The Book of Chocolate Saints

by Jeet Thayil

  *

  Why hadn’t he noticed it before? The lake was shaped like a death’s head moth. As the Ganesh immersions continued it grew thick with sludge. One morning they walked to the quietest part where a bridge connected the bird sanctuary – behind a link fence, the smell of excrement high in the air, no birds or sanctuary to be seen – to a small lotus pond. There was a crowd on the bridge, police officers, some park employees, and a couple of morning walkers in sweatshirts and sneakers. They pointed at a figure wedged among the litter and purple lotus blossoms. Xavier saw a bubble of black cloth in the green water, a man’s shirt, and he saw a body floating face down and a glossy fringe of hair.

  Goody spoke to a policeman who did not respond. She made her intonation flat and rough.

  She said, “Dead body.”

  She’s turning Indian, Xavier thought. What happened to the girl with the London lilt? But the policeman understood her now.

  “Dead body,” he agreed, “came in the night.”

  They watched as park workers pulled the man out of the water. Clumsily they dragged him to the embankment and clumsily they turned him over. He was youngish, naked from the waist down, with a faded rakhee on one wrist. More people gathered.

  “Dead body,” said the policeman, looking at Goody, his hand near his khaki-clad crotch.

  The drowned man was on his back, his arms stretched above him as if asking for help, a bit of lake slime on his knee. Nobody had bothered to cover him up. They had pulled him from the water and turned him over and their work was done.

  How had he got there? Had he drifted across the lake in the night or was he dumped into the pond from the bridge? A reveller accidentally drowned during the immersions? Had he been murdered elsewhere and brought to the park? If so, how had he been transported past the guards at the gate and brought to the most deserted part of the lake? And finally, who was he? Nobody knew. When Xavier persisted they told him to make a complaint at the police station.

  They put the man in a hand-truck and manhandled him into a van and the next day there was no yellow tape, no policemen, and no barricades. In the days that followed Xavier looked in vain for a mention in the newspapers or on television. A man’s body had been fished out of the water and it had been removed. There was nothing more to it.

  Life went on; it was the Indian way.

  *

  You are sixty-six, one six short of the devil’s own number. Your years rhyme with the black river Styx. You are in a town in the south to which you hoped never to return and you cannot shake off the feeling that you are starting from scratch with nothing to show for your years in the mines.

  “What about critical acclaim?”

  “Acclaim. Say ecstatic attention. Say adulation. Oh, and two books of extraordinary verse, and while we’re at it, half a dozen pictures verging dizzyingly on greatness, and shows on every continent except Antarctica, which isn’t a continent, and—”

  “I get it, acclaim doesn’t help.”

  “Wrong, pointless, monkey chatter.”

  They went to a coffee shop where they argued about the future.

  “I’m sick of this place,” said Goody. “Wasn’t Delhi the destination? Every time I try to talk to you about it you say tomorrow. I’m sick of tomorrow!”

  “The idea was to get a feel of the property my mother left me, the flat in which we are living at the moment, rent-free, I might add. A crucial consideration since we don’t know how long we intend to stay in India. The plan was to visit Delhi and make the appearance for Benny. I do feel obliged. We were in school together.”

  “You were in a lot of schools. That’s not saying much.”

  “Either way, moving to Delhi was never part of the script.”

  “Listen, New. I’m sick of this place. The air is bad and water’s scarce. You don’t like it either. We should move to a city that works.”

  He said, “Maybe you’re sick of being with someone and you want to go back to being single.”

  “But that was your idea. You were the one who didn’t want commitment. You said, and I quote, monogamy is the defeat of love. You called it monotony.”

  “I’d come out of a dry marriage. I was penniless, paying all kinds of alimony and child support. I craved my independence.”

  “You wanted my independence.”

  “I suppose I didn’t expect you to take to it with such gusto and flair.”

  “And by the way you’re still penniless. Don’t blame marriage.”

  More than the marriages it was the long aftermaths and the in-between periods that had depleted him.

  He married Edna in the Summer of Love as the sounds of the electric guitar and the Indian hand cymbal wafted through the streets of London. He grew his hair and published his second book and the poetry slowed to a trickle. He started to paint. In 1972 a small gallery in the West End hosted his first show, Haré Krishna, Haré Christ, a suite of melting psychedelic oils on canvas: Christ depicted as an Indian sadhu meditating in a cave; Christ escaped from the cross and hiding out in Kashmir; Christ with wife and daughter. (Edna had just given birth to a baby girl.) It was his controversial debut and the critics were unanimous. Xavier was the tonic the British art world needed, they said, and for a year he was once more the toast of Soho. He was interviewed on television and in the newspapers. A tabloid offered its readers a dinner date with the artist as a prize. He showed all over. He sold twenty-three paintings in one good month and made a lot of money; and then, as suddenly as it arrived it was gone. He was in India, on commission to paint the prime minister. The Emergency had just begun and the canvas took on the heavy sunless hues of the era. This was when Edna chose to leave, finally showing signs of the temper she had managed to hide when they were married. She sued for divorce and the court liquidated his assets including his art. He was left with very little. When his lawyer advised him to leave town he flew to Milan, where he lived in the immigrant quarter and didn’t paint. He went to the museums and wrote (prose) in his rented rooms. He became a man, as he wrote to his London agent, “who dines alone in restaurants”. His landlady was a big-breasted Roman of about fifty, whose loud voice and no-nonsense manner reminded him of some Indian women he knew, among them his aunts and cousins. But in private she proved to be the opposite in temperament to what he’d expected; she was needy, insecure, satiable.

  His agent lent him a sizeable advance and he moved to Paris, where he began to paint in earnest. He made the work that came to be called his Chocolate Jesus Period, Christ stretched on the cross and looking heavenward, a fairly conventional representation, except this was a dark-skinned Christ, a sun-stained Palestinian, a Levantine, a Nazarene, a Jew, not the blond blue-eyed man hung in the churches and museums of the west.

  One day in a bookshop near the Notre-Dame as he gazed at the poetry shelves a dishevelled old man approached. In his arms was a Persian cat that seemed serene and perfectly groomed in comparison to its master. The man asked a one-word question. Goan? Yes, Xavier replied, so surprised to be addressed in this fashion that he spoke the truth, which in those days he was not always likely to do. Need a place to sleep, the man said, and it was a statement rather than a question. The old man looked like a hobo but was in fact the proprietor of the bookshop and he took him upstairs to rooms with books on all four walls from floor to ceiling. There were cots and a table but no doors. You can sleep here and there’s a closet in the hall for your things, he said. In return you work in the bookshop for a couple of hours a day. What kind of work and how many hours is a couple, asked Xavier, suddenly unsure if he wanted to stay. The old man laughed and in his arms the cat twitched. Nothing strenuous, he said. You place or replace books in their correct positions, an hour or three of work at the most. My name is Walter Shelton and when I was a young man I spent a year in India travelling around with little money, without so much as a thought in my head. People took me into their homes, they were kind to me, they gave me so much that in my own way I try to help travellers in need. All this i
s a roundabout way of welcoming you to my bookshop. I hope you feel at home.

  Xavier took the metro to Gare du Nord and retrieved his bag from a locker and went back to the bookshop and spent a comfortable night, though the big room was dusty from the hundreds of books that circled the darkness. That night his dreams were set in cities he had never visited, heavy dreams filled with colour and sound as if the words in the books around him had seeped into his head through his ears. He was on the cobblestone streets of an ancient European capital, drunk on wine and vodka, and he walked past a turreted house with small stained-glass windows, the street narrow and steep and leading inevitably to the broken cobbles of a Bandra bylane near Saint Andrew’s Church and to the broken walkways he had known in other parts of the city, in Navy Nagar and Colaba and Byculla and Shuklaji Street.

  In the morning there was coffee and fresh bread from a bakery. The work was not difficult. He took books from a trolley and stacked them with the help of a stepladder. The San Franciscan at the cash register wore a goatee and ill-fitting beret and Xavier understood that the man was enacting a fantasy of French raffishness. He was Xavier’s overseer and he explained how to place the books on the shelves with, he said, minimum effort and maximum efficiency. There was plenty of time to browse. At one o’clock the shop closed for lunch and he wandered into a garden nearby, where he sat on a bench and drank cheap red wine and ate nothing. Some days he went to Pigalle, always in the afternoon, and he walked around Pig Alley and drew a map in his head of the studios of the artists. He envisioned a five-pointed star, Vincent on top, Picasso and Degas at the bottom, Manet on the left and Utrillo on the right.

  He saw Shelton off and on, the old man always in the same ratty sweater and colourless corduroy trousers. One afternoon the San Franciscan told him he had been invited to dinner at Shelton’s private quarters on the top floor. Brush up on your Poe, the man said. Xavier asked why he would want to do that. Because Shelton claims to be Edgar Allan’s great-grandson and Poe is his only topic of conversation, he said. Xavier was deep into a paperback, The Peoples of the Americas: Vol. III, a brief blood-soaked saga of the Aztecs, and he saw no reason to put it aside for the sake of Poe. He spent the afternoon on a bench reading about burial rites and the step pyramids of the moon and sun at Teotihuacan. At seven he put on a clean shirt and his quilted black jacket and walked up to the old man’s quarters on the top floor. As in the rest of the house, books covered every wall of every room, including the kitchen and toilet.

  This is where I keep the rare volumes, Shelton said in the kitchen, pointing to signed first editions of Joyce and Beckett, Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin, to suppressed or disappeared editions of M. Ageyev and J. K. Huysmans, to Thaw, a lost manuscript by Anna Kavan, to a collection of aphoristic texts by Edgar Varese that contained, among other things, a transcript of a conversation with the star Sirius, a stilted, mostly one-sided exchange concerning the date of the true apocalypse, and he pointed to a volume of Victor Jara’s lyrics, to a copy of Les Chants de Maldoror inscribed not by Lautréamont or Isidore Ducasse, but by Albert Lacroix, the book’s second publisher, a man renowned for the coldness of his feet and the soundness of his taste, whose inscription in Spanish, El Palacio del Miedo, may or may not have been genuine, and then Shelton’s hand described a wave around the main room and Xavier realised that every book on every shelf was either by or about Edgar Allan Poe. The little space that remained on the walls was taken up by portraits of Poe at different stages of his life, as a boy with a wispy moustache, as a young dandy with haunted eyes, and as a slightly older gentleman whose face seemed to have collapsed into itself. There was a framed notice from a newspaper with the headline, The Poet Poe is Dead, and below, Beastly Intoxication the Cause.

  Assisted by the San Fransican and his wife, the old man served fish soup and melted blue cheese over baguettes, a dish he called Franco- Welsh rabbit. Xavier produced a half-bottle of whisky, which he offered to the table and drank alone.

  Yes, Shelton said, I noticed that when I was travelling in India. You drink before you eat. I’m afraid so, said Xavier, it’s one of the bad habits the British passed on to us. Shelton looked surprised, as if Xavier had suddenly materialised at the dinner table. Tell me some of the others, he said. Xavier said he didn’t want to ruin dinner with a litany of woes and if Mr Shelton didn’t mind he would mention only the top items on his personal list: 1) corrupt top-heavy bureaucracies, 2) malfunctioning municipal administrations, 3) outdated laws and legal machinery, 4) a collection of states linked by no common language, except English, 5) a sense of cultural inferiority so strong as to be permanent or at least several generations deep, 6) mixed race Anglo-Indians excluded from the power centres of both India and the United Kingdom, who claimed allegiance to their fathers but were unwanted by them, 7)—

  In fact, said Shelton, you’re right. Let’s not ruin dinner.

  Xavier refused coffee. He waited for the old man to bring up the topic of his ancestry but he seemed disinclined to do so; and finally Xavier mentioned it himself. I heard in the bookshop that you are a descendant of Edgar Allan Poe, said Xavier. My great-grandfather, said Shelton. Xavier said, not officially, Poe died without heirs. No, not officially, my grandfather was born in 1850, a year after Poe’s death. Sarah Elmira Royster Shelton, my great-grandmother, was unable to speak of her son’s true parentage. She would have lost the family estate. It was a stipulation in her first husband’s will that she must not remarry. In our family, however, it is common knowledge that Sarah and Edgar were married secretly in the last year of his life. I am working on a family history that will clear it up, as well as the final mystery of his death. I argue that it was not a case of beastly intoxication as the newspapers alleged but brain fever. As you might guess my family has laboured under the poet’s great shade. My grandfather wrote stories that were serialised in magazines and collected into books and none of them has stayed in print. He wrote a travelogue under the pen name of Ptolemy Hephestion, who you may remember was Poe’s invention, a geographer who named and mapped the Eureka Ocean that sweeps men into nothingness. The travelogue too is out of print. My father wrote a series of sestinas in which the rhyme words are taken from the language of Poe. For instance, in the double sestina ‘Facilis descensus Averni’, the rhyme words are fathom, simoom, Ashtophet, eidolon, farthingale, and ichor, words that are devilishly difficult to rhyme, though fathom with its double meaning gives itself more easily than the others to the machinery of the sestina. Even among poets it was said to be an achievement. My father was also an essayist and editor and his innovations included putting bylines and photos instead of advertisements on the front page. His publications include five books of verse and a book-length essay about the use of ghee as a daily tonic for the digestive system, as well as the following unclassifiable works, How to Talk to Azaleas, Rhododendrons & the Flowering Dogwood; Mating in Captivity: the Anthropology of Marriage; The Man who Stole the Rain, and Jesus: The Collected Works. Of course none of this matters since he is remembered only for the book of Poe-inspired sestinas. As a young man I turned against what I saw as the dubious legacy of my great-grandfather. I decided I would not be a writer: I would be happy. I travelled the world and made friends wherever I went. I lived in India, Afghanistan, the Greek islands, Trinidad, and I returned to Europe in my late thirties and started a bookshop. I became a businessman and householder and I had children I did not neglect. I made a success of myself. Then, in my sixties I had a dream of my father. He was dressed in a nightshirt in the snow on the streets of Baltimore, a city I have never visited though I dream about it more often than I should. I say the name to myself in the dark and it never fails to bring me an image of a white gravestone and horses in the snow. In my dream my father’s lips were moving but I could not hear what he said. I got down on my knees and put my ear to his mouth and realised he was not speaking, he was shivering with cold. When I woke I understood I was being foolish. After all, Poe is my heritage, my great heritage. I was wrong not
to embrace him. What do you say to that?

  I have no idea what to say, said Xavier, finishing off his whisky. But there is no genetic law that says a father’s or grandfather’s or great-grandfather’s neurosis must become one’s own. Your youthful self may have got it right. It is better to cultivate one’s own obsessions than fill out second-hand ones, for the simple reason that one will never fill them to their original rounded dimensions. And who’s to say your own obsessions, prosaic as they may be, are not as valuable as a dead poet’s? Nurture your obsession slash addiction because it is – and forgive me for using such a cheap word – it is destiny. But this is only my opinion, and opinions, as the popular expression goes, are like assholes, everybody has one, which doesn’t mean they must be aired. Or excuse me, since we are in mixed company, let me rephrase that. Opinions are like armpits, everybody has at least one.

  Soon after making this speech Xavier thanked his host and left. Shelton said, that, friends, is an example of a bright and unsteady mind. Keep an eye on him. Make sure he doesn’t steal my books.

  Xavier decided to take a walk. He did not want to hang about the bookshop where he was the only non-white boarder, the shop staffed entirely by Americans, no Europeans, no Asiatics, no dark-skinned races of any kind; it was an outpost of white America and more than anything he was sick of the accent, the earnestness, the grating timbre of the voices. The dinner with Shelton had left him angry and tired. What’s more, he was still hungry. For the first time in his adult life he considered the possibility of returning to India.