The Book of Chocolate Saints

by Jeet Thayil

  “Shall we find some lunch?” he said. “The smell of burning flesh always gives me an appetite.”

  We walked into an alleyway. Buildings crowded round on all sides, the old wood houses whose façades were brown from years of smoke. We went into a small place with a shaded portico on a street of firewood merchants. A man behind a desk gestured for us to sit and we ordered tea and pakodas that a boy brought from a kitchen in the back. A woodcutter split and stacked logs in a rough pile against the wall of the alley outside. He wore a lungi and a T-shirt with a slogan: ‘Sorry I’ve not contacted you but I’ve become a secret agent’. He was small and tightly bunched, drinking whisky from a tea glass, and at each swig the sweat dripped from his face into the drink. He didn’t look much like a secret agent.

  Doss asked him how much wood he cut in a day.

  “Depends how many dead people

  come,” he said, and laughed.

  “How many will this pile of wood cremate?”

  The man put down the axe.

  “This pile? Maybe forty?”

  The man behind the counter said, “This is eight hundred kilos of wood, eight quintals. Fifty people, no problem.”

  They were bragging. The merchant grabbed a small bottle from a cupboard behind his desk and replenished his glass and the woodcutter also took a refill. I worked it out: eight hundred kilos for fifty bodies meant it took only sixteen kilos of wood to reduce a man to an urnful of ash.

  “First the body is washed in the Ganga,” the merchant said. “Then the butter and sandalwood powder must be bought. You can get it over there in the shop next to the cigarettewallah.”

  The woodcutter said, “Or you can bring it yourself. Cheaper.”

  The merchant said, “You put the butter and sandalwood on top of the body and a special agni below it.”

  The woodcutter gulped his whisky and said, “But the most important thing is the spirit.” He used the English word, spirit.

  The merchant laughed, “You put newspaper under the logs and light it and squirt the spirit all over to make the fire catch.”

  The woodcutter said, “Everything’s available on this same street. Spirit, kurta, agarbatti, talcum powder for a quick beauty treatment for your grandma.”

  And the merchant said, “Grandpa too. Men and women get the same treatment over here.”

  The woodcutter said, “Except in the fire.”

  “Yes,” Doss said. “Yes, yes.”

  “They burn differently when the fire takes them,” said the woodcutter, finishing his drink. He spat on the ground and picked up his axe.

  We listened to the sound of splintering wood as he lifted the axe and brought it down and steadily the pile of logs grew taller.

  Xavier went to where the woodcutter was working and offered the man a cigarette. He asked him something in a soft voice. The woodcutter hammered iron wedges into a piece of wood that he split with a single blow. His words acquired the rhythm of the axe.

  “The fire moves into the bones when the flesh turns into water and disappears in the flame. The chest-bones of men don’t burn, only the chest-bones of women. The spines of men will burn but not the spines of women. Only the chest-bones of the men and the spines of women remain.”

  When they gave us the bill Xavier insisted on picking it up. I offered to pay my share. I didn’t have much money and my offer may have been made half-heartedly but at least I offered. Doss didn’t even try. It was not that he was broke. He did not believe in paying. We walked along the ghats to the hotel and I realised I was feeling better thanks to the food. The morbid thoughts that assailed me earlier now had no hold on me. Doss talked all the way and when he wasn’t talking he was singing. Xavier was silent for the entire length of our walk. It’s a funny thing that their friendship took shape in Benares. They knew each other from Bombay, but the translation panel was the first time they had interacted professionally. In other words their literary association began with an argument. I always wondered how they got along. But maybe it’s like that thing people used to say, different and the same.

  At the hotel Xavier clapped me on the shoulder. He said, would you care to join us for a drink, dear boy? It was the first time I had heard him sounding cheerful. One of the Russians, not the drunk, the other one, he was there as well and the four of us went to the bar. This was a corner with a counter and a few bottles placed against the wall. Xavier asked if I was old enough to be served alcohol. I said I was eighteen, old enough to drive and serve in the Army, which meant I was old enough to kill someone in the name of my country; and though I wasn’t of legal age to drink, in a moral or logical universe I was certainly old enough. That is more than adequate for me, said Xavier, ordering whisky and beer. And for the first time that day, with a glass in his hand, he began to talk. I don’t remember all of it but I suppose I remember enough. I understood that he needed whisky to come alive. Until then he had been grouchy or sullen, the kind of guy who wouldn’t say two words when one would do. He’d say, hungry. Or, water. Now you couldn’t shut him up.

  He said, if you were to ask me why men and women burn differently I would likely say that it is because we are differently inclined and our differences cannot be resolved to our satisfaction, not by time and not in death. Time heals nothing. Those who say time heals and death resolves are speaking falsely or thoughtlessly or without the experience of loss. They are making up easy iterations that dream the dead, all the dead that ever died, packed in neat horizontal rows or stacked in pyramids of pyres that reach the sky, stacks so tall it takes all of one’s strength merely to ask, how can there be so many?

  He went on in this vein for a time. Then the talk turned to Rimbaud, as it does among poets of a certain age. There was a discussion as to whether his death was due to gangrene or cancer. Doss said cancer but he didn’t seem convinced. He had a book open on his lap and he was making notations in the margin and talking to himself the whole time. The Russian poet said he wanted to procure some of the local marijuana and Doss burst into a song about the colours of various intoxicants. The song compared bhang to charas and charas to ganja. It ended with a couplet that compared opium and alcohol:

  Afeem rang bhootiya,

  Sharab rang chootiya.

  The Russian poet said he was a disciple of Pushkin and a close reader of Tagore. This is when the conversation became a little heated, as I recall. The Russian, Nikolayev, said Tagore may not have been a great poet but he was undoubtedly a genius for there was a certain kind of clarity in his thought that illuminated his life and times. Doss or Xavier, I forget who, or maybe it was both, they were unnecessarily dismissive of Tagore. Xavier called him a professional mystic. He said it was his white beard and sadhu’s demeanour that had endeared him to Yeats, who was a sucker for all things mystical. Doss said Tagore was the first Indian poet to understand the importance of marketing one’s self and one’s image. He said Tagore’s true mastery was public relations. It gave me a bit of a shock to hear all this. I suppose it still does. It seemed to me a cold-hearted way to talk of one of the great figures in our literature. Whatever you may say about him he was the only Indian poet to win a Nobel.

  Xavier said he was tempted to stay in Benares, perhaps on the steps of Assi Ghat. He would grow his own beard to Tagorean length and resume his thwarted saintly destiny. He would give up art and focus on the real, on self-denial and vision, on fasting and mortification, on saying the ten thousand and one names of God until he forgot the meaning of language and no longer knew his own name. He would become Saint Francis of Assi or Brother Ass and he would speak his poems to the burning dead.

  This was some time after the publication of his second book, Saint Me, and I couldn’t tell if he was joking or if he was articulating a fantasy. We had all heard that he had writer’s block but only when it came to poetry. Only Doss had anything to say in response.

  “I have a better idea, Brother Ass,” he said.

  And that was when he came up with the idea of the anthology. He knew
how many poets, sixty or seventy, no more, and he knew how big the book would be, five hundred pages, with poems, essays, and drawings, edited by the two of them, Brother Ass and Brother Doss, and he had the title too: The Hung Realists: A Subaltern Manifesto.

  Philip Nikolayev, poet and editor, interviewed by Dismas Bambai at Ramanna Ashram, Rajouri Garden, New Delhi, October 2005

  Is that what he told you? Not true, absolutely off the mark! In fact it was I who was critical of Tagore! The Parsi boy was much too young to catch the nuance of the conversation. As far as I remember he sat glued to his seat and sipped his beer or whatever it was he was drinking. I remember he wore his hair in a Prince Valiant bob. Obviously he drank too much because he got the main points backward. I am a believer in and student of Bengali culture but I am able to maintain some distance from the kind of adulation that Tagore elicits. It is true that Doss and Xavier were critical to the point of rudeness but that’s a story for another day.

  It was 1984, a big year for me though I didn’t know it at the time. I was spending more and more time with the poet who would become my wife. At the time we were friends and nothing more. She was some years older than me and already famous in Russia. Six years later we would leave the country separately and soon the USSR would no longer exist. But I had little inkling of the future in 1984, the year of my first visit to India. I went to as many places as I could. Bengal, Bihar, Kerala, New Delhi, Benares, and in the last named city I discovered that an event grandly billed as the World Poetry Conference was currently in session. Of course I went and introduced myself and the organisers were kind enough to include me on the programme. I read some poems and I talked about Mandelshtam. After my lecture there was a question from someone in the audience. Why did Mandelshtam criticise Stalin? It was a young student from the Benares Hindu University. He seemed genuinely distressed that a poet would criticise Stalin. He was of the opinion that poets should not be reactionaries. These are the kind of questions you get in India. I said Mandelshtam criticised Stalin because he was a poet first and it was the poet’s job to ask the questions no one else had the courage to ask.

  After my reading I walked along the river to Assi Ghat where my hotel was situated. I saw oblong shadows under the skin of the water, moving shadows that rose in steps to the surface. I was subject then to an odd vision. I felt I was looking at myself looking at the water and I saw myself from a far distance and I did not know who I was. I remembered my name, my circumstance, my history, but I felt as if that particular name and face and history had no connection with me. It was an accident, nothing more than a random aggregate, and I, the true I, was separate from my body. I suppose I should mention that I was feeling a bit poorly. It was my first visit to Benares, a place with which I felt a profound connection. Yet I had spoken to nobody since my arrival. I felt as if nobody knew me or wanted to know me. They flocked to the other Russian at the festival who was famous all over the world. Me they ignored. So I was feeling sorry for myself. But then I walked into the hotel and was approached by one of the Indian poets, a well-known painter, though in my opinion the poetry is superior. He wanted to buy me a drink, he said, in recognition of the poetry of Mandelshtam and my own poems. And then he quoted from memory one of my Calcutta sonnets, a stanza that begins, “A million poets have lived here, small and big,” lines that embarrass me now, but not so much. We drank rum and water because in India the rum is good and the whisky terrible. We ate Indian Chinese, the cuisine they call Chinjabi, and then we recited poems from memory.

  That night I felt a kind of transference or transfusion or transmission. Trust me, I would never talk like this in Boston. In Boston I’m as American as a Smith & Wesson Saturday Night Special. It’s only in India and in Russia that I allow myself such liberties. Let me rephrase. I received a message that night from the vast partially charted forests of Indian poetry and it was only correct that it should happen in Benares. Where else can you find death, fear, and acceptance together in one place? I still felt the sting of separation from myself but now I knew what I was. I looked around me and I knew. I was one of a lost tribe of brothers and sisters marked by ink and drink, wanderers who find each other wherever in the world we may go.

  Aruna Dangle, social theorist and critic, interviewed by Dismas Bambai at Café Noz, Malabar Hill, Bombay, March 2005

  First of all I’m always happy to talk about the eighties. Most people tend to denigrate the music and hair and fashion because it makes them feel better about themselves and the desolate modernity in which they live. They don’t see that everything is circular. I take the longer wider view. You can do that when you are old. Baggy goes out, skinny comes in. Skinny goes out, curvy comes back. If you wait long enough everything comes back. I’m a sixty-two-year-old woman and I wear Hawaiian shirts and baggy jeans. I’ve been doing so for thirty years. Why change now? I still listen to ‘When Doves Cry’ and ‘Let’s Go Crazy’. The hell with it, I still play ‘Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go’ and ‘Footloose’ and ‘What’s Love Got to Do with It?’ Now that’s music, my friend. It makes you want to get up and shake your bees’ knees. It’s not trying to bludgeon you into submission. How can you listen to the new without hearing a soundtrack for the dungeon, music for the mean marquis while he dissipates the young and corrupts the innocent and scars the beautiful? Okay fine, let’s get to specifics.

  I came to see the anthology as a kind of hand-grenade. Those chokras lobbed it into the drawing room of the academy and everybody had to run for the exits, even the poets who were included had to run. It was a stun grenade. We had no idea! When Doss and Xavier asked for poems we didn’t know we would be part of a bloody palace revolution. I thought, right, another anthology, here we go again. I suppose I wasn’t paying attention. I suppose I should have known by the title, The Hung Realists: A Subaltern Manifesto. Of course, by the time you got to the introduction you knew exactly what was coming. You knew from the first para about the corrupted religious orthodoxy that determined our cultural lives and the idea that religious merit was nothing more than mere observance. Go to the temple or the mosque or the church and your duty was done and for the rest of the time you could be as immoral as you wished. It was fiery talk for a conservative god-fearing nation. The literary orthodoxy was most annoyed by the accusation that it had drawn up divisions between writers of different castes that were as rigid as the divisions between men and animals. Brahmin poets had arrogated to themselves the position of gods on earth and passed their privileges on to their descendants as a matter of course. After centuries of such abuse our poetry was crippled and mute. It had been bled unto death. People have been saying similar things since 1850 at least, when the Marathi social reformers began to publish their views in privately circulated journals. But nobody had said such things in the context of our literature.

  They positioned themselves those two. They thought it through and the end result was a grenade, I say. They even looked alike with the long hair and black kurtas and black jeans – as if they were in uniform. A Dalit and a Christian, brandishing an anthology everyone wanted to be in, an anthology that excluded the dozen or so names on which the upper-caste anthologists had always relied. Adil Jussawalla, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Keki Daruwalla, R. Parthasarathy, A. K. Ramanujan, Dom Moraes, Nissim Ezekiel, Arun Kolatkar, Vikram Seth, Jayanta Mahapatra, K. D. Katrak, Gieve Patel – they were all out. Only Imtiaz Dharker and Eunice de Souza from that lot were included and I’ll tell you why. Instead of picking the usual names these crazy fellows packed their book with poets who had been overlooked, the untranslated and untranslatable. More important, at least for me, they included women. Not that these choices were unjustified. They were completely justified. I suspect that gender may have been a guiding principle and why not? For how long had we been excluded for reasons of gender, women poets from all over the subcontinent, from all over the world? I say women poets not poetesses because I prefer not to use the detestable words. Eunice and Imtiaz were included because they were real poets – tha
t goes without saying – but also because they had always seemed to be temporary members of the other club. Besides, Narayan considered Imtiaz a friend and that’s one thing in favour of those two. They believed in their friends. When Doss was poor and homeless she helped him out. She published him and paid him. She introduced him to the poets and expected them to treat him as an equal. He never forgot. Xavier also liked her, and Eunice, but for other reasons. I always thought the Mehrotra headnote in which he referred to Ezekiel as endlessly or hopelessly or perennially priapic applied just as well to Xavier.

  Between those two my sympathies were with Narayan Doss as you can see. Xavier is a man deserving of no sympathy. I think his silence was a mask and in truth he had no fellow feeling. Empathy and charm were beyond him and this was especially noticeable when he and Narayan were together. Narayan was charming, effortlessly charming, and Xavier was effortlessly unfriendly. Yes, quote me on that.

  Sahej Singh Rana, trustee of the Sikh Museum, interviewed by Dismas Bambai on a bench on Platform Two, Churchgate Station, Bombay, March 2005

  It was the last day of October 1985, one year after the assassination of Indira Gandhi, one year after the state helped murder more than three thousand Sikh women, children, and men in the nation’s capital. This is another way of saying that it was the first anniversary of the worst time in our history. No, not true, one of the worst times in our history, because there were others. Let’s not forget 1947 and 1992 and 2002, the days of blood and feasting, families murdered in their homes because of faith or lack of faith.