The Book of Chocolate Saints

by Jeet Thayil

These encounters were the three stations of his flight from Bombay. He was an outsider to both communities. In the long history of their hatred there was no role for a militant Catlick like himself. He kept his general hostility alive by taking paranoia-inducing chemicals and at those times, stoned, it was a source of anguish that he’d been forced to settle in Goa.

  “That’s what I’m doing here. I had to come back to my own kind, my native place, and start over.”

  But there was another reason for his return to Goa. The magazine he edited had shut down. Overnight he joined the ranks of the unemployed and then he discovered, by accident, that his family had been feuding over ancestral properties in Anjuna and Candolim and Calangute.

  “I bump into this distant uncle, good old boy, at Churchgate Station, and he tells me, Jac, Jac, looks like your mother and brothers aren’t any closer to working things out. Looks like it’s going to be a long and bitter fight, too much cash involved. I didn’t know what he was talking about. I didn’t know my brothers and my mother had taken each other to court over property that belongs to me too. They didn’t mention it. They wrote me off. So I came here to put a spoke, like, in their wheel, cause some trouble.”

  He appointed a lawyer who talked about the law as if it was something that could not be understood by ordinary men, as if it was a benediction, a mystery akin to the ways of God.

  “There is a law within the Law,” he told Jacopo. “Our work is to discern what this may be and to tailor accordingly our aspiration and our longing for release.”

  He did nothing for a year and more and Jacopo fired him and appointed someone else and while he waited for the case to work its way through the system two years passed. He found himself living like a primitive with few needs and possessions. He smoked and wrote articles on birds, identified two hundred and fifty of the four hundred or so species in Goa, compiled details about mating habits and diets: he went to ground.

  “How do editors contact you?”

  “They don’t. What makes you think they do?”

  “Well, how do you work?”

  “I contact them, like. It’s all fucked up,” he said.

  He had a way of stressing the last syllable of each sentence and the tic gave his speech an out-of-control quality.

  “I like birds,” he said, inside a heavy stream of smoke. “I like birds for the perspective they give. I’ll show you.”

  He got up from the broken armchair and crossed the road to a steep hill fronting the house. As they climbed Dismas wished he had more water, stouter shoes, a wider hat-brim. They hiked steadily and stopped only to smoke, the effect of the hash cumulative, a slow expansion in the head and unease in the chest. But it wasn’t unpleasant and the more they smoked the more he liked it. Sound deepened. He heard a hidden layer of detail behind the wind and the noise they made as they walked and he sensed the sea out there. Soon they came upon two motionless men balanced on sticks held to their chins. Small and perfectly still, they did not return Jacopo’s greeting. They were men of the hills, tribals from Central India whose silence and stillness made Dismas feel like an interloper.

  Heat, the occasional mouthful of water, the sound of insect life, the rhythm of the climb; Dismas felt his consciousness narrow to these elements. Jacopo pointed out a long-beaked bird so tiny Dismas would not have noticed him, a butcher bird busily hooking a piece of skink meat on a thorn for later eating. They saw barbets and bee-eaters and glossy raven-like jungle crows. They heard the complex and manic call of a nightingale. And then they crested a hill and came to a skeletal tree beside a garbage dump where Brahminy kites and golden eagles swooped for food or roosted amid great drifts of plastic and charred household waste. They were on a peak high above the Arabian Sea and the wind carried a stench from the dump. The Brahminys took flight, copper and white in the sun, or they waited, sentinel on the dead tree. Dismas held Jacopo’s binoculars to his eyes and watched as a young Brahminy fell backward into the sky with a single flap of his wings.

  They came to a headland and the sea came into view. The beaches of North Goa lay before them in a single unbroken curve of sand. Candolim, Calangute, Baga, Anjuna. Fishing boats and merchant ships crowded the water near the shore but further out to sea it was bare and tranquil, the sun beginning to set. Night falls quickly when you are on top of a strange hill in the middle of nowhere without a torch or supplies.

  Jacopo went by instinct. He lost his way and found it again. He took a path and doubled back when he realised it led nowhere. It was getting darker from one minute to the next and soon it would be difficult to see. Dismas realised he was dependent on Jacopo to get them back to the road and the hash had made him paranoid. How well did he know the fellow after all? What manly ritual were they enacting on this remote Goan hill? What if he was deliberately trying to get them lost, what then?

  Dismas took the lead and Jacopo said nothing when he blundered into undergrowth so thick it was impossible to proceed. They turned back, the path barely visible as they continued downhill, until, the sun gone and full night almost on them, they came upon a family walking in single file and a village with crying children and cook fires and sullen silent men. They emerged opposite Jacopo’s almost exactly where they had set out. As they crossed the road the night turned featureless and Bible black.

  *

  The journey from Forgottem to Old Goa was only a few hours by road but it felt long and arduous. The bus bounced and swerved along unpaved country roads, braking only when it came to a village or small township. To take his mind off the bus driver’s homicidal or suicidal tendency he paid close attention to the scenery as it blurred past, the gutter-spouts and eaves, the picket fences and peaked front porches, the whitewashed churches: a Mediterranean scene but for the scorch of sunlight and the corrosive sand.

  He alighted at the depot and changed buses. Then, a different kind of journey – highways, regulated city traffic, frequent stops. The bus followed a river to the Basilica of Bom Jesus. There was a steep climb and the packages on the overhead racks slid to the floor. They passed the ruins of Saint Augustine’s Church, the rafters overrun with moss and the walls missing but the windows and doors intact. For the final leg the passengers piled into a chartered van that took them to the church grounds.

  It was a mela. Bollywood music issued from speakers attached to trees. Stalls sold paired links of chorise sausage and fizzy beverages in stoppered bottles. There were small hills of bruised apples and boiled sweets and cotton candy. He noted Saint Xavier dolls made of plastic and tin. The saint wore knee-length boots and a blue smock tight across the chest and hips. He had the wide-legged stance of a Jesuit superhero.

  Dismas drifted into a church where people sat in small groups with plastic bags at their feet. They were staring at a tall oil on canvas that hung on the main apse. It was a representation unlike any he’d seen, not the gaunt haunted saint but a jollier man with a ruddy complexion and an air of well-fed bonhomie. A bushy red beard partially obscured his grin and jowls. Over the great stomach a rich surplice hung like the mast of a small sailing vessel. The artist had made solid areas of flagrant red out of the saint’s cheeks and his hair was red and his eyes unnaturally blue. It was Saint Xavier as Falstaff, inviting the people of Goa to partake of the feast.

  And though the picture was a falsehood it seemed correct in the context of the mela and the pilgrims with their plastic bags of food and drink. They posed in front of this or that reliquary and they stroked the empty Medici casket that served as Xavier’s tomb, empty because the body had been moved for viewing. The casket’s marble cupids and gilded Florentine pillars were open to the elements and to curious hands.

  A woman, matronly, still young, placed her freshly reddened lips against the casket and asked her friend, “Removed photo?”

  “Removed,” her friend replied.

  It struck him that they weren’t pilgrims but tourists, holidaymakers in town for the opening of the season. The true pilgrims were in the pews and they carried no came
ras or snacks, their eyes straying to the Falstaffian Xavier and to the tumult of tourists and cameras and to the sign by the casket: Please Keep Godly Silence. Don’t Disturb Religious Feelings.

  Outside on a raised stage a priest spoke into a microphone.

  “How can we experience this god who protects us from bondage and slavery?” he said, showing the congregation the backs of his hands.

  He was plump, with sharp sideburns and veined eyes.

  “People say, ‘I made love.’ It means they had sex. Brothers and sisters, this is not love. Love is unconditional. God does not say, ‘I love you, but.’ To bear witness to God’s love we must know the teachings of the church. This Exposition is not meant for fun. It is a catechism.”

  He asked the congregants to stand.

  Anticipating him they said, “Oh Lord, hear us as we pray.”

  “To replace corruption with righteousness,” the priest said.

  “Oh Lord, hear our prayer.”

  Now it was time to collect money and women in blue saris went up the jerry-rigged aisles. Each carried a long stick with a pocket at the end, like a butterfly net. No coins were passed, only notes.

  The priest began the communion service.

  “We eat your body and drink your blood,” he said. “Let this bring us health in mind and body.”

  More priests appeared, not as grand, in dirty white cassocks and worn rubber slippers. They walked the aisles and hesitantly handed out communion wafers. Pressed into Dismas’s hand the communion was shiny and tasteless and slightly soiled. He touched his tongue to it and let it drop under the seat.

  “Saint Xavier, your heart was burning with love. To proclaim this love you went from country to country and died. This is why God in heaven took you to him and kept your body uncorrupted on earth.”

  But Dismas had found the book the ponytailed man had told him about and he knew the body was corrupted and he would see it soon for himself.

  *

  The day before, in Panjim, he’d stopped at a feni bar near the canals to ask for directions. The auntie behind the counter pointed at a house that stood on its own beside a live oak threaded with pink ribbons. Inside was a high-ceilinged room that was more warehouse than shop. The light came from a single bulb on a wire caked with sticky dust. There were no customers and only one clerk. On the counter were CDs by local choirs and newsletters or homemade tracts or journals for the itinerant preacher and back numbers of The Watchtower, Good News Journal and Awake!

  Dismas asked the clerk if the book was in stock and the man found a copy under the counter. It was as if he had been waiting for just such a request. Was it a popular book? The clerk said it was not; the author was a lapsed Jesuit. Dismas asked what this meant. The clerk said the author had given up the priesthood to marry and have children.

  “But personally, I think once a Jesuit, always a Jesuit.”

  He put the book into a bag that had the name of the bookshop in Old Testament script, REDEMPTION HARDWARE. There was a line underneath in smaller print, ‘Jesus saves and so can you. End of time sale: 30% off on all titles.’

  It was a holiday of some kind. Children played cricket on the street, the wickets drawn in chalk on the wall. They used a lime-green tennis ball and a heavy bat and when the bat connected to the ball it sailed into the sky like a glowing green asteroid. He came to a canal where steps led down to a chapel or shrine, the water deep green and covered in moss.

  On a bench he took the book out of the bag. The Worldly Travels of an Otherworldly Man: Saint Francis Xavier’s Hard Life and Difficult Death was a handsome hardcover volume with cream paper and a silk ribbon bookmark, published in Bombay in 1982. There was a bibliography and index, transcripts from documents, photos and histories and colour plates. There was a list of recommended reading and thirty-four pages of notes. On the cover was an etching of the dark-skinned saint.

  The author John Lobo may have given up the priesthood but his Jesuitic training was like a watermark on every page. He had compiled everything he could find on the saint into one orderly volume and evident in the crotchety attention to detail was his own astringent personality.

  He wrote that he’d become familiar with Francis Xavier’s style of letter writing and he could tell from the language when the saint was despondent and when he was elated.

  It will surprise no one if I report that the latter condition was rarer than the former. Key is the fact that he was seasick throughout the year-long voyage to India. Even then Xavier’s was a remarkably sunny disposition and he was full of plans for the future, but only during the journey. As soon as he arrived at his destination, at any destination, how his manner changed! The Slough of Despond descended quickly. I learned some things about him. If he described a landscape as Indian you can be sure he was unhappy due to some imagined slight or inadequacy among the people he met. If he described a bird it meant he had been overtaken by joy.

  But it wasn’t Xavier’s letters or the facts of his life that interested Lobo as much as the events that followed his death: the book was a meticulous documentation of the various exhumations and misadventures and mutilations that his remains had endured. It seemed like an eccentric way to compose a biography and there was only one clue as to Lobo’s reasons. He began his introduction by saying that if hardship was an index of saintliness then Xavier was the prototypical saint, for death had put no end to his difficulties. Then followed the list of true-to-life indignities that his body had suffered at the hands of sailors, church officials, and devotees.

  From an excess of devotion or bad luck his remains endured multiple exhumations and numerous acts of random mutilation. Two months after the burial on Sancian a sailor dug up the body and took as a souvenir a piece of flesh from his thigh. This is where the idea of his incorruptible body took root and spread. It began with the sailor reporting to his shipmates that the body was still fresh.

  The saint’s remains were transported to Malacca where they were reburied in a rocky grave. The difficulty of the burial is on record. His neck was broken to make the body fit into a space that was entirely too small to receive its guest. This assessment is built on the number and extent of injuries discovered on the body during the first exhumation: fractured ribs, a dislocated nose, a bruise on the left breast and another on the right cheek.

  Two years later the body was exhumed once more and taken by ship to Goa. A medical examiner, who would contribute in no small measure to the saint’s quickly growing legend, wrote, ‘The body was incorrupt.’ An English physician, who visited Goa in 1675, described the corpse as ‘a Miraculous Relick of his better part, it still retaining its vivid Colour and Freshness, and therefore exposed once a Year to publick view’.

  The body went on view and these yearly Expositions, as they came to be called, became further occasions for mutilation. An unbalanced Portuguese woman by the name of Isabel Caron bit off the small toe of his right foot. Instead of being punished she was commemorated and her name associated with Saint Xavier’s in all subsequent histories of the saint.

  Then came the worst cut. A lay brother who shall not be named cut off a piece of flesh from the corpse. Which piece? In later years he apologised for his action and attributed it to a kind of hysteria, but the facts of the matter are quite clear. He took a piece of the saint’s genitalia and installed it in the reliquary of the Basilica of Bom Jesus, where the corpse, separated from several of its extremities, still resides. The church has denied this terrible mutilation, but I offer the incontrovertible proof of mine own eyes. For I have seen the relic in question.

  I am sorry to say that the Jesuits themselves were responsible for most of these unfortunate events. Of course, even in their depredations they kept meticulous accounts. The documents show that another toe of the right foot was detached – ‘found loose’ according to the account – and allowed to find its way to the Bom Jesus. Two joints of a fourth toe were added by order of the patriarch. These body parts did not travel far. Others did. Saint Xavier’s ri
ght arm was sawed off from the shoulder joint at the request of the Jesuit Superior of the Society of Jesus. The hand and forearm up to the elbow were sent to Rome, where they lie at altar in the church of Gesu. The upper arm was divided into three pieces, one was apportioned to a Jesuit college in Cochin, another sent to a college in Malacca, and the shoulder blade to the former Portuguese colony and present casino destination of Macau. The corpse’s internal organs from the chest and abdomen were removed and sent to various reliquaries in various countries at the request of Jesuit officials. But there were unrecorded mutilations as well. More toes were taken and between two official examinations, in 1932 and 1951, the left ear disappeared. The examination reports are revealing compilations of medico-religious prose. And by the mid-twentieth century there was a change in the terminology employed by the church to describe the saint’s poor remains. The relics are no longer described as incorruptible.

  Here Lobo quoted from one of the reports:

  We can no longer speak of an incorruptible body – which is not necessary, for the sanctity of a person is not measured by the preservation of his body – but of the sacred relics of Saint Francis Xavier, for what we have today are mainly bones of the Saint … a shrivelled skull, two legs, the left arm and hand, and heaps of bones, loose vertebrae, ribs or fragments of ribs and pieces of skin.

  “How meagre an inventory,” wrote Lobo, comparing the list above to a report from 1782:

  He has the whole head with a great portion of hair. His facial features have deteriorated, but are covered up with skin, except the right side that has a bruise. He has both ears, and all his teeth visible, except one. He has his left arm with hand eaten up, he does not have the right arm … The body has everything save the intestines. There were legs with dry skin, the bare feet covered with skin, lines made by the veins as well as the nails could be seen. Only one toe on the right foot was missing, and had been taken off by a devotee.