by Jeet Thayil
I’ve lived too long abroad and I’m turning into a brown redneck or a black racist, but who can blame me?
He exited the shop and rushed blindly through the twilight. When he bumped into other pedestrians he muttered rudely under his breath though it was his own fault. Some people smiled or laughed because they saw that he was drunk and out of his mind, but others glared after him and muttered curses in return.
When he became aware of his surroundings he saw he was at the Cimetière de Montmartre, a place his mother had loved and taken him to when he was a child. He had visited it soon after his arrival in the city so he could look at Degas’s grave, not because he was a devotee of the work, but because he was moved by the thought of saintly Degas in his last years when he wasn’t painting, when he was friendless and nearly blind, his deprivations caused by the idea that an artist should have no life, no wife or children, no common consolation except art. The idea was insane and admirable and worth a return trip to the cemetery but tonight the gates were closed. It was late and it had started to drizzle. He recognised the fine Parisian rain that had killed so many poets and painters, a rain Xavier had learned to treat with deference. He turned away from the cemetery gates and wandered toward a dark avenue, where he hurriedly took a seat on a bench at a covered bus stop and pulled a book out of his jacket and a notebook from his hip pocket, reading from one and scribbling into the other. He realised he wasn’t alone.
Partly hidden in the shadows on the other side was a thin bedraggled Arab who held a bouquet of wilted pink roses. Had he stolen them from the graveyard? The Arab’s other hand was clenched in his overcoat pocket as if he held a switchblade or a pistol. At first he stared at Xavier without speaking and then he asked which country he was from. Xavier shook his head and the man said, Indian? You don’t look Indian. In my country you could pass for Kuwaiti or Sudanese, some dark-skinned Arab, said the man.
“What are you writing?”
“Writing, rewriting, taking notes,” Xavier said.
“Are you a note-taker?”
“Not exactly.”
“Are you a writer?”
Instead of replying Xavier continued to scribble in his book.
“I don’t like writers,” the Arab said, inching closer. “I don’t like writers and I don’t like painters.”
“Well, perhaps they aren’t fond of you either,” Xavier said. Then, seeing the look on the man’s face, he added, “Whom do you like?”
The Arab held up the wilted bouquet.
“I like singers,” he said.
He explained that he had been a teenager when he heard a song called ‘Salma Ya Salama’ on a dance floor in Tangiers. He had been fourteen or fifteen and just learning about sex and music and where his own inclinations lay. Here he wiggled his eyebrows suggestively at Xavier. He heard the song first on the radio and then he heard it in somebody’s car and probably on the beach, in fact definitely on the beach, and soon it was everywhere. You couldn’t escape it. Everybody seemed to be whistling it or humming it and all the nightclub singers were doing cover versions. It was a hit, a genuine over-the-moon beautiful fucking hit. He loved to dance to it and so did his friends, a group of boys who wore outrageous clothes and make-up and went to clubs every night. There were girls in the group but it was the boys who were the real queens. Trust me, he said, boys are more queenly than girls, more dramarama, you know, whatever. The song was all over the place that winter and then all of a sudden it was gone and replaced by another, just as catchy, just as maddening. Total French disco, which none of us had ever heard before. And he knew immediately that it was the same singer, because it was a voice you heard once and didn’t forget, a voice that put a chill in your bones because it seemed to emanate from a landscape devoid of life, the voice of the moon if the moon could sing, a voice that belonged to someone who had looked into the heart of man and seen his true nature, an inconsolable voice.
The man held up the bouquet and said, “Dalida.”
“I beg your pardon?” said Xavier, thinking he was referring to the extravagantly moustachioed Spaniard or some kind of Gallic sex toy.
“That was her name,” said the Arab. “Dalida. Such a musical name, don’t you think? I learned that she lived in Paris and I took a ferry from Tangiers to Algeciras and then a train. I came to Paris to be near her, to be in the same city. I took jobs here and there and I ran errands for people. I got by, thinking all the time that in a few weeks or a few months I would go back to Morocco and this was my Parisian adventure, ça va, ça va. Then one day I went to a club and there she was. I heard her, I mean, I saw her. She was beautiful but it was a frightening kind of beauty. I knew she would not stay long in this world. How did I know? I’ll tell you. At the club I stood at the edge of the stage clasping my hands like a typical fag and there was a moment, one moment I’ll never forget, when she looked straight at me and said, ‘Mourir sur scene.’ She smiled as she sang but it was a reflex, a facial memory of a smile that had occurred a long time earlier. I knew immediately because her eyes told me. After all how could she not when so many of her men had killed themselves and she too had tried so many times without success?”
“How many men exactly?” Xavier asked.
“Three times at least. Once she was in a coma for days.”
“I mean how many men killed themselves,” Xavier said.
“Six, six men, imagine! Her first husband shot himself in the head when he failed to win a singing competition. He was just twenty-eight, an age at which the weight of the world sits heavily on a poor boy’s shoulders. He was dropped from the final round and when he learned this he went to his room, wrote a letter to the jury, and shot himself in the left temple. Dalida found his body. Think of it! They’d just been married and they had presented the song together. A month later she tried to kill herself but she failed. Years later the man who had discovered her, her producer and former husband, a man with a lovely name, Morisse, he too killed himself and he did it the same way, shot himself in the left temple, as if he wished to send Dalida a message. Then her close friend,” here the Arab made quote marks in the air with his fingers, “leapt to his death from his apartment. He was the same age as Tenco, her first husband, and it was as if he too were trying to tell Dalida something. What was he trying to tell her, what were they all trying to tell her, these death-loving men she loved? You can guess that she heard their voices in the night, saying sweet things and beckoning to her. She did not listen, not then. Her songs grew darker and darker but she went on and then one of her last lovers – she had many, so many, Egyptian pilots, Italian doctors, French journalists – he sucked the exhaust out of his Renault and died in the garage. At least two of her fans did the same, leapt from high windows and sucked off cars. But she? She chose a better way. A much more elegant way, pills in a warm bed in a luxury hotel. And she did not do it for love.”
Here the man stopped and waited for Xavier to ask a question.
“Well, why did she do it?”
“Because she was getting old and she knew her best years were behind her and she knew that whatever happened next, it would be a disappointment.”
The drizzle picked up a little and the trees dripped on the roof of the bus stop. Xavier smelled a wood fire somewhere, though the street was deserted. The Arab said he came to the cemetery to stand by her grave and leave some flowers. Xavier asked what he planned to do with the roses since the cemetery was closed. The Arab sighed theatrically. It had happened before, he said. There was nothing he could do about his absent-mindedness. He was distracted by his fate, his loneliness, his poverty, and the fact that he was a foreigner in an inhospitable town where even the rain told you to go back to your own country. How could he go back when his country no longer existed? His parents had died, his extended family didn’t care for him, and his friends, his beautiful friends, had vanished.
He nodded and walked unhurriedly to the cemetery gates. On the pavement he arranged the long stems and broken roses into the letter
D. Then he set off down the unlit street, a small hunched figure in a dark overcoat, hatless in the rain.
Soon after this Xavier left Paris but he never forgot the story of the singer in whose life suicide had become a kind of contagion.
He returned to Bombay on the day the monsoon broke. The Emergency had at last been lifted and Mrs Gandhi voted out of power. The plane descended bumpily through clouds thick with rain. Foot by foot it descended and the turbulence eased. Outside, India was reappearing.
He was alone and starting over, his mother in the asylum in Bangalore, his blacklisted father living in New York, the apartment in Navy Nagar long vacated. He moved into a hotel on Marine Drive and supported himself with journalism, embellished reminiscences of the painters and poets and writers he had known. He went out every night. At a party he was introduced to the actress Lula Nadkarni, a former Miss India who had been voted one of the five most beautiful women in the world by Vogue. But New, she said, we are childhood friends. Don’t you remember? He said that he did, though he did not. He dropped her home and they met again the next day and the next and finally he said, Lula, I own three pairs of shoes, a typewriter, and two pairs of trousers. But New, said Lula, I can help you with your wardrobe. He tried again. You don’t understand: I own half a dozen shirts, some books, and a few paintings. New, said Lula, it’s simple, let’s go shopping, I’ll take you. When she understood that he was proposing to her she said he would have to ask her father and he did and in a month they were wed. It was her second marriage and his third. They checked into a suite at the Taj where one night the phone rang with news. His father had died of a heart attack. His father had died and left him an apartment on Central Park West, an apartment and enough money to set up a second home if he wished.
*
On the way back to the apartment on Infantry Road they stopped at Koshy’s to pick up his birthday cake. It was still early, the restaurant just opened for business, and he walked into the mid-morning gloom and felt warm air pockets open in his head, as if the flu had decided to set up camp. The big room’s train station echo was exactly as it had always been, and the discoloured walls and peeling paint, the smell of cigarette smoke and fried meat and beer; he took a sniff of the air and understood what was wrong with him, that it wasn’t the onset of the flu. He wanted drink.
Koshy’s was where he would take his first vodka of the day at a table by the cash register as far from the window as possible, because in those days he was always hung over and sunshine was the enemy. All these years later being in the old room made him yearn for the oblivion of drink and as always his craving for alcohol was mixed with cravings for sex and travel and physical risk. He wanted drink but Goody had put her foot down. His last binge had been a week-long blackout that had ruined his New York opening. Plus, she said, who knew what alcohol would do in his current state? One more binge and she was gone, it was a promise, she couldn’t take the stress of wondering if he would drink himself to death. They waited in silence for the cake to be packed and that was when the idea came to him. The restaurant’s senior manager, Kurien, was a convener of the local AA group and a crony from the days of whisky. He was standing near the entrance to the vast kitchen in the back and he didn’t seem surprised to see Xavier or to hear that he wanted to attend a meeting.
“This evening at six thirty. Come along and you’ll learn a new way to meditate. The nose suits you, brother X!”
“I’ve never been to a Bangalore meeting. Too busy drinking, as you know. And the idea of hanging around with a bunch of grumpy drunks – it’s enough to make you hit the bottle. In any case I always thought AA was for quitters.”
Kurien laughed. “So it’s time you joined us. It will be my pleasure to welcome you to the quitters’ brotherhood. And on your birthday too, auspicious!”
The flame-of-the-forest was in flower on the road in front of the apartment. There was nothing too remarkable from below, wide-spreading branches and shy fern-like leaves, but from a distance a great umbrella of saffron-scarlet flowers bloomed forty feet above the ground. He’d been feverish all day, tremble-handed and subject to visions, imagining a shot glass of whisky dropped into a schooner of beer. When the whisky leaked into the lager it turned the exact colour of the flame-of-the-forest’s flowers. Then with no connecting thread he saw a Senegalese woman who’d posed for him once in London, her face framed by a stiff red wig, sweaty in the electric light. She wore a tight black skirt that peeled like a sock and her figure was identical to some Palaeolithic drawings he’d studied in school, voluptuous mother images that were all torso and curve of hip and breasts that hung to the navel. He saw the woman’s face as clearly as if she were in front of him, the exact jut of the lower lip, the smile like a trace element, the serenity in her eyes; and he remembered the jolt in his belly when he saw her shaved sex, the bud in the great valley of her.
He got to the restaurant exactly on time and he imagined himself in the future, a punctual old man nursing a mug of lemon tea and waiting for the AA meeting to begin. Fifteen minutes later Kurien arrived, apologising, saying he was chairing Oye. Xavier wasn’t sure he’d heard him right.
“Overeaters Anonymous. Now look, don’t you worry, the boys will take you to the meeting and I’ll come by when I’m done.”
He waited at a table in the back and one by one they arrived, the boys, who were in their forties and fifties, old-time members of the local chapter, and they went across the road to an empty school where a pool of white light spilled from a classroom. A dozen or so men sat at desks constructed for children and on the blackboard in white chalk were the usual sobriety slogans. Xavier knew them all; they sounded to him like the battle hymns of a doomed republic.
At the teacher’s desk was Vincent who introduced himself as a liar and good-for-nothing who should by all rights be in jail, or dead. It was only thanks to the fellowship that he’d managed to save his life, to let go and let God, et cetera, et cetera, and Xavier tuned out for a time, until finally the man called the meeting to order and asked if there were any first-timers. Xavier put up his hand, meaning it was his first time at this fellowship, but he was misunderstood.
“Hi, Xavier. Welcome. We’re glad you’re with us for your first time.”
Vincent introduced a man with an accent out of Hell’s Kitchen.
“Hi, my name is Keith and I’m an alcoholic?”
“Hi, Keith.”
“Tell you what, I thought I knew everything, right? I went to meetings to learn the twelve steps, follow for a while, and go right back to drinking. I wanted to show the guys I’d given it a shot and it wasn’t for me.”
He was a small tense American with a weightlifter’s upper body and he leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and spoke with long pauses.
“This is a big day, maybe the most important day of your life,” he told Xavier. “Opportunities, right? You either take them or you don’t. I used to let them go because they cut into my drinking life. Now I pick up on them.”
When he stopped there was applause.
Vincent said, “Mike, do you want to share?”
On the street a car backfired. Nobody flinched except Xavier.
Mike spoke with his eyes closed and hands clasped, the picture of someone lost in prayer. He said his job was to be on the phone all day reassuring his clients and what he really wanted to do was to hurt them. He wanted to bitch slap them. One morning, after his usual quarter of vodka, he was leaving for work when he had an argument with his wife and blacked out for three minutes. He came out of it covered in blood, his wife and two kids screaming. He’d stabbed himself repeatedly with a pair of scissors. It was not easy to connect the calm look of the man with the chaos of his life.
“I started to write down my fourth step,” he said. “A searching and fearless moral inventory. I should be in jail for some of the things I’ve done. My wife would leave me if she knew. I start writing and I look at the words on the page and I don’t know who wrote them. Even my handwriting look
s different. Been sober now for eighty-two days.”
He too had been addressing Xavier, who began to feel like a fraud.
Mike said, “Another thing I’ve learned here is to keep quiet. My mouth has got me into a lot of trouble, I’m learning to keep it shut.”
And he did; he said nothing more.
Xavier put his head on the desk and pressed his forehead against the gouges in the wood. Someone was addressing him.
“Do you want to share?”
“It’s my first time here, I don’t know if I have anything to say that will suit.”
“That’s okay,” said Vincent.
“And I’m not sure I need a group.”
“You can say anything you want.”
“I quit alcohol without AA, may I say that?”
Vincent said, “Personally I don’t think you quit, I think you’re taking a break. Meeting makers make it. Let go, let God.”
Some half-grunts of agreement and then a new voice, a man whose name Xavier didn’t hear. Arrogance, he said, was the original sin. Only attending regular meetings helped him stay sober in the world.
Xavier understood that the men wore alcoholism like a secret identity only other alcoholics recognised. To the world they were ordinary men but in their own heads they were superheroes and saints. He imagined a halo two inches above the head of the man who was speaking, a dull oval glow the colour of dirty copper. They all had them, even Vincent.
Above my head there is no halo, only a hollow. They are the halo men and I am the imposter.
The meeting ended with a group chant, “Keep coming back.”
Outside, the last man to speak joined Xavier and Keith the American. He said he had come to the meeting because it had been raining that day and whenever it rained and there was a cool breeze blowing he wanted a drink. Xavier knew the condition: nostalgie de la boue, de l’oubli, de l’oblivion.
As they walked to the street Keith asked how long Xavier had been sober.
