The Book of Chocolate Saints

by Jeet Thayil

  31 October 1985. A group of us had gathered to remember that miserable day. We were melancholic Sikhs transplanted to Bombay from Delhi. Some of us were born here because our parents or grandparents could no longer bear to live next to friends and neighbours who had turned on us in the moment of our need. They say some things must be forgiven if they cannot be forgotten. But there are things that can never be forgiven.

  We gathered at Café Britannia in the Fort area and had a dismal meal. We were sitting around with our milk teas when Xavier came in, followed moments later by Doss who had stopped to pick up whisky. They were the only ones there who were not Sikhs and this matters a lot. For them it was a question of solidarity among poets, though I hardly thought of myself as a poet in those days. Also it was an act of solidarity among those who did not belong to the overclass. I believe they were already thinking in terms of the subaltern manifesto.

  From Britannia some of us went to Ankur, a divey permit room where the poet Manohar Shetty was tending bar. This was before his Goa avatar, back when he’d published just one book, A Guarded Space. Or it might have been Guarded Space without the article, I’m not sure any more. To tell you the truth I remember the title because I thought it was an accurate description of the city at the time: a safe space for all faiths, for women, for the homeless, for refugees. In less than a decade that would change but we didn’t know it then. It was strange to think that a poet who had been published by Newground, one of the hot presses of the time, was working in a bar. The thing is he was a Shetty and the bar and restaurant was part of the family business. He wasn’t exactly a hired hand.

  He gave us a booth to ourselves and joined us and because of the nature of the remembrance by then the conversation had turned to brutality and blood lust. As I remember Xavier was silent during this, though he’d drunk as much whisky as anyone. Shetty preferred feni, in my opinion the stinkiest drink in the world, the kind of drink that exits through your pores and makes a man smell like a distillery. All of a sudden two bottles of Launi cashew feni appeared on the table. I don’t know where he’d sourced it or why he decided to share it with us, but we each had a shot followed by sips of whisky. This is not the best mix in the world, and meanwhile the conversation or argument was still raging. After a few hours Xavier stood up holding a shot glass with both hands as if he was about to bless us or consecrate the drink or sprinkle it on the gathering like holy water.

  “I would like to toast the Indians,” he said, “the most bloodthirsty of all races on this sad and benighted,” and he didn’t finish because he fell headlong into a table thick with bottles and glasses and plates. There was a big sound of breaking, the sound of heavy table glass shattering and more delicate cut and blown glass smashing into the floor tiles, and in the midst of it all the poet Xavier moved his two arms as if he was swimming on a broken sea of feni and whisky, and by some miracle nobody was hurt, not even Xavier.

  After this the party drew to a close and everybody dispersed. I found myself walking with Xavier and Doss toward Churchgate Station. I don’t know where my friends had disappeared but they were gone, vanished into the moisture of the city in October. Doss asked if I was a writer. No, I replied. I didn’t have that luxury although I had written a memoir that was looking for a publisher. What was it called, he asked. My 1984, I replied. He asked if I wrote poetry. I said I had started as a poet and published a slim book that was no longer in print. None of our books are in print, Doss replied, this is what it means to be an Indian poet. All this while Xavier was a little ahead of us, walking or staggering with the bowlegged gait of a sailor. I told Doss what I had been thinking about during the conversation at Ankur. For whatever reason I had not felt like articulating it then. Blood lust, I told him, was something only humans enjoyed. It was a pleasure, I said, like anger. No other animal killed for the pleasure of killing, No other animal let the wash of blood go to its head in such a way that it could only be assuaged with more blood. I said this and when I looked around I noticed Xavier had disappeared. Where did he go, I asked Doss. Oh, X has a tendency to disappear when he’s drunk, he said. He’s not one for goodbyes. When we got to Churchgate we found we’d missed the last train, which in those days left at a little past midnight. I was living near Opera House and I knew I could walk or take a taxi home. Doss had to go up to Grant Road. I assumed he was living in Tardeo or up near Chowpatty Beach around Wilson College. I told him I could give him a lift up to Marine Lines or Charni Road, but he said he would stay right there and he pointed to a bench on platform two, this bench, the last on the platform. It was dark and he would be able to sleep until the first train arrived at five. He said he liked the bench, that he would use his shoulder bag as a pillow, that it wouldn’t be the first time he had spent the night on platform two.

  A year later or maybe two years later I read a poem in the Sahitya Akademi newsletter. It was titled ‘31 October 1985’, and in it he told a coded version of the events of the night, coded but faithful, as I recall. After I left he had fallen asleep and woken up when the first train trundled in at five. He opened his eyes and realised he could not see. His first thought was that he had gone blind, or partially blind, because he could see movement and shape without definition. Was this the meaning of blind drunk? He feared the cashew feni had been adulterated with methyl alcohol and had destroyed his eyesight. And then he realised that he could see after all, that someone had stolen the spectacles off his face as he lay passed out on the bench. The glasses were a foreign make worth a hundred rupees on the street. The poem ended with a list of the stations from Churchgate to Bandra on the Western Line. The narrator was a thinly disguised version of Doss. He disdained buses and refused to take taxis if he could help it. He’d driven a taxi once and he would never willingly sit in one again. It was all about the trains for him, the times, the Western Line versus the Harbour Line, the names of the stations like mantras, or madeleines, and each assigned a musical note:

  Churchgate | Sa

  Marine Lines | Re

  Charni Road | Ga

  Grant Road | Ma

  Bombay Central | Pa

  Matunga | Ta

  Mahim | Ni

  Bandra | Sa

  Churchgate and Bandra, according to this system, were the same note occurring on different octaves. The poem also assigned a sea to each station:

  Churchgate | Red Sea

  Marine Lines | Adriatic Sea

  Charni Road | Mediterranean Sea

  Grant Road | Black Sea

  Bombay Central | Caspian Sea

  Matunga | Persian Gulf

  Mahim | Arabian Sea

  Bandra | Red Sea

  Later, as we know, the poem became one of the founding tenets of the Hung Realist movement and it came to be permanently associated with the Bombay poets. The reason I brought you here is because this is the bench on which he died eighteen years later, just as his poems were being studied by a new generation of writers. This is the bench he liked to sleep on, this is the platform he knew best, this is the name that begins the list of Western Railway stations in his poem. The corrugated roof up there must have been one of the last views of his life. I thought you’d like to see it.

  Farzana Amanella Kaur, arts activist, interviewed by Dismas Bambai in Lado Sarai, New Delhi, October 2005

  I became a kind of rakhi sister to those boys. I always had a job, which meant I always had a bit of cash. Through most of the eighties I was working as a liaison at the British embassy in Bombay. It led to the usual jokes. Are you a spy, Farzana Amanella? What does a liaison do, Farzana Amanella Didi, other than liaise? Do you tell them what we say and do and think and drink? In that case could you give them a message from us, Farzana Amanella, tell them the Raj is over and they can fuck off back to Blighty. And before they fuck off how about an apology from the Gateway of India for the two hundred years of plunder and famine? I gave it right back. I had to. It was the only way you won any respect from those rascals. I could tell you the answer, boys, I said, but t
hen I’d have to leave you floating face down in the Backbay. Another time I said, even if I were a spy, which I can never admit, do you think MI5 is interested in what poets think?

  I knew Lula from the movies and I met her when she hosted a panel for a British Council event and asked for an assistant. Someone suggested my name and I went over to her place a couple of times. Later when she started to edit Turnkey, possibly the shortest-lived literary magazine in the history of short-lived literary magazines, she asked if I would help and I said yes. Lula was the managing editor, not that she did much managing. Mostly she was photographed at the offices in one of her beautiful saris and she would perch elegantly on an armchair or a desk. She was the face that would launch a thousand sponsorships. I was supposed to help with correspondence and press. It was easy work. I turned up for a few hours on Saturday and that was that. It wasn’t because I needed the money. I was a devotee and she recognised that right away. She was the same.

  I asked her once if she wrote poetry.

  She said, darling, pottery? No, thank god. I’m a reader not a writer and it is a far far happier place, if you ask me. Don’t you wonder why these poor souls do it? There isn’t a sou in it and hardly any fame. Or there is a bit of fame but only when you’re too old to enjoy it. And it’s hard work, sweetheart, seventy drafts for a tiny page of print and for what? What do they get other than a bit of love from the likes of you and me? Is that the only reason they do it, do you think? For our love?

  On Saturday Lula was in the midst of preparing one of her elaborate French meals with the linen and cutlery and individual servings, everything except a nice wine for each course. Vodka was the drink in that house and by then it was the only thing she and Xavier had in common, Indian voddy just this side of rotgut. We sat in the living room and every once in a while she’d toddle off to the kitchen – she never drank in company, she was too much of a lady – where she’d down her voddy and come back loopier and happier. And while in the kitchen she’d also supervise Newton’s favourite bacon-wrapped prawns or scallops in cream or beef stew in red wine, always preceded by a green salad and always followed with dessert.

  My desk was on the enclosed gallery facing the garden. She toddled in wearing that famous smile that was a little blurry at the edges and getting blurrier. She said, Farzana, darling, I’ve had the best idea. We have a hole in the magazine this month, sweetheart, so I used the old noggin and came up with a deliciously naughty notion. Why don’t you interview Newton? I said, me? I might have blushed. But I’ve never interviewed anyone, I told her. Darling, Lula said, it isn’t like pottery. Anyone can write up an interview. Besides, once Newton gets going you can’t shut him up.

  That’s how the interview took place. The final version had little to do with my original questions. He insisted on writing it himself and said he wouldn’t agree to it otherwise. Nothing came of it. Turnkey’s proprietor made Lula drop the whole idea. He said there was too much sex in it. As the publisher he would be charged with obscenity and there would be a lengthy court experience. I have possibly the only existing copy. Xavier gave it to me and forgot about it. For the record the questions about the woman and the sari and so on aren’t mine. He added most of it later. It wasn’t an interview as much as a self-interview, a way of fleshing out his old obsessions. That was the only reason he agreed.

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

  I went back to India in 1990. I flew to Bombay via Calcutta and Delhi. From there I thought I’d go to Madras or Cochin but it never happened. I came down with a fever, a stomach bug I picked up on my travels, and a doctor diagnosed it as paratyphoid. I told him I’d never heard of it. What, I asked, is paratyphoid? He fixed me with a look and wrote out a prescription. I was staying at the Sea Face Guest House, a dump near Wilson College. There were no amenities, no minibar, no room service, not even a chair, but it was cheap and close to everything. And it was only going to be for a night or two, I thought. Of course not! The dump became home. I stayed for months.

  The Sea Face logo was a kind of seaside fantasy, the ‘S’ with its elaborate curlicues and tropical colours wedged between air-conditioning ducts and exposed wiring. It made me laugh. Sometimes I didn’t laugh, I smiled in a bitter self-deprecating way. The Sea Face Guest House. Even now the name is enough to bring forth a paratyphoidal churning in my bowels. It was within spitting distance of Chowpatty Beach, which was not a beach for swimming. You sit on the sand and stare at the water and I did a lot of that in my first few weeks in Bombay. Every evening I would have a low fever but by morning I’d be well enough to go out for a small walk.

  I spoke only Urdu. This gives you some strange looks from Bombaywallahs who speak only Bombay Hindi. Urdu is comparatively classy and it might even be considered elitist. I smoked charas at an adda near the temple in Babulnath and I spoke Urdu. I found the charas medicinally helpful in that it settled my stomach and made me feel better generally. First thing in the morning I went to the temple of Babulnath and smoked a chillum and then I went back to the guesthouse to rest. I napped or worked and sat on the beach with a book for an hour or two. Once I started to feel better I’d go back to the temple at night for a last chillum. Even a newcomer to the city would know that it wasn’t the best charas, hard as stone and that smell of boot polish. Classic Bombay black! But it helped me sleep and in a week or two I found I was regaining my strength. I’d go to Babulnath and sit and listen to the bhajans, and one day, purely as an exercise, I started to transcribe the melodies. I found it was a calming thing to do, because I thought about nothing except the music. Sometimes it seemed to me that I was trying to transcribe shadows or the notes between the notes. And it seemed to me that this was a pertinent quest for a Russian-American poet in Bombay. To be a shade, a shadow man in search of the shadow notes of typhoid bhajans. I searched and did not find and after a while I felt I was turning Indian. This is what it means to be Indian, I thought. You are forever in search and the search becomes its own reward. First I gave away my trousers and switched to pyjamas. Then I took to wearing a dhoti, the only type of garment that was comfortable in that humidity. And I realised I was wrong: after all, I wasn’t turning Indian, I was turning into a Bombaywallah.

  After two weeks of living like one of the sadhus of Babulnath I began to feel almost normal. I telephoned Xavier. It’s Philip Nikolayev, I said, do you remember me? The Russian poet! That was his immediate response. He welcomed me to Bombay. He said the anthology we had discussed all those years earlier had been published at last. I said I already knew that because he had mailed a copy to me in Boston. Forgive me, he said, my memory isn’t what it used to be. He said it was something about the water in Indian taps. The river that supplied the water must not be the Ganga but the Lethe. This was the true cause of our collective amnesia, he said. Then he laughed and said he was living in Colaba. He invited me to visit him the next evening.

  I took a number 123, the red double-decker BEST bus that ran all the way from Chowpatty to Navy Nagar. I sat on the top deck with my feet on the big open window in front and I enjoyed the breeze blowing in from the Arabian Sea. From there you watch the lights of Marine Drive on your right and the water-stained art deco buildings on your left. The night is warm and from your position on top of the bus you are willing to concede that the Queen’s Necklace may be a cloying colonial nickname for that stretch of sea-facing road but it is not entirely inaccurate as a visual or poetic marker. A Russian poet in India may even burst into song as he watches the waterfront lights and the hundreds of people going about their business. He might feel a sense of hopeful oneness and sing a few lines from ‘Awara’ or ‘Pyar Hua Ikarar Hua’ or some other Raj Kapoor classic. He might even forget his illness for a few moments. You never get an experience like that in a car, however nice your car might be and however well your chauffeur may drive. On the top deck of a Bombay BEST for the price of a two-rupee bus ticket you will be rewarded w
ith a sense of accidental luck.

  I found the address without much trouble. It was off Electric House on the second floor of an old redbrick building called Sargent House, the last building at the other end of Allana Marg. The elevator was a cage-like antique that rattled and shook all the way up. I was shown in by a thuggish fellow, some kind of major domo, well-spoken English but cagey. Not the kind of guy who reassured a visitor. He told me where to sit and brought me a glass of water and wanted to know all about me. What was my name? Was I Christian? Which country was I travelling from? How long would I be in Bombay? Was I staying for dinner? He was unshaven and broad of face and he had a way of licking his chops after asking a question. I never saw any sign of Xavier or his wife although every once in a while I heard shouting from inside the apartment. The major domo, the old Bombay apartment, the shouting from the other room, the fact that Xavier was nowhere to be seen, all of it struck me intensely because I was still a bit sick. I felt as if I had walked into an Indian version of a gothic horror tale and in the next room was Jane Eyre grown old and angry.

  I waited but the major domo made no move to find Xavier. Instead he sat on the couch and asked all kinds of questions, as if it was he I had come to meet. After about forty-five minutes of this I gave up. I left and had tea at an Irani restaurant before taking the 123 back to Sea Face Guest House. There was a phone on the counter of the restaurant and on a whim I asked the proprietor if I could use it. He said yes in British-accented English, an accent I hear only in India. It always amuses and dismays me at the same time. I thanked the proprietor and dialled Xavier’s number. The major domo answered and I refused to hang up. After some time Xavier came to the phone and apologised. He had been asleep and if I didn’t mind would I please come back? I paid for the tea and the phone call and walked down Colaba Causeway and turned left on Allana Marg. The major domo let me in again and I found Xavier on the couch where the major domo had been sitting just moments earlier. There was no sign of his wife, an actress who had worked in some of the better Indian movies. Then Xavier asked if I would care to join him for dinner. We talked about Narayan Doss and his disappearance from the Bombay scene. I had heard it was because of alcohol but Xavier would neither confirm nor deny this. We talked about Benares, my travels, Thom Gunn and the poetry of Aids, why Elizabeth Jennings had been forgotten, Elizabeth Jennings’s considerable bust-size, the sodomites of Cambridge and the demonstrable connection between homosexuality and espionage. Dinner was pork and chicken, heavy food, especially since I’d been on a mostly vegetarian diet. By now exhaustion was beginning to creep up on me and I said I better go back to Wilson College. I explained that I hadn’t been well for some time.