The Book of Chocolate Saints

by Jeet Thayil

  Before I left he took me to a room off the balcony where he had stacked some of his more recent canvases. It was around the time of his Kanheri Cave series. Do you remember the five-line stanzas painted on colour field caves? I remarked on one in particular, Kanheri Caves No. 9; Black, Blue, Black, because there was no black or blue in it, only purples and reds and anyway it was nothing like a cave. He pointed to a smear of crimson at the centre of the painting. The stupa, he said.

  “Like a red phallus in a purple yoni,” I said.

  “Caves are about sex. But sex is not the point.”

  I admitted that I had never been to Kanheri and he suggested I make a trip if only to get a sense of the destruction wrought on a first-century monastery.

  “Look for the delicate defacements,” he said. “Be mindful of the dexterity it took to cut off the tiny noses and breasts, quick careful work with the tip of a sword.”

  Suddenly I heard a woman’s voice shouting in Hindi. The voice came from somewhere close, the next room perhaps. Xavier excused himself and I heard him speaking to someone in an undertone. Then I heard the woman’s voice again and her words were absolutely clear and I felt on my skin the words she said.

  “Oh Newton, how do you keep going from day to day? Why don’t you give up?”

  Again Xavier spoke in a barely audible voice.

  And again the woman spoke, her voice louder. “What? What will you do? You know you’ll never leave me.”

  When Xavier came back I could tell he wanted to be alone. Soon the clamour started again from the next room. She was shouting at the downstairs neighbours because they had left garbage in the stairwell, or at least that was what I understood from the little I heard. I took Xavier’s hand and wished him well with the cave series. I had wanted to ask about the poetry. Was it true he had stopped writing? But the major domo appeared out of nowhere to show me to the door.

  On the bus back to Chowpatty I didn’t feel like sitting on the upper deck. I got off at my stop and went directly to my room and tried to sleep. Paratyphoid is a strangely proprietorial ailment. You become detached from the functioning of the body. You are fatigued but the fatigue belongs to someone else. You feel as if you are not body but mind. Today, so many years later, I still associate with Bombay the feeling of physical detachment and separation.

  I waited a few days until I felt better. Then I packed water and a bag of nuts and a couple of boiled eggs and took a bus to Grant Road. From there I boarded a local train to Borivali Station and took a cab to the national park. When I got to the entrance of the caves I had to sit down. The climb looked exhausting and I was already tired. I peeled an egg and realised I had forgotten to bring salt and pepper. I chewed slowly and drank some water and then I started to climb. I counted the steps and each time I came to fifteen I took a short rest. There were fifty-two in total. At the top I bought a ticket and walked past a gauntlet of vendors, women selling bruised fruit out of baskets, bottled water, packaged peanuts, and uncovered cooked food. Everywhere in the caves I would find the results of their venture – plastic bags, empty wrappers and bottles, layers of rubbish like alluvial deposits.

  I had been thinking about the first time I saw Xavier’s illustrated poem ‘Kanheri Caves, No. 9’ in a literary magazine run by a Russian poet I know, a friend and rival who lives in Brooklyn. I remembered the disembodied genitals in the picture and the stanza embedded in it that began with the lines, “Giant Buddhas wait their crash, / The stone worn smooth as flesh.” Caves are about sex of course, he was right about that, but at Kanheri this is both true and false. Kanheri is about the expression of sex and the denial of it. You only had to look at the voluptuous wall friezes of men and women with noses and breasts lopped off. Everywhere in the caves were male and female embodiments of early earthy Buddhism. Some of the figures were so tiny it would need a certain delicacy of touch and, yes, a certain dexterity to cut off the tiny noses and breasts. Every figure in every cave, even the third and central cave with its echoing chamber of stone and towering three-storey Bamiyan-like guardian figures – one on either side, the lineaments distinctly Greek – even these had body parts missing. The invaders had gone from one joyous human figure to the next and worked with the tip of their swords, as Xavier had said. And what had this painstaking work achieved? The missing parts made the sensuality of the figures more rather than less vigorous: it made the thought of sex inescapable. As a viewer I was as affected as the defacers had been. Affected, afflicted, whatever it was, I felt like a defacement addict visiting beautiful amputations. Were they everywhere in India, I wondered, these mutilated figures? Was it similar to learning a new word? Once you saw it somewhere you saw it everywhere.

  Sex emanated from the mutilated cave figures and entered the visitors, the Indian tourists who were uninterested in the site and ignorant of its meaning, who lounged against the wall and gazed at each other or blankly into the distance. Small armies of monkeys loped around them, expert foragers who knew how to intimidate and steal. Near the central cave two women in bright fitted salvaars sat on a low wall. The taller one brushed her hair. They were time-passing, grooming, taking their ease at an ancient cave formation and watching the monkeys. A large male, his erection sharp against his fur, dipped a lazy finger into a smaller female and pulled out a sticky white rope of fluid that he touched to his tongue. Then he was into her from the back and done in a few quick strokes. The women watched expressionlessly, without embarrassment, and the one who brushed her hair, whose gaze was direct and unnerving, for a moment or for two moments moved her hand in the exact rhythm of the male monkey’s denuded buttocks as he pumped disinterestedly, briefly, into his partner.

  As I made my way back to South Bombay I knew I was ready to leave the city. I missed my books, my work, my wife. I missed my life. There’s nothing more to tell. That was the last I saw of Xavier. I returned to Boston and finished the book I was working on. We had a baby. I became a householder. From time to time if I felt nostalgic for that impossible country I dipped into the subaltern anthology. It always cured me of any lingering false sentiment.

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

  Newton’s version was different to mine. The last thing he seemed to be concerned about was veracity. Reading it now, I see what he was trying to do. He wanted to tease out a set of private obsessions and use fiction to tell the truth. I think he had a compulsion also to be entertaining, or to not be dull. He insisted on calling the interview a collaboration, which I don’t think it was. And he insisted on sharing the byline, which was generous of him and misleading. Here’s the full transcript or whatever you want to call it:

  Q: Shall we begin?

  A: How did you find me?

  Q: Not very well by the looks of it. Do you mind if I use a machine?

  A: You are already using a machine. How did you find me?

  Q: Tracked you down.

  Q: Let’s talk about the woman. Tell me about the first time you met her. Tell me about the … room.

  A: Always the same room on the first floor of a numbered lodge on Shuklaji Street. She is standing in front of a mirror dabbing at her face with a hankie. I note that it is a clean embroidered hankie and the streetlights have just come on.

  Q: What else is she doing?

  A: She is not looking at me. She puts her handbag on the windowsill. The handbag is one of those cheap plastic jobs, so cheap it looks like imitation plastic. I know what’s inside because I take a look when she goes into the bathroom. Item one: a second hankie, also cheap. Item two: a pair of bus tickets. Item three: bright red nail paint. Item four: lipstick of the same shade. Oh, also a box of Ship matches and two cigarettes, make them Gold Flakes. You’ve got to understand that she matches things in the most vulgar way. Today it is red, a red plastic comb in the hair, red slippers, red lipstick and nails. She thinks she is being fashionable. She is not. She is being a Bombay whore. No, that’s not good enough. She is bei
ng a Shuklaji Street whore or a Falkland Road whore or a Kamathipura whore.

  Q: Right. Right. What is she wearing?

  A: Peach coloured panties, a bruised peach frayed at the edges and much the worse for wear. ‘SWEETY’ is embroidered in black thread on the left just above the thigh. Add a white bra. Preferably the incomparable Sona brand with the medical straps and stiff pointy cups and multiple rusted hooks at the back. The important thing is that she is embarrassed about the underwear. She has no idea how desirable ugliness can be.

  Q: Is this a turning point of some sort, even if it’s a bit ambivalent?

  A: Nothing if not ambivalent. Put that down instead of staring at me with your microphone. Put it down as my epitaph. Of course it is a turning point.

  Q: Why?

  A: This is when I understand what I am feeling. I love and I long to suffer.

  Q: Is that all she’s wearing, underwear and a blouse?

  A: No, no. She puts a petticoat on. She smiles at me as she ties the cord. She says, what are you looking at? Never seen a girl dress? And then it begins. She picks up the sari.

  Q: What colour is it?

  A: Changeful like thought or water. Conceals more than it reveals and reveals more than it conceals. She could be bare-breasted and bare-bottomed and you wouldn’t know, such are its voluminous, luminous hiding-places. The colour doesn’t matter.

  Q: Can you describe it?

  A: A shiny synthetic sort of turquoise. Awful really. She tucks in one end and the rest is a bright puddle on the floor. She is twisting around to look at herself. The fabric follows like a dog. She does not look at me.

  Q: Is she being coy?

  A: Certainly not. She couldn’t be bothered.

  Q: What are you doing?

  A: Sitting on the bed with a book in my hand.

  Q: Which book?

  A: Who knows? The Bible, maybe, or some detective with a drinking problem, or the biography of a dead Englishman. What difference does it make? A book she bought from the raddiwallah. She is teaching herself to read English.

  Q: Could we talk about your book?

  A: Which one?

  Q: The first, Songs for the Tin-Eared, and the award.

  A: What about it?

  Q: There’s a description of Holi repeated throughout: “Tell about the game you play / O toreador, you skintight tease / tell how you feint & sway / the image that lies at ease / down, a dream in friendly dust / as chalk outlines your silhouette.”

  A: That was a long time ago.

  Q: But aren’t you contradicting your stated Hung Realist position regarding the modernist’s floating identity and the cultural placement of Indian iconography?

  A: I try not to think. I prefer to drink.

  Q: Are you a plagiarist?

  A: Who isn’t? Or to put it another way, wouldn’t you? Which itself is a plagiarism. I told my friend Tom that good writers steal and bad writers borrow. He stole it immediately. Everybody is a plagiarist.

  Q: What is she doing now?

  A: Tying tight a white cotton cord and hooking the sari into her petticoat.

  Q: Tell me about priorities.

  A: Priorities are subject to circumstance. They are rearranged according to the critical faculty.

  Q: What happens when priorities are rearranged by the critical faculty?

  A: Madness is a rearrangement of priorities.

  Q: What about obsession?

  A: What about obsession?

  Q: Do you think you are obsessed?

  A: If I thought I was obsessed I wouldn’t be, would I? I know what you’re getting at.

  Q: What is obsession?

  A: The hair in the reel, the milky drop oozing out of the single eye and so on. I shall tell you what obsession is, the name of a perfume.

  Q: Do you want to take a break?

  A: No, do you?

  Q: What’s she like?

  A: She’s my favourite whore.

  Q: Jealousy?

  A: Of course.

  Q: You said, “Life imitates Hindi movies,” but you also said, “In the word lies the seed that is treason to the flesh.”

  A: Mumble. Mumble. Mumble.

  Q: May I ask why you drink so much?

  A: Such a question, useless and terrifying.

  Q: You mean there’s no reason why you drink so many vodkas and beer chasers?

  A: Yes, there’s a reason. Someone has to do it. Someone has to drink as much as can be drunk.

  Q: Do you have to drink as much as can be drunk every time you drink?

  A: I have to.

  Q: Why do you have to?

  A: It’s better than being a banker or a chartered accountant or a chime lesser.

  Q: Sorry?

  A: A chile Melissa.

  Q: Child molester! Right!

  A: It’s the only possible act in a world where all action has been stripped of meaning.

  Q: Would you like to comment on the recent criticism of your work as “prodigious feats of twisted sexuality”?

  A: All non-adult behaviour is labelled childish by the simple-minded. If you are tagged as a child prodigy every thing you do will be seen as prodigious. Speaking of which, although I have reached my prodigious capacity I do believe I shall have another drink.

  Q: Do you mind that we’re sticking so rigidly to the Q&A format?

  A: I mind only the secret life of colours.

  Q: The streetlights were on.

  A: Her eyes – the cupboards of her soul.

  Q: She left at dawn.

  A: All she took was rainy day money.

  Q: No bodies abroad.

  A: I remember …

  Q: Nothing.

  A: … splattered on the wall and across the dresser there was indeed …

  Q: Nothing.

  A: Her secret colours.

  Q: No bodies abroad.

  A: I let her go.

  Q: She left at dawn.

  A: I remember …

  Q: The streetlights were on.

  A: I remember …

  Q: What do you remember?

  A: Dimples.

  Q: Are you comfortable?

  A: Are you an imbecile?

  Q: How does she look?

  A: Bored.

  Q: What is she doing?

  A: Walking away from the mirror and looking over her shoulder. She wants to get the fall of the sari right and tuck the bra straps out of sight.

  Q: Black bra?

  A: No! I told you, white with conical cups. A sense of the hospital, of something old-fashioned.

  Q: Old-fashioned?

  A: Unyielding, uncomfortable, too wide in the middle.

  Q: How does it look?

  A: Beautiful.

  Manoj Patel, artist, member of Progressive Autists Group, interviewed by Dismas Bambai at Pocket 17, Artists’ Colony, New Delhi, November 2005

  I count myself as one of the few friends he had among the artists. We started around the same time. Once we painted together in a gallery. Ten-foot canvas in one hour and ten minutes and we went home with sixty thousand in cash. Each. This was in the eighties when sixty K was not bad at all for an hour’s work, but Newton said we’d been cheated. He said it was robbery. I think he was short of cash. He wouldn’t have said such a thing otherwise. He didn’t know what to do with money, other than to spend it.

  I knew he had a separate life in poetry but I didn’t know much about it. Of course I heard about the prize and I remember the headlines when he protested the annexation of Goa and announced that he was a British citizen. You see, I’m a Gujarati speaker. I had to teach myself English by watching television. Even now English is not my most fluent language. Better I don’t talk about poetry, but I can talk about the art and I can tell you something about the kind of man he was. His strategy from the first was to make enemies not friends. He wasn’t interested in being liked. For some reason he considered me a friend or he thought of me as someone who was not an enemy. I don’t know why.

  I wan
t to talk about the night of Ram Khanna’s party. Xavier happened to be in town and I asked if he wanted to come. He thought about it for a long time, long time, weighed it over as if it was the most important decision of the year, and then he started to ask a lot of questions. How many people would be there? What kind of guests, from the art world or the real world? Would there be dinner? I said, yes there would be dinner and there would be a lot of people. He thought about it some more. Then he wanted to know how much talking he would have to do. I told him he didn’t have to talk if he didn’t feel like. He said, not at all? I said, no, not at all. Finally he consented as if he was doing me a personal favour and I called for a taxi. I didn’t want to drive because I knew some moderate to heavy drinking would be done that night. Ram Khanna lived in one of those old Delhi houses with a lawn and a driveway, landscaped bushes in the shape of dinosaurs and pterodactyls, the whole Lutyens thing. It was a cold night, Delhi in January, and there were wood fires in braziers lining the way to the front entrance. I saw Ram Khanna and his wife standing at the front door and greeting guests with folded hands. Then I noticed the strangest thing. When he saw Xavier, Ram Khanna’s face collapsed into lines and caverns. He looked very old. He clenched his teeth and said something I couldn’t hear. Of course he regained control in a few seconds and remembered his role as host and greeted Xavier in a polite way. I should mention also that they knew each other’s work but it was the first time they were meeting.