by Jeet Thayil
“Really, I’m sorry.”
“Doesn’t mean a thing, sorry, easiest word in the English language. Instead of mouthing the empty word, think. I’m escaping without funds, without a sou in the world. Lend me some.”
“What?”
“Dosh, jack, cabbage, the wherewithal. Lolly, filthy lucre, the loot. Greenback, stack, rack, a peti.”
Dismas had a backpack and a clamshell phone. He had a black hoodie and satisfactorily scuffed desert boots. He had a wallet with dollars and rupees, a train reservation, two debit cards, and a passport-size photo of Aaliyah.
“Uh, how much do you need?”
“How much do you have?”
“Twenty thousand rupees and a few hundred dollars,” he said, regretting the words as they left his mouth. “I could lend you five thousand?”
“That won’t help very much, I’m afraid. I’m skint, as in, there’s nothing in the till. Give me the twenty, you can always get more at an ATM.”
“I’m about to catch a train to Goa.”
“You owe me. You owe me.”
Dismas shook his head. He saw the nurse at the top of the steps. A rickshaw stopped near Xavier’s outstretched hand.
“I’ll send you a cheque care of the post office in Panjim. Give me the dollars too. I’m in need. I am dependent on your kindness.”
“Newton, this is a bit much,” he said, but he handed over the money.
“The inability to love.”
“What?”
“Dharini. I saw it in her face, what it means to live without love. What does love mean when the world is ending? Twenty-year-olds feel the end of days. I do too. I mean, look at me. This is what happens when the void engulfs your brain. Inability. Your curse as well.”
“It’s time we ended this.”
Coming toward them was the nurse and a man in a doctor’s coat. Xavier laughed and climbed into the auto and Dismas realised that he’d never before heard the older man laugh. It was an unsettling act of aggression, like a monkey baring its teeth; there was no affection, only malice.
“It’s not me, it’s me,” Xavier said.
“Either way, time to break up.”
Xavier reached into the pocket of his ancient sports coat and brought out a sheaf of folded paper, which he presented to Dismas with a small flourish.
“Something I’ve been working on intermittently for decades, a book of poems about the black and brown saints of the world. Rather autobiographical, I must immodestly add,” he said. “Consider it an advance payment against my debt.”
Reluctantly, Dismas took the poems.
And as the auto pulled away Xavier said, “You can’t break up with me, Bombayman, I’m unbreakable.”
5.
On the overnight train Dismas remembered he knew someone in Goa, the defrocked editor of a Bombay men’s magazine that went out of business when mass-market pornography arrived in the world. But it had been years since they met and he wasn’t sure of the address. He also had the location of Xavier’s boyhood home in Forgottem and a recommendation for a hotel.
Late at night he overheard the men in the compartment discussing a ghost ship. A bearded man did most of the talking, describing the ship in loving detail, how the night before she was to set sail a powerful current seemed to drag her keel this way and that. All night the vessel moved independent of the tides, as if a giant underwater hand were playing with her as a child might play with a bathtub toy. In the morning they found a dead dolphin near the stern, a young dolphin with a terrible gash in its side. When the first mate saw the dolphin his eyes filled with fear and though he said nothing the men knew he had seen a premonition and they too were afraid. Soon it was time to set sail and they weighed anchor. The mainsail filled and the ship rocked but she would not move. There were shouts from the men of awe and incomprehension. The sunlight seemed to darken by a shade and they saw mist wrap around the forecastle and spread from spar to spar as if they were far out at sea. Where had the sea smoke come from? The men, superstitious as are all seafarers, looked to each other for a sign that they had not drowned in the night. There were whispers among them that a ghost was on board, perhaps the ghost of the dead saint they were transporting to Spain. The saint did not wish to leave Goa, said the bearded man to the others. And here he quoted a song, or a proverb from a book, perhaps a yogi’s biography or autobiography, or perhaps it was from a movie about a yogi, he couldn’t remember. But how well the couplet fitted the tale of the saint who wished to stay.
His ship was set to sail for Spain;
Before it left, t’was back again.
You can still feel his power, said the man. This is why people take away bits of his flesh, to see for themselves if the body is still fresh. One of the other men asked if it was true, was it fresh? Yes, the bearded man said in a child’s voice. It bleeds!
Dismas tried to sleep but images crowded his head and after some time he sat up on his bunk. Only he and the bearded man were still awake and when the man began to speak his words mixed with the sound of the wheels. He said he was a steward on a cruise ship and it was his first time home in more than a year, but he was in no hurry to return because he didn’t know what he would find. His father had died and his brother-in-law had taken over the family home. This was the problem when you sailed for a living. When you returned it was as a stranger to a strange land.
He was silent for some time and then he apologised. It was late and he had been travelling all day, he said, and it was always in the final leg that exhaustion set in. He asked if Dismas was on work or holiday and when Dismas said he planned to visit the Basilica of Francis Xavier, the man closed his eyes for a moment. What a coincidence, he said, for that was the saint they had been discussing earlier in the evening, whose remains would not leave Goa. Dismas was in luck: the Exposition of the saint’s remains occurred only once in twelve years and the next viewing was scheduled for the following week. An important saint, the patron of wanderers without destination, said the sailor, holding up the medallion that hung around his neck. There was a book by a former Jesuit named John Lobo that told the true story of what had happened to the saint’s relics. Of course the church had tried to suppress it and some booksellers refused to stock copies but the Restoration bookshop in Panjim was worth a try, he said. And now, if you don’t mind, I will shut my eyes and try not to dream.
Just then the sound of the train changed. Everywhere, in village and mangrove and level crossing, night was falling, and in the rough dwellings by the water the glow from the kerosene lamps joined the colours of the Christmas lights strung among the trees, a shifting wall of green that fell away as they pushed forward. In the shadows thrown by the train indistinct figures moved, emptied of colour and detail, and as one by one the lights were extinguished in the towns they passed the train also went dark until nothing remained but the dim blue of a night light in the corridor.
*
Living in Goa, even temporarily, even with your onward tickets booked, you thought about futility. The beach was everywhere and power failed for long stretches and from noon until five in the evening it was too hot to go outside. You ate big meals and took siestas after lunch.
His accommodation was a one-room cottage not far from the address he’d been given for the old Xavier house in Forgottem. He had expected some remembrance of the artist, a bust or plaque to mark the house where he’d been born, but the plot looked abandoned, its entrance marred by a thorny overgrowth of bush and a sagging padlocked gate. He tried the neighbours but the Ribeiro house too was empty: he would have to come back. His boots were wrong and his clothes were too heavy; grit settled like a new layer on his skin and he had to make an effort to walk to the beach in search of the ship he had been told about.
“It’s the kind of thing you will see only in India, one of our specialities – dereliction,” the Bangalore businessman had said, and pleased by the sound of the phrase, he had repeated it. “Dereliction is our speciality!”
Dismas ha
d expected trance music and squalor, garbage strewn with marigolds, deranged tribes of long-haired legionnaires. But there were no reggae shacks selling sarongs and alcohol, no drug dealers and prostitutes, no parade of hallucinating tourists and vengeful locals; instead he found a narrow strip of clean sand and a shack and a fence of bamboo matting to keep out the stray dogs and cattle.
My River Honey dominated the view, a big ship stuck fast in the shallow water: the dereliction he’d been told about. Tourists walked on the sand or bathed, dwarfed by the hull of the crippled sailing vessel. They took snapshots of its faded insignia and the thick brown rust that leaked into the water. The ship was the subject of half a dozen legal actions and discussions in the legislative assembly and now it was part of local folklore, emblematic of the state’s corruption at the highest levels. A British salvage firm contracted at great cost had tried and failed to refloat the vessel. Fresh tenders had been offered but nothing had come of them and in the intervening years My River Honey had become a part of the waterline, an iron reef that had changed the shape of the beach.
And at the far end of Forgottem bay, another oddity, a sixteenth-century prison fort converted into a five-star hotel. There was a sign with a list of partially crossed-out warnings. The first was untouched, ‘Swim on this beach at your own risk.’ The second and third had been painted over, but hastily, half-heartedly: ‘Swimming here is like committing suicide’, ‘Many people have died here – please do not swim without supervision’. Careless as it was, the obscuring of the warnings had worked. Entire families were in the water, British visitors on a package tour, living in a refurbished Indian heritage site and swimming in its dangerous private waters.
He rented a scooter and took it on a road that was a thin strip of raised earth between coconut trees and paddy. He rode past egrets in a waterlogged field and a whitewashed church, and he stopped near a garage where a group of men worked on a motorbike. Across the road was a house so darkened by grime that it took a few moments to see the murals on its façade: a slender figure in a green waistcoat and hat, and a rooster in faded red, yellow and green, and a woman in a red dress holding a lacework fan.
He knocked on the door and peered into windows and trailed mud on the stained porch, but everything was dark and printed with dust as if the house had been unoccupied for years, exactly the kind of place in which he expected to find his friend. The men working on the motorbike knew better. Jacopo’s house was next door and in any case he was not home, he had gone to market. They told him to look for the red scooter.
“Nobody else has one like it.”
Dismas remembered passing the market early on the ride out. Now he reversed the trip and went back toward the beach with the sun in his eyes. He saw the egret, motionless among the paddies, and he parked in a gravel courtyard. The big church was empty but the fans spun on their long stalks and the floor was spotless. He sat in a pew at the back near a picture of Saint Sebastian, whose posture suggested his true identity – a saint of perpetual assent, his confusion and faith as clear as the sunlight on the gravel. Dismas was subject then to an old memory, a Bombay rave where Ecstasy mixed with orange juice had been passed around as fuel for the dancing. Half out of his head he had climbed a stack of speakers and waved to the crowd from the top. Jacopo had put out his arms. Jump, he’d shouted, I’ll catch you. And such was the pull of the music and the chemicals that he had considered it.
The market was a flat-roofed shed in the main square. He found the red Lambretta right away, its licence plate and rearview missing, the machine in a state of advanced disrepair, and he found Jacopo in a market stall staring intently at the tomatoes.
“Been a time,” said Dismas.
“Yes, yes,” Jacopo bellowed in greeting.
They rode back to his home, which was in worse shape than the abandoned house with the murals next door. On the porch were puppies and half-chewed bits of bread and bowls of water. Jacopo fell into a broken rattan chair. His faded blue jeans were cut off above the knees and he was shirtless, his chest a mat of dark fur, leaner than Dismas remembered.
“Just sit anywhere,” he said. “Later, we’ll do some budding.”
Birding. They would go birding.
Dismas cleared the debris from a low wall that bordered the porch. Near him was the cot on which Jacopo slept, surrounded by firewood, toys, bits of wiring, electronic components, odds and ends of mysterious provenance and purpose. On a stool was a pair of German binoculars in a beautiful leather case.
“I picked up something,” he said, holding up a tube of hash. “A present, like.”
He broke off a good chunk and held it to Dismas’s nose. The smell was heady and unmistakable and it had an immediate effect: his arms came alive with goosebumps. A small joint was made and lit, in silence, the ritual protocol observed, and now an elderly man walked past the porch and Jacopo exhaled a cloud of smoke in his direction.
“My uncle,” he said, gesturing at the man. “I’m the black sheep, like, they expect a certain kind of behaviour from me, can’t let them down.”
When he passed the joint Dismas took a cautious pull of unadulterated resin. The heat and ambition drained out of him in an instant. To smoke hash in Goa was to lose all interest in your surroundings. You let the sun work on your pores. You watched the puppies waddle and fall. You knew there was no reason to get out of your chair.
In the decade since they’d met Jacopo said it had become difficult for him to continue in Bombay.
“Everything changed. People I’d known for years, shop owners, barflies, layabouts, I realised I didn’t know them any more, didn’t trust them. The crazies were in our midst. Plus the drugs changed. Paranoia, I know ya. LSD-25 became -26 and -27, MDMA cut with mephedrone, and the Special K, yeah? Who decided elephant tranquilliser was a party drug for humans?”
One night, a month after the Babri Masjid was destroyed by a mob of Hindus, Jacopo took a taxi home to the suburbs. There were fires along the way, the city in flames, houses and shops put to the torch, and the strangest thing of all, no people on the streets. In Bombay! The taxi approached a police check post and an armed sentry gestured to the driver to stop. He sped right past. Jacopo ducked but there was no gunfire.
Minutes later they reached Mahim and the driver said, “Look, don’t mind, are you Hindu or Mussalman?” Jacopo replied, “Neither, I’m a Bombayite.”
“It doesn’t bother me but in case there’s trouble I should know.”
“I’m not Hindu or Muslim.”
“Then?”
“I’m a Catholic. From Goa.”
“Boss,” said the driver, a well-built young Maharashtrian. “These days that’s as bad as being Mussalman.”
They drove in silence until Bandra. The driver said it wasn’t safe to go further and Jacopo spent the night at a friend’s house.
I came to understand the hold of fiction over the people of India, said Jacopo. I realised this was one of the last remaining places in the world where people killed themselves over invented stories. The riots had come to define the city. It affected everyone, even someone as marginal as he. And for some reason the city’s madness came to him in the form of epiphanies that took place always in a Bombay taxi.
One evening he took a cab from the airport to his editor’s house at Walkeshwar in the heart of the city. Because there were no shrines on the dashboard Jacopo assumed the driver was Muslim. Jacopo was travelling with a female colleague and he noticed the cabbie’s eyes fixed on his in the rearview mirror. The mirror would slip and the man would tilt it up, positioning it for a view of the couple in the back. Then Jacopo noticed that the meter wasn’t working. A wire had come loose, the driver said. He told the man to drop them to another cab, but at a traffic light on the arterial road connecting Worli to South Bombay the driver headed into a side lane. For gas, he said. The lane, Jacobo knew, was in a Muslim neighbourhood. His paranoia kicked in. Why couldn’t the driver fill petrol on the main road? Because, the driver said, I need gas,
not petrol. He meant the cooking gas cylinders some taxis used as cheap fuel. By now they were deep into unfamiliar streets and Jacopo shouted at the man to stop. As they haggled about payment two men in skullcaps came up to the driver.
Jacopo laughed soundlessly, exposing his black front teeth. “I knew it, Hindo’s, Hindon’ts, Mozzies, city had gone to the dogs of god.”
If his first two taxicab moments turned him against Hindus and Muslims the third turned upside down his view of the city and his place in it. He was on his way to the airport, finally making his move to Goa, and a woman approached the cab at a traffic light. He noticed that she didn’t distort her face in the familiar dry crying. Her salvaar kameez was worn in the Muslim way, the pallu framing her face, and her glass bangles were a play of colour from elbow to wrist. Everything about her was tasteful but what held him was her face. He tried to look away.
“I am your sister,” she said. “Don’t turn away from your sister when she asks for your help.”
She spoke in a quick rush timed for the traffic lights.
“You will go to London and Switzerland. Fortune will follow you like a bride. If you help me I will help my brothers and sisters.”
Her hands were on the window frame and her face was inches from his, so close he could have kissed her. He gestured at the car ahead of them.
“See that car? Lots of money – try them.”
“The rich are stingy,” said the woman. “They never help the poor. Only the poor help the poor.”
She was looking straight at him as she paid him this compliment. She had looked past their differences to the fact of their mutual exclusion from the city’s citadel. Her eyes told him that nothing he might say or do would change her opinion about the connection they shared. As soon as he reached in his pocket and gave her a note she was gone.
