by Jeet Thayil
His voice was hoarse and papery with smoke and when he laughed his gums showed pink against the ash of his skin. Dismas envied the man. At eight a.m. on a weekday morning he was taking pleasure in a beer. The day was ahead of him to do with as he wished, to destroy or repair or fritter away; and not once would he have to gaze upon the cadaverous face of Mrs Merchant.
A sunless morning, sky the colour of smudged kajal, already cold though it was only October. The city had just had the shortest summer on record. In May there was old slush on the streets, July and August were hot, and now a chill was in the air. It seemed to him that winter had stayed all year round. And it was only a matter of time before the immigration authorities came to collect their debt.
At Madison Square Park he saw a man sprawled on a bench with coffee and the day’s newspapers and he experienced another jab of envy.
He took the elevator up to Indian Angle and punched in, hoping to slip out as soon as an opening presented itself. But it was production day and he had to send off the Immigrant Agony page and the Immigrant Lawyer page needed to be formatted. The editor also wanted a quick story on an actor who had a role in an upcoming Hollywood movie. The actor played a cabbie and had one line. “Everything all right with you, my man?” But such was Indian Angle’s excitement that the story rated a thousand words on the front page.
“But he plays a Pakistani,” Dismas told Mrs Merchant.
“I don’t care if he plays the ukulele. Try and do a decent job. His parents are friends of mine. Nobody else is here, that’s why I’m asking you.”
Pereira arrived late and as soon as he was seated he picked up the phone and called Dismas. They sat at adjoining desks but Mrs Merchant did not allow employees to talk among themselves.
“Chinese?” Pereira said. “You go. I want Kung Pao Chicken and spring rolls!”
One of them would go first and order a meal for two. They would eat together but return to the office separately. The editor didn’t like to see her employees going out for lunch. What if they talked about her? Worse, what if they enjoyed themselves?
Pereira hung up first and cradled his head in his hairy hands. The walnut skin on his hairless skull gleamed with oil and his fingernails were scored with diabetic ridges.
Dismas Bambai’s hand was still on the phone when it rang again, Mrs Merchant with a summons, and when he looked up he saw her signalling urgently through the glass.
She had a lot to say and most of it concerned herself.
“I am shocked and disappointed, obviously,” she said, applying moisturiser on the webs of her bony hands. “Shocked. Disappointed.”
For some reason she smiled, showing yellow teeth in which the fillings were of a different, whiter colour.
“I should have known better than to hire someone without references. If nothing else it shows an appalling lack of honesty on your part.”
She had had a call from the police about Dismas’s arrest. The officer said the drug bust was fairly minor and Dismas had received a suspended sentence, but his work status would have to be reviewed.
Mrs Merchant shook her head slowly, a dreamy look on her face.
“You can continue here until the end of the month but after that we’ll have to let you go,” she said. “I can’t afford trouble with immigration, I can’t, cannot.”
She applied a minuscule amount of moisturiser to each finger.
“I keep telling myself it could be worse,” she added, “it could be the tax guys. Compared to them immigration’s a walk in Madison Square Park.”
Pereira and Dismas had lunch at Hong Kong Best Taste on Sixth Avenue. Because it was the end of the week they had beer. The small table wobbled when Pereira picked up a spring roll with his chopsticks and dipped it into the chilli sauce. He held the roll in front of him, his hairy blunt hands only slightly unsteady.
“Let us take pleasure in this good spring roll fried deep and fast, as Chinese as anything you may find so far north of Chinatown and so far west of China,” he said, before taking a bite.
He chewed happily with his eyes closed.
He swallowed, smiled shyly, and said, “Kung hey fat choi.”
“Kung hey fat choi to you too,” said Dismas. “But it isn’t New Year just yet.”
“You know,” Pereira said, taking a deep draught of his beer, “I wasn’t always a journalist. There was a time I wanted to be a playback singer.”
Here he broke off to sing, softly and tunefully, a Hindi song from the hit seventies movie Sagar.
Sagar jaise ankhon wali,
Yeh toh bataa tere naam kya?
“I had an idea. I thought I would do an album of Hindi movie songs translated into English. I’d keep intact the melody and the rhyme and all of the jauntiness. For example, the Sagar tune would go like this:
You whose eyes are like the sea
Tell me what your name might be.”
“Fantastic,” said Dismas, clapping softly.
“It’s not bad but I had enough sense to know I was not a brilliant singer. So I wrote about singers instead, and movies, and Indians dead in America. Not that I’m complaining. It’s a better way of making a living than being out in the world.”
Dismas took a sip of his beer. There would only be the one and then they would rush back to work, returning separately to their desks.
“Now, you,” said Pereira. “You are a different story entirely.”
“What do you mean?”
“Can’t you see?” Pereira said. “Can’t you see into the future?”
“No,” said Dismas, taken aback. “I’m trying to keep my head above water and I’m not doing a very good job of it.”
Pereira looked carefully at Dismas and nodded.
“You’re doing fine,” he said. “And you really don’t know about yourself?”
“Know what?”
“Since you ask, let me tell you. You are a writer. You were always meant to be a writer. All of this,” he waved his chopsticks around the restaurant and toward the street, “this is your apprenticeship.”
The noise of the lunchtime crowd quietened and Dismas saw himself for a moment from the outside; and the restaurant he was in, the job he held, the city in which he lived, all of it receded to a distance he could not bridge.
“It’s a vocation and a curse,” said Pereira, lifting his glass once more. “Full many are called but few are chosen. When it brings you fame and riches, when that happens, remember who said it first.”
They touched glasses and drank deeply and then Pereira sat back with his eyes downcast and finished his meal in silence. They said no more about it but for years afterwards Dismas remembered what Pereira had said; and though it brought him no second sight, no snapshot of the future, it revealed to him the deep seam of unhappiness in his friend’s heart.
When he returned to his desk Pereira was bent over his keyboard, already working. Dismas stared at his computer screen, blank but for the single sentence he’d written that day. He could see Mrs Merchant in her cabin gesticulating at Sheri-from-the-Islands. The end of the month was three weeks away; suddenly it seemed a long time to wait for the small paycheque he would receive. He printed out an email from his office account. He picked up his backpack and put away the books on his desk – travel guides to the United States and India, Xavier’s second and last book of poems, Saint Me, a new biography of Dr Ambedkar, a small pile of Moleskines. He packed his Cross chrome ballpoint, the PalmPilot he had splurged on but rarely used, and a bottle of Eternity stashed in a drawer. Everything else he left untouched; he left the computer running; he spoke to no one.
From the deli he picked up a sandwich and a bottle of water and walked to the park. The man he had seen that morning was on his knees on the grass, feeding the squirrels with crumbs collected in a Burger King bag. Dismas found a bench not far from him and ate his sandwich. Later he walked to Union Square. He bought Fruit of the Loom T-shirts and a pair of black and chrome Air Jordans. They would be the last purchases he would mak
e for a time. He drank an espresso macchiato and ate a croissant at a counter from where he watched the workers hurrying to and from their jobs, and he had a long overdue insight. He understood that leisure was the most expensive commodity on the planet, so rare a thing that the wealthy could not afford it. No one could, except the homeless and the deranged. He remembered Pereira’s words.
This is my apprenticeship.
What would he write? He would work on two books simultaneously. He already had a title in mind for the first, The Loathed, about the poets of Bombay in the eighties and nineties. It would centre around Nissim Ezekiel, Arun Kolatkar, and Dom Moraes. The other book would be an oral biography of the painter and defunct poet Newton Francis Xavier. He would use the interviews he had conducted years ago in India and the new information he had uncovered. He would conduct more interviews and update the material. It would be a biography like no other; he would make of his subject a window from which to view a broken society and a vanished literature. That night he turned the alarm clock off and slept ten hours. The uninterrupted sleep and the morning sun made him hopeful. He made a phone call and took the subway uptown.
Xavier came to the door wearing a Burberry trench over pyjamas and a new pair of dark glasses.
“I came to say goodbye, I know you’ll be leaving pretty soon.”
Xavier nodded, distracted, a man with important things on his mind.
“I have a message for you from an old friend. First things first, you never told me if the Marys are yours or not. I mean, I did bring them all the way from India.”
“I didn’t, did I? Well, so it goes.”
“Aren’t you going to let me in?”
“I think not.”
“But why not? You’re leaving soon. I thought I’d come and say goodbye. I’m trying to make the appropriate noises.”
“Everybody leaves. I’ve been making periodic trips to India mostly for art-related reasons. Lately they’ve been few and far between because I do hate to fly. It seems to me this is as good a reason as any for an extended visit. In any case, I’ve never been appropriate. Goodbye is a bit excessive, if you see what I mean.”
“X, you’re a cold bastard.”
“I am cold to the cold-hearted. What message?”
He looked like he’d just woken up. Clearly he would keep Dismas waiting at the door like a salesman. Why had he come?
“A message from Benny Time, the televangelist?”
Xavier took off his sunglasses and put one end to his purple lips. He looked past Dismas into a distance.
“He saw my interview with you in Indian Angle and got in touch the old-fashioned way, by handwritten letter.”
“Benny’s not an old-fashioned fellow.”
“Actually it wasn’t much of a message. Says he’s been trying to contact you and you don’t answer emails.”
“Goody’s supposed to do that but she forgets from time to time.”
“He didn’t say what it was about. Mentioned that you were schoolmates. He was your agent for a bit in London and you painted his portrait.”
Dismas gave him the email he had printed out and Xavier folded it and put it away without looking at the contents. He put his sunglasses on and searched the pockets of the trench for a cigarette.
“Super, and what’s old Benn up to these days?”
“He’s on the road a lot. He has the look of a man who relies on tanning salons and well-paid personal trainers, or at least that’s what he looks like on the Internet. He’s famous.”
“He always did have that look. Benny has been famous, you see, for a long time.”
“He read that you’re going to India and he wants you to come to his event in Bangalore. He wants to see you in person. His contact details are in the email.”
“Good. If he’s in India I might have a job for him. Perhaps I’ll ask him to stage the 66 opening party. He’s rather good at that sort of thing.”
He patted his pockets once again and turned around to look into the apartment. Dismas wondered if Goody was inside.
Xavier said, “I suppose we are old friends, the operative word being ‘old’ not ‘friend’. Benn’s friendships are need-based. He commissioned two paintings from me, portraits of himself. One official and one secret.”
“With clothes and without?”
“Well done. Now, if that’s it.”
“Don’t let me take any more of your time?”
Xavier shrugged exaggeratedly.
“There is one more thing. I’ve been thinking of writing your biography. I want to ask your permission and make it official.”
“No, thank you,” said Xavier, without so much as a moment’s hesitation.
“It might be worth your while.”
“I can’t stop you from writing whatever you wish to, but let me be clear. The answer is officially no.”
They stared at each other for a moment. As Dismas turned to go, Xavier unwisely spoke and in time the speech would find its way into print.
“One last thing,” he said. “I wouldn’t sell those paintings if I were you. Authorised forgeries are a separate category of artistic endeavour from fakes. They have nothing in common with mere copies. A forgery takes skill and imagination to execute and is usually made by a good artist, though perhaps not a great one. A forgery has its own value quite separate from the value of a fake. What I mean is that even after it has been unmasked a forgery carries some intrinsic value for a collector. I’d point you toward certain well-known individuals who collect forgeries and whose collections are enjoyed only in private. Such a collector will pay a substantial price for a forgery, much more than the inconsequential sum you paid for the Two Marys. Why do they collect forgeries? For one, they do not buy all forgeries, only those they recognise as exceptional, that is, a forgery in which the artist has painted something new, something that did not exist previously, and painted it in the style of a master who may or may not know about it. For another, I really must be going.”
Dismas remembered the Polaroid picture in Goody’s apartment, the intricate work she had done, the way she had inhabited Xavier’s style. And who had painted the Marys? Xavier had hinted but he had clarified nothing.
At no point in the conversation did Dismas mention that he had left his job and would be returning to India.
*
Fireflies appeared the week he was leaving, fat city fireflies lit up like ocean liners. He went for long walks and in the evening he would see them cruising the avenues. Some afternoons he started at the Bowery end of Spring Street, the Chinatown end with the lighting and signage and restaurant supply stores; from there he walked to West Street by the river. He liked Spring Street because it was short and manageable: you could go from one end to the other in twenty minutes. He walked past the boutiques and galleries, past the Fire Museum, past Balthazar’s red awning, past stolid cast-iron buildings and the modest James Brown House, which was not named after the singer and was loomed over if not cowed down by a giant glass structure; and for much of the walk he was accompanied by fireflies, pinpoints of yellow light that did not dance away when he approached. At Lahore Deli, a Pakistani cabbies’ hangout, he took a seat at a plastic-topped table and watched Hindi movie songs on television and ate kheema-roti. The kheema was covered in a deep layer of golden-brown oil. When he stepped out of the restaurant the fireflies were gone.
One night he carried his writing desk to the street. He placed it on the sidewalk against a tree and placed a chair in front it. He brought down a box of odds and ends and put on the desk. Then he returned to the storefront studio he’d occupied for two years. The view from the window did not alter whatever the season, a stretch of dirty sidewalk, cars and litter blowing on the road, a few silent pedestrians, and on the weekend young drunks and the chaos they loved. It was difficult to think of it as a street in a first-world city. He watched a couple stop by the tree. The man wore the straw cowboy hat fashionable that year, curled at the sides and dipping deeply at the brim. Without exc
hanging a word, he picked up the desk and the girl took the chair and they were on their way. The furniture had been on the sidewalk for less than twenty minutes. Next came a man walking a bicycle, which he leaned against a no-parking sign. He went to the box of household discards and opened a bottle of olive oil and took a whiff and returned it to the box. He read the label on a bottle of mango pickle and he examined a bathroom rug and a box of detergent and shower curtains, but he took only a bottle of Ayurvedic liver medicine, which he placed carefully in a pocket of his cargoes. Though it was late in the evening he put on his sunglasses, and he climbed on his bicycle and rode away. Then Dismas saw a tall figure in a thick Kashmiri shawl, a man who looked like a professor at a North Indian university. By then nothing was left of Dismas’s belongings except the box of discards. The professor took off his glasses to read the label on the bottle of pickle. He sniffed the contents. He examined nothing else but he took the box. He was seventy at least, tall and stooped and embarrassed.
Years later when describing the evening in the overly eloquent and sentimental style he favoured, Dismas wrote that he had been “overcome by the anxiety, the sadness, the grip of first-world poverty, the loneliness and lack of certitude, the hooded figures and blank winterbitten faces, the week of work and the waiting for the weekend, the misery of New York City, the misery we carried like birthrights, all of us who were adrift in America and aching for the world”.
BOOK THREE
Of What Use Is a Poem that Cannot Pick Up a Gun?
Saint Gandhi
of Porbunder; in darker South Africa,
saw the light when travelling by train;
wore only homespun;
gave up salt & sex; so tragic a
man, who split a nation
in two; befriended apocalypse;
died with the name of God on his lips;
shot by a man with God in his name.
Saint Arun
