years in the wilderness famously suffering from artist’s block or alcoholic dementia or just plain laziness had ruined him for good, had wrung out of him whatever talent he’d had as a young man, had left him old and used up and as dead as his work. Time Out New York didn’t bother with a review but had an item in the listings page, without an image, that described the show as an Indian eccentric’s last huzzah. The New Yorker carried a mention on its website though not in the print edition. It was a studiously non-committal paragraph that said nothing, positive or negative. Only the Wall Street Journal carried a review longer than two hundred and fifty words. The reviewer seemed knowledgeable about Xavier’s career and asked whether the paintings were clever forgeries made with the connivance of the artist. He said they had no artistic merit or interest, except to scholars of the art of forgery. And after all, this is what it was, an art, though whether it was one of any value was a question that would have to be decided by art historians and philosophers. As far as the reviewer went – and it wasn’t far because unlike his colleagues in the New York Times and the New Yorker, he was not ideologically committed to everything Newton Francis Xavier produced simply because he had at one time been part of the Trotskyite-Anarchist Bombay collective that called itself the Progressive Autists Group – as far as the reviewer went, 66 was a future virus that signalled the end of honour. He said the show was an act of violence by a master criminal whose own talents had long been squandered in the pursuit of wine, women, and vertigo, whose contention that art cannot save and pure art was impossible made frightening sense in a world where the pursuit of purity had led to endless bloodshed. It was an important review but no one in the art world or at least no one who mattered read the Wall Street Journal and even if they did they would not admit to it; and so the most potentially damaging accusation aimed at Xavier during this period went unremarked.
*
One evening in the fall of 2003 Xavier sat on the stoop of a converted storefront on Christie Street. His skin had a grey tinge as if he had not washed in days. He leaned against the railing and slept for some time but he opened his eyes when Dismas Bambai said his name. He pulled himself up. Ah no, thought Dismas, here we go. He’s come to have it out and demand an explanation or a duel. Speaking in an exaggerated nicotine whisper Xavier said that Goody had kicked him out of the house. Could he trouble Dismas for a place to stay? Inside the apartment he asked for beer. Do you like them, he said, handing Dismas his sunglasses. His eyes were bloody and pouched in black silk.
“I gave myself a treat,” he said. “Would you like to venture a guess as to how much?”
“I don’t know. Forty dollars?”
“Try two hundred and forty!”
Dismas only shook his head.
“Forty is a knock-off from Canal, my good man. Does this look like a knock-off? Well?”
“Sorry but it does? Some of those copies are pretty real.”
“Some copies are real. Truer words,” Xavier said. “Now then, to the news of the day. She’s had enough, says she can’t take it. Told me to come back when and if I got sober. Hellish scenario if she’s serious. I mean, beyond disastrous, a complete fuckaroo. All my work is there and why wouldn’t it be? The apartment is mine. I shall have to evict her or patch it up and both options strike me as decidedly hard work. Quelle horreur!”
Dismas went to the Spanish grocery on the corner and bought some long-necked bottles of beer and a carton of milk. Xavier drank the beer like medicine, all four bottles, while telling a story about Goody’s parents.
He had met them once in Delhi. Goody’s stepfather, a retired doctor, suffered from a mysterious bronchial ailment that no physician had been able to diagnose and he spent several weeks of the year in a hospital unable to breathe without a machine. Stepfather Lol made it plain that he didn’t approve of his daughter’s much-married lover – he always called Goody his daughter, while Goody insisted he was her stepfather and her real father had left when she was little; all she remembered about her father were inconsequential details, for example that he wore white kurta-pyjamas – and Stepfather Lol took pains to mention that her lover was older than he. On his way out Xavier took Lol by the elbow and told him in a confidential tone that sex was the thing that kept men and women together. He said there was a reason why he had a young girlfriend and Lol did not.
“I can fuck,” he said, “and you cannot.”
He told Lol that his stepdaughter was a student of the human impulse, her subject being men and women, and women and women, and men and men, and the prodigious thing they had in common. He said that he, Xavier, had made it his subject too, or one of his subjects, which is why he and Goody got along as well as they did and why their sex was nothing less than incandescent. But why was he saying all this to Lol, who knew his stepdaughter’s sex? Lol, said Xavier, was a tall man with a full head of white hair and a pale Brahmin face. Xavier could see the effect of his words, though the man’s expression was mostly hidden behind a beard. I lost it, Xavier told Dismas. I admit it freely, I lost it and I was ashamed of myself. I called and apologised but the incident has somewhat coloured our subsequent interactions. He’s never forgotten. And what I’m saying, Bombayman, the point I’m making is that I didn’t forget either. Her stepfather, I have to say, is a prick! You’ve heard the saying, if you want to know what a woman will
be like take a look at her parents? Well, let’s hope Goody turns out like Mrs not Mr Lol, Xavier told Dismas as he finished the beer and went loudly to sleep.
The next morning Dismas went to work and when he got home that night Xavier was asleep again. He’d changed into a pair of kurta-pyjamas and tidied the house. He had arranged the books, sending fiction and poetry to separate shelves. In the morning Xavier was deep into The Prison Journals by Q Ball Li and he was unusually communicative.
He said, “And where, pray, did you pick up this bit of social history?”
“Old Li? He’s a Chinatown figure, a living Bowery ghost. I met him back when he was using. He’s part of the lore of downtown and he gave me the book in lieu of a debt.”
“I find it somewhat difficult to trust junkies as a rule but I must say there is something about these journals. I’ve been looking at them all morning. The best chapter for my money is the one composed entirely of food entries, what he ate at which time of day and what he drank, each item recorded like an entry in a cash ledger. It seems to me a kind of aphoristic spiritual text, if you see what I mean. Because it hints at the meaning of life without being didactic and much like life each entry ends the same way.”
“With a ritual.”
“For example,
13 October.
8 a.m.: 2 corn fritters, 2 eggs scrambled in bacon fat, instant coffee with milk.
11 a.m.: Glass of cold lemonade from a Mason jar, the bluish quart jars they no longer make.
2 p.m.: Green apple, half a farmer’s loaf & avocado with olive oil, lime juice, salt & pepper.
4 p.m.: Black tea with milk, 2 squares dark chocolate.
8 p.m.: Goat cheese on rye, sliced tomato with salt & olive oil.
8.30 p.m.: Cigarette.”
That evening Dismas found the room had been vacuumed and Xavier’s sleeping space cleared. His towel was in the clothes hamper and his toothbrush removed from the communal bathroom down the hall. There was a note on the fridge. “Thanks for the hospitality. You may treat this note as an IOU redeemable the next time we meet, the note, that is, not you, or, for that matter, yours truly, X.” A postscript had been added in pencil: “She isn’t YOUR wife! You’re off your onion & the poem sucks bollocks!” In the closet was a parting gift. A plastic bag with two empties of vodka and half a dozen bottles of beer, also empty, and a set of kurta-pyjamas streaked with shit and vomit. Also in the bag was the poem Dismas had not intended anyone to see. How had Xavier located it in its hiding place deep in a shoebox of printouts? How much snooping had the old man done?
Written in rhyming couplets reminiscent of a ghazal, though without the ghazal’s formal complexity, the poem’s narrator was a man who lived in a watchtower on top of a cliff. From the watchtower he had a view of the ocean and the rivers that fed into it. He watched the slow boats that travelled from town to town. Some of the riverboats had lights strung across the top deck, coloured lights that blinked on and off in a monotonous distracting pattern; and if the night was calm the narrator heard tiny music made by toy instruments, no melody or harmony but notes that followed one after the other without urgency or emotion. He grew to despise the music and on some nights he shut his ears with cotton wool, which served only to heighten the general agitation of his nerves. Then he would apply himself more intensely to the duties required of him: to warn the townspeople of any changes in the patterns of water and air and to look for unusual tidal formations or anything that might appear as a portent.
As time passed he did his job to the exclusion of everything else and soon he became convinced that a great upheaval was coming. He felt sorry for those who would be swept away. Often he slept in a room at the top of the watchtower and his wife brought him food and if sometimes she forgot he would go hungry for a night. With no one to talk to, his eyes were his only source of contact with the world and they provided him with the sounds and images he substituted for nourishment and his wife’s companionship.
That year the monsoons failed and the comings and goings of the boats became more frequent. He could see the people of the towns gather along the coast and the riverbank. There was general distress among them and he knew more privations were ahead. The fishing boats went out even when the seas were rough. More items were shipped in from other towns, often at substantial cost. The farmers were the worst hit. They lived from hand to mouth in any case and the loss of their yearly crop meant a season of hunger was on its way. Some killed themselves in the hope that the government would give their wives and children monetary compensation that would last until the next monsoon. Sometimes entire families poisoned themselves, parents, grandparents, and small children. When the authorities came they found a room in which there were so many dead the officials had to put handkerchiefs to their noses and take shallow breaths. All the while the government’s advertising campaigns continued to talk of the giant strides the nation had made in global business. It had become, they said, a beacon of light, a leader in the field of ideating, making, and spiritual technology.
When it happened, there was no warning at all, unless you took into account the agitation of the birds. From his lookout point at the height of the tower he watched the crows fly in circles as if they would dash themselves against the trees. The dogs began to whine and run inland. He took the plugs out of his ears and shouted for his wife and he kept his eyes on the horizon. He saw a hole in the ocean that seemed to fill and swirl. He saw the water recede from the shore and the townspeople run after it to retrieve coins and photographs, lost engagement rings, the bones of drowned friends, a car that had rolled off a ferry, a piano, a small aeroplane. As they crowded around these objects he did what he’d been trained to: he set off the watchtower siren. But by then there was too much commotion and not enough time for the warning to make a difference. And in any case the townspeople had forgotten the meaning of the siren. It had been too long since they had heard it ring.
In the last couplets of the long poem the narrator leaves his post and runs toward the ocean. The water keeps receding and the people keep running, idiotically, picking up whatever treasure is left in its wake. He sees an old woman fill the skirt of her dress with the fish that flop on the dry ocean bed. He sees a group of boys playing on the hull of a long sunken submarine. He shouts the name of his wife.
Goody, he cries. Goody.
But the wave gathered into the shape of a giant fist; he wept when he saw there was no one he could save.
*
One morning in the late fall on his way to work Dismas Bambai descended the stairs to the subway and caught a sharp stink of funk and urine. He walked past a man drinking beer from a tall can, drinking deeply, his hoodie pulled low. His wet parka sported lighter burns and black grease streaks but his sneakers were spotless.
“A quarter for a phone call,” the man said. “I mean, a dollar, a dollar’s what I need.”
