by Jeet Thayil
I had a shower and switched on all the lights. I found English pop from the eighties and turned it up loud. I like getting dressed to music. I would have been happy to be alone but Sam was getting up and the mornings were difficult for him, not that the evenings were better. (Sam. What can I tell you about Sam? Let’s just say he was in analysis too. We were two analysands living together in perfect disharmony.) I washed my face with an alkali soap and when I looked up Sam was leaning against the doorway with his milk tea.
“I dreamt someone was teaching me patience in a house that was on fire,” I told him, because I like to tell someone my dreams. “It wasn’t my stepfather. It was a man in white kurta-pyjamas, a man I dream about sometimes. I see him with my mother but I never see his face. The house was on fire and he told me to sit quietly in my chair. Just sit, he said, sit with your knees together and don’t do a thing. This was when I knew he was not my stepfather. How did I know? My stepfather would never say those words to me. Sit with your knees together. The man in my dream shut the doors and windows and the room filled with smoke but he wouldn’t let me get up. Don’t move, he said. You must learn to be patient. If you don’t know how to be patient you don’t know anything in this world.”
Don’t get me wrong, I felt quite safe in the dream. If you tell a child everything’s going to be fine she’ll believe you. Children want to believe. For example, I always believed my mother however stupid her lies. I believed her but I didn’t trust her.
The night before I’d been lying in bed looking at a men’s magazine when the phone rang. I remember there was a photo of an Indian or Pakistani starlet on the cover, nude but for a bar code on her navel. And the phone rang and Sam said, go on, answer it or she’ll keep ringing. I said I couldn’t help her. I knew what she was going to say. She was going to go on about the dog.
“For god’s sake,” said our Sam and picked up just as the phone stopped ringing.
“I don’t remember the last time we made love, do you? Is it because you’re English?”
“Oh, please.”
“Because if you’re gay there’s hope,” I said.
The phone rang again and again Sam picked up.
“Hullo, hullo, yes, here she is.”
Then he said no and gave me the handset.
“Why do you call in the middle of the night? Call in the daytime like everybody else,” I said.
The voice was the same as always, heavy, sedated with alcohol or drugs, rusty with disuse.
It said, “I knew you would be awake.”
“I’m not awake,” I said.
“I can’t sleep,” the voice whispered. “I’m alone and I can’t sleep and
it isn’t even midnight.”
“I’ve told you before, take a pill.”
“I took a pill, I took a few pills and they don’t work.”
“I don’t want to talk to you.”
“I know, but there’s no one else I can call. Tell me, who can I call?”
I threw the magazine to the floor. I was cramping with pain on both sides of the abdomen, my fallopians most likely, and I had a sudden craving for prescription medication or codeine or Thai whisky (which is actually rum), something anything to take the edge off. But there I was comforting my mother when she should have been the one to comfort me.
I said, “If you need to talk to someone in the middle of the night call a professional. I’m not your therapist.”
“Therapist, the rapist. Terror piss.”
“What? What?”
“Thoreau pissed.”
“Have you finally lost your mind?”
“I was thinking about the dog. If he hadn’t made me walk the dog none of it would have happened.”
When my mother finally hung up Sam was asleep. Or he was pretending to be asleep, because he was good at pretending was Sam. Whoever said girls are the great pretenders had no idea. Boys are better. It’s the only thing they’re better at. I went back to the magazine, the Pakistani on the cover who reminded me of a waitress at the Sliver where sometimes I picked up coffee. The waitress wasn’t butch exactly. She wasn’t your mama’s dyke. She had the new look. She was wide open to the world in whatever shape or gender the world chose to manifest. On my first visit she had caught me staring and she’d stared right back. She had thin lips and badly made eyebrows, actually a badly made unibrow. But my nipples had hardened just looking at her. The waitress smiled as if she knew the exact effect she’d had and I remember wanting to reach across the counter and slap her face or pinch her or squeeze her until she yelped; I’d wanted to mark her in some way. The girl had a bone-shaped stud in her tongue and I wondered if there were studs in her labia. Then I asked myself why I was attracted to working girls, waitresses, salesgirls, beauticians. Because the lower a woman is on the social rung, the better the sex? Or was it simply a power thing, someone who can be told what to do? Lying next to the sleeping Sam, I touched myself without heat and fell asleep and dreamed of the man who taught me patience.
(By the way, I’m quite aware that I have a tendency to digress into thoughtful exegesis at inopportune sexy moments but there’s nothing I can do about it. Blame gender studies. Blame gender. My generation and yours is of a more recent uncorking than Xavier’s. We exchanged the intellectual tyranny of communism and existentialism – followed closely by modernism, with false starts in the general direction of deconstructionism, post-structuralism and semiotics, itself an offshoot of the older subjugation of symbolism – my generation exchanged these tyrannies for the new tyranny of gender studies. But the ends of tyranny are the same. If you are not up on Foucauldian biopolitics and heteronormative versus homonormative and the minutiae of the gender binary and the homoerotic subplots of Charles Dickens, if you’re not up on the jargon you are not part of the discussion. You are a pariah. Your bark is irrelevant.)
That morning as I got ready for work Sam sipped his coffee and asked what I was doing. I was in the bathroom with a pump dispenser. What did it look like I was doing? I read aloud from the label: “Removes excessive sebum, dirt particles and dequamation without drying skin, supports the barrier function of the skin’s acid mantle.”
I said, “As far as I know, dequamation is not a word. Do you think they mean desquamation, the shedding of the skin’s outer layers?”
Sam said I should look it up.
“I did. It’s from the Latin and it means to scrape the scales off a fish.”
I pushed the pump twice and spread the stuff evenly on my face. I rinsed with cold tap water and wiped with a tissue and said the words again, the skin’s acid mantle. I soaked a cotton pad with alcohol-free toner to close my pores then mixed a bit of the no-nonsense Clarins sunscreen with a generous puddle of aloe vera moisturiser and dotted my cheeks, chin, forehead, and nose. I spread the dots evenly over my face.
“You look like you’re getting ready for a date,” Sam said.
“Sam,” I said, “blimey, cor, cry-fucking-key, the twentieth century has left the building. Women have sex with men as anonymously as men have sex with men. You don’t own me or owe me or want to make love to me. I wish I were going on a date.”
“Sex without strings.”
“The stringless fuck, yes, if that will get a rise out of you.”
With a flat sable brush I applied a base for the concealer. A white soufflé-like fluid, its job was to deflect light and make it harder to spot blemishes, which I had my share of, alas, not to mention, alack.
“I discovered only recently that sable is made from the fur of a marten, a shy, slender, bushy-tailed creature that lives in the northern forests. Actually I’m not sure it’s shy, though it is certainly all of the other things. This is a posh-ish brand and they say they don’t test their products on animals but that doesn’t mean a marten wasn’t violated for my selfish ends.”
I picked up a hairbrush.
“Cheap brush, some kind of fake wood. It does the job.”
I was jabbering because I was nervous. My eyes didn
’t need much work. I outlined with kajal and highlighted with a coppery brown mixed with black. I skipped the lipstick.
“No date,” I said. “I have an interview with a painter and I want to show him some of my work. See what he says.”
I put on a skirt and slipped the hairbrush in my bag and the phone rang.
I picked up and said, “Now what? Why don’t you give it a rest?”
But it was my analyst.
“Sorry, sorry, sorry, Garima,” I said. “I thought it was my mother.”
“Then I’m glad you’re standing up to her at last. I’m calling to ask if we could reschedule tomorrow’s session for the evening?”
I said yes and hung up.
I didn’t have a date but I had hopes. The power failed just as I opened the front door. In the silence I heard Sam curse. It took ten minutes to find an auto. The driver was young, not more than eighteen or seventeen by the look of him and so new to the city that he didn’t even glance in my direction, which, I have to say, was a nice way to start the day. I told him to take me to the Sliver and I took a table at the back. The shop had just opened and the waitress was alone. Good morning, ma’am, she said. We sized each other up and didn’t smile. I want a double espresso and a banana-nut muffin, I told the girl, and don’t call me ma’am. A television above the cash register was tuned to a religious channel. A bare-chested man with a bushy black beard and a lazy eye assumed a series of yoga poses. At the end of each asana he leered suggestively at the viewer. Utterly disreputable little man, I thought. When the waitress brought my order I asked her to show me where the toilet was and she led the way to the ladies’ room. It adjoined a larger restroom with a wheelchair access sign. I pointed at it and said, after you. She didn’t hesitate. That was something in her favour: she didn’t hesitate. Inside she held her face up for a kiss but I stepped back and locked the door and put a finger to my lips. Then I reached into my purse and took out a five-hundred-rupee note, which I folded and tucked into the girl’s bra. She looked at me as if she had expected more or as if money was the last thing she expected, but she didn’t return the note. Her lips were small and bow-shaped and seemed to be smiling even when she was not. She smelled of fried food and sweat and her fitted black trousers were so snug it was difficult to push my hand inside. Obligingly she unbuttoned the trousers and pushed them down and started to say something. Don’t talk, I said, reaching in my handbag for the hairbrush with its palmsized round back. But I’d hardly begun when it cracked in two. The waitress moaned, her cries muffled, her dark ass red and marked; and I spasmed twice. I sat on the toilet and pulled the girl around. Her mound was shaved and hairless and darker than the rest of her. There were no piercings in her labia but the clitoris was an anatomical miracle, a fleshy pink head buried in folds of dark flesh like a dwarf penis, visible even when she stood with her legs closed. I kicked her feet apart and licked briefly and tasted metal. Just as the girl began to tremble a response I stopped. I smelled menstrual blood and realised it was my own and I was afloat again, I was a floating head of air and light. On my skin the low hum of fever and my mind clear and emptied, perception narrowed to smell and taste and touch, the first time in days or weeks that I’d felt alive. I stood up shaky in my heels and took a quick look in the mirror. My hair was perfect. I pulled down my skirt and grabbed my handbag. Outside I ate half the muffin and took a sip of the lukewarm drink and left without checking to see if the waitress had returned.
It was ten a.m.
It took forty minutes to get to the offices of Closed. I met my editor and said I’d file a story in the evening in time for the web edition. Then I Googled the painter and blocked out more questions and printed out some of my own work. I had a smoothie at my desk and went to the ladies’ room to change my sanitary pad and made it to the terrace of the café in Hauz Khas a little before two. I wrote the first sentence of the story before he arrived. “New York-based artist Newton Xavier is in Delhi for an exhibition of his nudes.” The rest would write itself. He was about twenty minutes late and when he sat down I caught a whiff of something, unwashed clothes or some general dishevelment. He wore a fisherman’s sweater and a duffel coat with a paperback stuffed into one of the pockets. I spread my notebook and recorder and pencils on the table and said something about the weather, always a topic in Delhi. I ordered coffee and felt a bubble of moisture or blood drip into my sanitary pad and I remembered that I hadn’t let the waitress kiss me. The thought made me wet again.
I turned on my recorder and said, “Tell me something you’ve never before said to a woman.”
His reply was immediate. “I do not want to sleep with you.”
I said, “Is that a line that works usually? I want to sleep with you?”
“Not always,” he said, “but this one does. Let me paint you.”
He took off his coat and placed it on the back of a chair and said, “Speaking of which, perhaps you should allow me to paint you.”
I noticed that he had an odd way of saying these things. It was as if he was mouthing lines he’d said many times before and didn’t really believe, as if he was playing the role of roué with no real interest in the outcome. Later it struck me that it was an effective seduction technique. I thought I should try it myself.
I asked what he was reading and he pulled the paperback out of his pocket. It was an advance copy of a novel by a famous writer. What was his opinion of it?
“The hero’s name is Ka,” he said. “Say the name twice in rapid succession and that is my one-word review of the book.”
I asked why he would read a novel he did not like. “Because sometimes I read for the opposite of pleasure. This book is an inadvertent lesson in how not to write.”
The interview stretched to lunch and we went downstairs to the restaurant and took a table by the picture window. I remember there was a wide view of the city in all its haze and I switched to vodka cocktails because I knew where this was headed and I needed backup. He ordered black coffee – the former alcoholic’s beverage of choice, he said, because he was newly on the wagon and a little push would send him tumbling off – and grilled fish, to which I helped myself.
I gestured to the waiter and pointed at my glass and used the universal code. “Repeat.” When the cocktail arrived I drank thirstily and the sight of me drinking too much had an effect on him. He acquired the manner of a Jesuit monsignor, a type I knew from one of the schools I attended.
Was he a good Catholic?
“Catholics grow up in the sin house, if you see what I mean,” he said. “We are always talking about sin or thinking about it or committing it. Then we confess. In return we receive just as much penance as we can handle, we recite sixteen Hail Marys, we put money in the poor box and kneel on the stone and beg forgiveness and then we do the dirty all over again. Sin is expiation, salvation is negotiable, pleasure is pain. I mean, who invented the communion of sadomasochism?”
I considered his pop eyes and white stubble, the air of disreputability, and mixed with all that some inescapable charisma, something in his self-containment you wanted to shake up. He was returning the scrutiny. He said later that he knew at the moment of our first meeting that I was capable of anything.
I said, “I’m not Catholic, thank god, but for some reason my notion of God is western. I experience guilt and shame.”
“I would not have thought so.”
“You mean I come across as guilt-free and shameless. That’s a hell of a thing to be telling a woman at the first meeting. How old are you?”
“Fifty-eight, and you?”
“Twenty-six in September.”
“I’m old enough to be your husband,” and, realising what he’d said, “I mean, your father.”
“Old enough to be my husband, old enough to be my father. But you’re married.”
“I am. And I live in my wife’s house in Bombay.”
And then he said the words that would determine the course of the evening and possibly our life together.
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br /> “Come to communion with me first thing in the morning, refresh your sense of shame. When God is in your heart I’ll show you how to sin like a good Catholic.”
The city lay before us, flat and vast. In the distance streaky lights flared from the haze of construction dust and dropped a layer of yellow on the tarmac of the old airport. Parakeets flew an erratic line to the darkening trees.
He said, “In fairness and as a countermeasure I give you two verses of John: ‘Most assuredly, I say to you, whoever commits sin is a slave of sin. And a slave does not abide in the house forever.’”
I felt a chill on my neck and gathered my things.
“What are you working on now?” I asked. His blue notebook had been in his hands the entire time. I pointed at it. “Is it a poem?”
He said he liked to make lists because a list was a way of shoring up your ruins. He was making a list of suicide saints, he said, a partial list because a complete list would be endless.
“Where would you stop?”
“I’d like to hear it,” I said.
“Are you sure? It does go on a bit.”
“I’m sure.”
He opened the notebook and said the list would begin at the beginning with the Book, because nowhere does the Bible condemn self-murder. How could it when martyrdom was an early variant of suicide? And if suicide was a religious act then suicides were the unacknowledged saints of the universe. Beginning with Samson under the pillars. Or Saul taking to his sword, his name cursed for all time, like Saint Judas, the second most famous Biblical suicide. Or Jesus himself, whose death was a pact the Son made with the Father, Jesus and all his apostles, self-made suicides to a man. He said he had come to the conclusion that a complete list was too difficult an enterprise even for him, akin to making a world-sized map of the world. Instead he would begin with the poets and proceed not chronologically but sideways, starting with the earlier Romans such as Lucretius and Lucan and Labienus. Or Attila Jozsef who answered to the name of Pista, because after consultation with the neighbours his foster parents decided that the name Attila did not exist and when he found it years later in a story about the King of the Huns he threw himself on literature as on a sword. Mayakovsky the gambler, partial to Russian roulette, failed prophet whose gunshot was heard around the world. Sergei Yesenin’s blood-written goodbye, his patent leather shoes and the handheld noose like a scarf around his neck because there was nothing new in dying or in living. And Marina, unable to work, penniless from slaving on the hard ship, her husband and daughter taken, abandoned by her lovers and begging in advance for her son’s forgiveness. The pharmacist Georg Trakl, whose sweet secret was colour, the white sleep, the silver hand, the silver scent of daffodils, the red body of the fish, the red poppy, the red wolf, the purple clouds, the purple grape, the green silence, the green flower, the black rain, the blue grief, the soft blue footsteps of those who had risen from the dead. Gérard de Nerval, who told his aunt, this life is a hovel, don’t wait up, and hanged himself with an apron string. Reinaldo Arenas sick in New York City, and his note, Cuba will be free, as I already am. Ana Cristina Cesar harnessing the evil of writing to confront desire, who gave in on a London street. And Celan deep in the Seine, free to be Ancel again. And the outlaw poet Johnny Ringo, his boots tied to the saddle and horse run off, feet wrapped in his undershirt, dead in the fork of a tree from a gunshot to the head. Vachel Lindsay and Sara Teasdale happy in the wide starlight because the dead are free if only for a single hour. Sylvia, classic head on a kitchen towel in the oven. Assia, acolyte of Sylvia, also by gas. Anne Sexton in furs, sipping a martini in the garage. John Berryman off a bridge into the frozen Mississippi, whose last lines were, I didn’t, and I didn’t sharpen the Spanish blade. Randall Jarrell’s dark overcoat stepping into night-time highway traffic. Lew Welch, disappeared into the wilderness. Hart Crane, disappeared into the sea. Weldon Kees, disappeared. Harry Crosby, priest of the black sun, who crafted images from the air and gave himself a twenty-five calibre black sun hole. Reetika Vazirani with a borrowed kitchen knife, taking her infant son first, in a house borrowed from friends. And after the poets, the others. Dhan Gopal Mukerji, pioneer writer in exile, never white enough or warm enough in America, never Indian enough in India, marginalised by preference, performed the rope trick at home. Hargurchet Singh Bhabra, in his leather and shades, smashed dinner plates to the floor of the lecture hall as a writing exercise and with the sickness upon him he changed the name of his novel to Faust. Andrés Caicedo on a failed mission to Hollywood, returned to Colombia to follow his own rule that young men should not live beyond the age of twenty-five. Géza Csáth, neurologist, violinist, music critic, painter, writer, seducer, wife murderer, morphine addict, whose study of pain led to brilliant complications and poison at the border. Jerzy, who wrote, I’m going to sleep a bit longer than usual, call it eternity. Virginia, bombed from two homes, left on the banks of the River Ooze her hat and cane and a letter to Leonard: everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. Walter Benjamin in Spain on a trudge to nowhere, transit cancelled, delivered by morphia, whose friend Koestler borrowed some and tried it too, but failed, and tried again forty-three years later, this time taking with him a wife. Malcolm Lowry, buried in Ripe, dead by misadventure or alcohol and barbiturates, rich man’s son who never recovered from early happiness, author of impossible instructions to himself: describe sunlight. The novelist Ryunosuke Akutagawa, who inherited his mother’s madness, took Veronal for the vague uneasiness. Dazai Osamu, Akutagawa worshipper, five-time attempted suicide, thrice with women, who succeeded alone in a canal. Yukio Mishima’s short sword on its left to right trajectory, then the difficult upward pull; two years later his friend Yasunari Kawabata, who for two hundred consecutive nights saw Mishima in his dreams. Harry Martinson, killed by critics in a Stockholm hospital, seppuku with scissors; Richard Gerstl, seppuku with butcher’s knife raging against Schoenberg’s wife; Emilio Salgari, seppuku in a park, raging against his publishers, to whom he wrote, at least have the decency to pay for my funeral. Diane Arbus who said if she had photographed Marilyn, suicide would have been writ plainly on her famous face, as it was on her own, Diane, with her downers and slit wrists and overkill. John Minton, friend, drinking partner, hoarder of Tuinals, painter at odds with an abstracted time. Ray Johnson’s backstroke from the Sag Harbor Bridge, Frida’s painkillers, Dora Carrington’s pistol, Pollock speeding and the tree he aimed for, the miniaturist Daswanth’s dagger, Witkiewicz tied to his lover, who revived, Arshile Gorky wifeless, studio burnt down, broke and yearning for clarity. Dalida and her luck the third time round. Richard Brautigan and Freddie Prinze and Leslie Cheung, who stepped from the Mandarin Oriental in Central, twenty-four floors to the street below. And the actresses of the Indian south. Silk Smitha, who took the poor woman’s recourse and wound dupatta to ceiling fan. Lakshmisree and Nafisa Joseph, also Monal, also Shobha, all of seventeen. Fatafat Jayalakshmi’s sleeping pills. Prathyusha’s juice and poison in a parked car. Divya Bharati, fooling on the ledge under her window. And my old friend and collaborator, the poet Narayan Doss, dead drunk and dead on platform two of Churchgate Station, and if the cause of death was a heart attack the true cause was suicide by alcohol, the Bombay poet’s recourse. And the list would end as it began, with a Roman poet, say Cesare Pavese on a hotel bed, writing, “Okay, don’t gossip too much,” because he knew that gossip would become part of his myth, the poet’s suicide myth, which, as we know, is the most powerful of all suicide myths.
