The Book of Chocolate Saints

by Jeet Thayil

  She asked him if he would be going to the wine shop that morning. She had to pick up a certificate from her college and would only be able to get to the shop at lunch. No, Bhuvapathi said, he would not be going to the shop. Had he given up on it, she asked. It wasn’t that he had given up, it was just that he was busy with other work, he replied. After all he had not always been a wine shop owner, once he had been a physics teacher and according to his students a good one. He had been a physics professional and an astronomy amateur. The wine shop had started as a temporary measure, but they had become accustomed to the income and the temporary had become permanent. The shop had paid for her education and the house in which they lived and that was the only thing that could be said in favour of a business that counted alcoholics and thugs among its valued clients. It had been good for them but perhaps it was time to shut it down. What other work, she asked, looking at the Hindoo on his lap. Thinking, he said. He had been busy thinking.

  “Do you remember something I used to say when you were a child?” he said. “About the sound the universe makes?”

  She tried to remember but he had said so many things about the universe; it was a constant topic when she was growing up.

  “You said universal vowel and first sound babies make are both same,” she said.

  “Not all babies, only smart ones like you.”

  “The sound of oh, this is what you said?”

  “Better astronomers than me said it a long time ago. Now some gravitational wave theorists are also saying that the sound or vibration of space-time is ohm. Isn’t that strange?”

  He pointed to an article he had been reading in the newspaper. She moved around to read the headline, What Is the Universe Saying?

  “I am opposed to the unquestioning acceptance of ancient teaching,” Bhuvapathi said. “But this.”

  She put her breakfast plates in the sink and picked up the house keys and put on her shoes.

  “I’ve been thinking about two things. One, ohm as a frequency or vibration may at last be measurable if the measurer knows what he is looking for. And two, some Arabic words in common astronomical notation reveal unexpected connections between civilisations and epochs,” he said, folding the newspaper and putting it in her backpack. “Take this with you and look at it when you have the time.”

  But she took it out and put it on the table.

  “I’ll see it on Internet,” she said. “There’s never enough news in the newspaper. It’s always less. There’s never enough information to clearify my doubts.”

  “Clarify,” said her father.

  “Yeah, clarify.”

  At the door she asked if he had heard of the new dwarf planet, Eris.

  “The goddess of discord. Also, ‘sire’ spelt backwards. If it is a dwarf, it’s a daddy dwarf or mama dwarf. As large as Pluto. So the question is as many-handed as our own Hindu discord goddess. If Eris is a dwarf then Pluto is a dwarf. If Pluto is a dwarf we must remake the list of planets. Is it a dwarf or a full planet? Decide. And if Pluto is a full planet, then why isn’t Eris the ninth planet in our system?” Bhuvapathi said. “Anyway they’re always discovering new dwarfs. No reason to get excited.”

  She considered for a moment his solemn frown and lopsided glasses and faded Pink Floyd T-shirt and she went back across the room to kiss him on the top of his newly grey head.

  It was a little after noon when she reached the wine shop. The new boy Arjun was at the counter and Mr Narasimhan was working the cash register. He had already taken out his tiffin box and placed it beside him. He ate lunch at the same time every day, twelve fifteen exactly, not at twelve and not at twelve thirty and she liked this about him. She decided to put off doing the accounts until the lunch rush had subsided and in the meanwhile she took over at the register and racked up sales, mostly quarters of rum and whisky; then it was all sound, voices in Kannada and English placing orders, faint traffic, notes counted and clipped, change made, coins dropped into the coin tray. A local beer manufacturer had delivered a point-of-purchase advertisement that was a life-size cutout of a woman in a bikini. She told Arjun to put the cutout next to the refrigerator so customers would see it near the chilled beer. Immediately beer sales increased.

  Late in the afternoon she sat in the inside office with the accountant and went over the returns they would file the following week. The accountant had just had lunch and she could smell the spices on his fingers and the strong milk tea on his breath. She felt a little sick and hoped they would be finished soon because some college friends were planning an afternoon trip to Nandi Hills. The accountant began to itemise and double-check everything. He was annoyingly thorough and two and a half hours later they were still working. Every hour on the hour he would step out of the shop to light a cigarette that he never smoked to the butt. He took three or four drags, leisurely and with some surprise, as if he had only just taken up smoking and couldn’t understand why it had taken him so long to get around to this essential pleasure. Then he flicked the cigarette on the street and came back into the shop. The accountant smoked Wills Navy Cuts, like Xavier, whose life had coincided with hers for a couple of weeks. She realised she did not mind that he had left as abruptly as he had. She had given nothing of herself to him, or nothing that could not be retrieved with a little effort. But he had picked her up and used her and dropped her like an empty bottle of whisky. Had he treated Goody Lol the same way, the woman she had heard so much about and looked up on the Internet? She and Goody were the same size and body type but Goody’s clothes were more stylish and feminine, gauzy dresses, headscarves, hats, high heels. She knew how to be a woman. Dharini’s wardrobe consisted mainly of jeans and saris. They had something in common though Goody would never know it: they were strong women drawn to rascally men. When the accountant left it was much too late for Nandi Hills. She stopped for take-out puffs and cutlets and took an auto home.

  The house was dark and her father had gone to bed though it was still early. She put on the lights and opened the windows and put the food in the oven to heat. His morning coffee and newspaper were still on the dining table. She cleared the cup and sat down with the paper. Near the article about the speaking universe she found the following words written in Bhuvapathi’s hurried hand:

  AL KHWARIZMI = ALGORHYTHM

  AL JABR = ALGEBRA

  AL SUFI = AZOPHI

  AL FERGHANI = FERGANA = ALFRAGANUS

  AL BATTANI = ALBATEGNIUS = ZIJ

  She put the food on a plate and took it into her room. She took off her shoes and dialled up the Internet and in less than ten minutes she knew that her father had made a list of ancient Muslim astronomers and attempted some kind of strange etymology, something to do with the migration of the astronomers’ names and ideas into English and Latin. The discovery dismayed and thrilled her. She fell asleep wondering if she should ask him about it or if it would be better not to mention it at all and again she dreamt of her mother and remembered nothing of the dream when she woke. It was late and she went into the shower. When she came out he was at the window staring at the champakali that had not flowered that year. He had forgotten to make coffee. He had not bathed or shaved. He was talking to himself though she could not hear what he was saying. She asked him what was wrong and he lifted his index finger and nodded. She waited and when he still did not speak she went to the kitchen to start the coffee.

  “Nothing wrong,” he told her at the breakfast table. “I was going over something in my head.”

  “You’re okay or not?”

  “I’m okay.”

  “Means you won’t come to the shop today also?”

  “Dharini, Ari, crazy people do not worry if they are crazy. I worry therefore I am not crazy. I worry a lot so you should not worry.”

  “You’re not crazy because you worry you’re crazy?”

  “Do you talk to her sometimes?”

  “Who?”

  “You know who. I talk to her every morning. Sometimes she talks to me.”

 
“What does she say?”

  “Just now?”

  “Yes, just now.”

  “She said this country can be saved but only by those it is trying to exterminate.”

  *

  She came home early that evening. Her father was out somewhere taking a walk or visiting the lending library. She noticed the house had been cleaned and the breakfast dishes washed and put away. His room too had been tidied. On his desk she found a small pile of handwritten notes, variations of the names he had scrawled in the margins of the newspaper. On the top sheet he had arranged the words in this way:

  ALGORHYTHM = ALGEBRA = ALCHEMY

  AL KHWARIZMI = AL JABR = AL KIMIA

  ALFRAGANUS = ALBATEGNIUS

  FERGHANA = ZIJ

  AZOPHI = AL SUFI | ABOTANY = AL BATTANI

  She tried to make sense of it. Had he put the words together according to category instead of meaning? Then why would Ferghana, a place name, equal Zij, a type of book? Where had Alchemy and Abotany come from? They were not among the first list of words he had made in the margins of the Hindoo. And what had happened to Al Ferghani? Why had only the Latin version of his name been retained? Why did Al Ferghani no longer fit into Bhuvapathi’s overall scheme, if he had one? She hoped there was some kind of pattern in the way the words occurred and she looked up each word again in case she had missed a connection. Finally she gave up and sat with her head in her hands and then she switched to her favourite webcam channel. The Japanese girl sat before a dish that might have been dessert, small squares of yellow and red jelly over black beans and syrup the colour of menstrual blood.

  In a while her father came home with books from the library. In her room he stood behind her chair and they watched the girl use a tiny silver spoon to eat the extra-large bowl of syrupy dessert. Lightly he caressed her shoulders.

  BOOK FIVE

  ‘I Only Know Beautiful When I Paint It Nude’

  Saint Larry

  or Lawrence, or Bantle the Man;

  of Poona & Vancouver;

  burned both ends before the ink ran

  dry; of outsiders & the homeless, a lover;

  precocious & precious, a prodigy;

  patron of transmigrants, vegetable sellers,

  men of spinach & tomato yellers;

  rider on the tide of tragedy.

  Saint Nissim

  of Galilean oil-pressers

  ship-wrecked off the coast

  of Maharashtra

  one hundred & fifty years

  before Christ;

  lover, bird-watcher, et cetera;

  first of the comic confessors;

  of Marathi-speaking

  Bene-Israeli Jews;

  lifelong Bombayman;

  psalmist & palmist; beggar-king;

  payer of latter-day dues;

  ‘my backward place is where I am’;

  & the daisy’s revenge: the forsaking.

  from The Book of Chocolate Saints: Poems (Unpublished)

  Beryl Xavier, mother, interviewed by Dismas Bambai at the Bangalore Institute of Mental Health, Bangalore, June 1998

  It is a strange feeling to be released into the world after you’ve been confined for so long. How long I don’t know, I stopped counting. I walked out of the asylum gates and discovered that everything had changed but only on the inside. The core had changed and the outer crust was the same. I was back in Bombay. Alone. My son had left his wife and moved to New York. My husband was dead. Everything had changed but still the world looked like the world. People went about their business. The weather changed according to the season. There were newspapers and cars. There were hospitals for people and animals. Façade. Everything is façade.

  I went to live with my brother and his family in Bandra on the junction of Perry Cross and Turner Road. It was the house in which I’d grown up, in the neighbourhood where there is a park and a road and various other places of interest named after my family. Next to us was the Jogger’s Park and next to the park was the sea. At first I felt like I was back in school. I was in my old room and some of my childhood things were still there, my globe, some photo albums, my collection of Miss Marple books, though my Sam Spades and Marlowes were missing. The other reason I felt like a schoolgirl was because they kept an eye on me. I suppose they couldn’t believe a lunatic could return to the sane world and I suppose they were right to feel that way. A lunatic cannot unsee his visions however much he might want to – and me, I didn’t want to unsee anything.

  At first I felt like a guest, some kind of poor cousin from the hinterlands. I had forgotten how big the house was, especially when compared to my modest accommodation at the asylum. There were three floors, a lawn in front and a lawn in the back, and from the terrace a view of the Arabian Sea. As always there were more servants than family members. Let’s see, two cooks, a bearer, a driver and a gardener, not counting the watchman and the tradesmen who came and went. One of the cooks and the bearer had been there since I was a girl. Then there was my brother and his wife who were both in their fifties, and my newly married niece – what a funny word, niece – and her young husband who was studying for a degree in hotel management. I thought, right, there will be no doctors in the next generation. And why should there be? I’m a doctor and look what became of me.

  The first night we had dinner on the big table in the front room. The old cook Miriam made the kind of meal my father used to demand every day, mutton cutlets, mutton biryani, cucumber raita, noodles with deep fried minced okra, jaggery pancakes, sweet banana chips and fish pickle, and a bebinca for dessert. As a child bebinca was my passion. My brother had remembered and he had asked Miriam to make one for me, but it was different somehow, not so rich and the flavour too subdued. Or maybe it was me, maybe I was unable to taste complex food after all those years of lunatic fare. Still, it was a loud meal and a happy one, all of them talking at once and only my niece’s new husband sitting quietly. I liked him right away.

  The first night in my old room I had many dreams one after the other. Or it was one continuous dream with many parts. At the end I was in a forest at dawn and a pack of jackals had gathered around me in the weak light, slavering at me, each one laughing his head off. I can’t describe to you what the laughter sounded like except to say that it sounded like the devil, whose multiple throats can produce simultaneous voices in different registers. I knew it was the devil laughing in layers at his own devilish joke and I knew what it was about. It is always a joke on me. When I woke it was dawn or getting close to dawn and I heard laughter coming from the road outside, voices laughing in concert. For a few minutes they would laugh loudly using all the breath in their lungs and then they’d laugh as if they were conversing in confidential tones meant only for each other and then there would be a whispery silence. I dressed hurriedly and left my room and walked downstairs as quietly as I could. It was still early. I encountered nobody as I left the house, only the watchman who opened the gate for me and saluted as I stepped into Turner Road and went toward the laughter. Of course he didn’t know that I should not have been going out by myself. As I neared the park I glimpsed the sea beyond and just then the strangest feeling came over me, a sudden elevation of skin temperature combined with breathlessness and a sense of holy drift, I don’t know how else to put it. My head felt warm but I didn’t have a fever. I was dizzy and confused and for a moment I saw myself, my outer crust mostly unchanged but for the spectacles and grey hair, and my insides pinkly new. I saw myself on the curve of pavement leading to Carter Road, walking aimlessly in every direction as if I had picked up a virus or infection. That was when I understood what was wrong with me. Freedom. It was the first time in ten or twelve or fifteen years that I was walking in a city alone, unaccompanied by attendants. I could have got into a rickshaw or a taxi, there were several parked by the side of the road, and I could have asked the driver to take me somewhere. I could have gone to Bandra Talkies to watch a film or to Elco Arcade for ice-cold pani puri or to the station or to Poona o
r even Goa. I could have done whatever I felt like. The driver knew nothing about me. He didn’t know who I was, who my husband was, who my son was, or what I had done to my son. As far as he knew I was just another old lady and the only thing different about me was that I was slightly less cared for than the other old ladies of Carter Road. He would gladly have taken me wherever I wished to go. I walked to the park thinking these thoughts that put a smile on my face and there I found a group of people following the instructions of a stout man in a white shirt and white trousers. Jumping laugh with mouth closed, said the man. Medium laugh, he said. Cocktail laugh, he said, and it sounded like a party at the Taj, such a sound of tinkling and merriment. One-metre laugh, he said, and how they laughed, so loud I’m sure it was heard even in Bandstand. Arm-swinging laugh, he said, and the laughers swung their arms as if they were marching. And now to end, said the man in white, silent laughter with mouth wide open. And that is what they did, laughed silently and heartily. And soon my shoulders too were shaking uncontrollably as I laughed. Oh, how I laughed!

  When I got home I told my brother Denzil about the laughers at the park and he told me it was a club and they laughed for their health. I went the next morning too and the morning after and although it did no wonders for my health it helped in one way. Denzil and his wife were now quite comfortable with the idea of me going out unsupervised. My days fell into a routine. I woke up early as I always have and I went to the park unless I was feeling shaky or unfit for laughter. After laughter I would walk by the mangroves of Carter Road all the way to Khar-Danda until the smell of fish drying in the sun got too much for me and I’d go home for breakfast. Sometimes Patsy, my niece, and her husband, Olav, would sit outside if it wasn’t too hot and he would practise scales on his guitar. He was teaching himself a song. First he would play it on a tape recorder and then he’d try to reproduce it on the guitar. When I heard him play the guitar it sounded like music but on the tape machine it was completely different, like traffic in a town that was falling into the sea or a sick animal fighting to the last, a death struggle that went on and on, more than ten minutes, more than fifteen. What kind of music is this? I asked Olav. He said it was a recording made by a saxophone player who had died. I don’t remember the musician’s name but I remember the name of the song because my aunt is also called Naima. Olav said he would change the music if it bothered me. On the contrary, I said, it made me feel better to think there were others like me in the world.