The Book of Chocolate Saints

by Jeet Thayil

  After lunch everybody usually took a nap, everybody but me. And in the evening Patsy and I would go to the market to shop for dinner. I got into the habit of going out for coffee at midday, sometimes as soon as lunch was over. I went to a small sea-facing café on Bandstand and ordered black coffee and a slice of chocolate cake. It was the best part of my day. I’d eat the cake and drink the coffee and listen to the conversations around me. If somebody said something interesting I would make a note of it. Once a bearded young man with an enormous backpack was deep in whispers with another young man who looked like his twin, except he had taken off his backpack and placed it on the floor. I didn’t know what they were talking about but the words sounded to me like the old poem by the priest, the deacon, about men and islands and the prophetic sound of bells. I had started to carry an exercise book with me and I wrote down some of what the young man was saying. “Amateurs hack systems,” he said. “Professionals hack people.” And I thought of my son, of course, and the worst day of my life when I had tried to attack him with a knife. I started to cry but I made sure to cry softly so nobody would notice and the young man continued to talk and I continued to write. I wrote through my tears. “We used to think concealment was protection but it turned out exposure was protection,” he said. And he said, “We’re always one line away from being awesome.” And he said, “Stay jealous.” After some time I stopped crying but I kept my pen ready. There was a long silence and then the bearded young backpacker hit the tabletop with his hand and said, “Thursday’s son I’m watching porn, you got your Friday duckface on, burn a U-turn to the john, moan the dawn we waiting on.” Was it a message, I wondered, from my husband? But of course that couldn’t be. It could not be. He was far away in some other café by another sea. And in any case there was nothing he wished to say to me. Or was it a message from my son? Some afternoons the conversations were in Hindi, Marathi, and English, people speaking three languages at the same time. Sometimes every conversation was work-related and it seemed as if everybody was there for a business meeting. A woman in a suit said, “Everybody is a customer.” Immediately I wrote it down. She was speaking to a man who nodded eagerly. He was hanging onto her words. “Some happy customers become distributors.” I was beside myself. Goodness, I thought, how could there be so much business in one city? Was everybody engaged in commerce of some kind? It seemed to me there were a thousand ways to make money and ten thousand ways to spend it. Perhaps it had always been this way and I had not noticed. One Monday early in the afternoon two men wandered in and ordered black coffee and when it came the one with the bald head and glasses produced a hipflask and added a shot to both their cups. The other man had a full head of hair streaked with grey, a handsome man who smoked incessantly. The smoke bothered me and I thought of changing my table but the tears were upon me again and I didn’t want to attract unnecessary attention. So I sat and waited for the woe to stop and meanwhile I listened to the young drunkards, the happy drunkards sipping whisky at noon. It goes without saying that I envied them because I was not allowed to drink. Alcohol reacts with my medication, I fall asleep. The drunkards were discussing a magazine that lay on the table between them and they seemed fascinated by the cover photo of two middle-aged men in suits sitting at an outdoor table. “I thought they hated each other,” the one with hair said. “Newton hates everyone,” said the bald one. “God only hates Newton.” And then I realised that one of the men they were discussing so intimately was my son. I took another look at the photo as the tears continued to fall. There was a title I could not understand, MEETING IN NEEMRANA. But there was no doubt that it was my son in the picture. Now the tears came in an unstoppable flow. I felt so humiliated. It was my son they were talking about. I had been disgraced in front of the world. I had been crushed. I told myself to breathe and I remembered the laughers in the park and I thought about the one-metre laugh. I took another look at the magazine. The caption said the other man’s name was Naipaul and when I saw his face, the deep furrows, the downturned mouth and pouched eyes, the cold, absolutely cold and ruthless eyes, I knew God was the correct name for him. If God were to take human form he would look like this.

  Farzana Amanella Kaur, arts activist, interviewed by Dismas Bambai in Lado Sarai, New Delhi, October 2005

  The last time I met him? That would be the late nineties, probably around 1997 or 1996, around the time he left Lula and moved to New York. I went to a reading at the Jehangir Art Gallery and he was one of the featured poets. I was a Bombay girl for many years before I moved to Delhi. I’d been to a few readings but never one like this. It’s probably best to describe it as a kind of avant-garde event, which was common enough in the world of visual art. The poets were considerably less experimental in my opinion. I don’t know why, I really don’t. It might have had something to do with the time. The years of planned socialism had just come to an end and India was stepping slowly into its future of unplanned capitalism. Maybe this had a reverse effect on the poets, what with the exuberance of the seventies and eighties unravelling into caution. So it was a bit of a surprise to stumble into this thing. There were six of them, Dom Moraes, Adil Jussawalla, Ranjit Hoskote, H. Masud Taj, Newton Xavier, and a poet whose name I can never remember, skeletal fellow, strung out or drunk, who put together an anthology some years later, The Bloodshot Book of Contemporary Indian Poets, or something like that. Anyway the idea was the poets would stand at a measured distance from each other and recite simultaneously for half an hour. The audience was invited to walk from one poet to the next. You could listen to a poem and move on as if you were walking around a poetry bazaar and sampling a taster. Wonderful idea, I thought. The listener or viewer became a participant in the process rather than a passive recipient of the mercy or vitriol of whoever was reading. Unfortunately, the only people present were the poets and yours truly. This was before the age of self-promotion. They thought all they had to do was read and the audience would come. Three or four people did come but by accident, students and housewives on their way to the Samovar for a cup of tea or a beer, and they found themselves in the midst of a piece of literary history or performance history or art history, and of course they had no idea. The poets didn’t care to notice and it occurred to me that they had never been in a room together before. Once they started it was obvious that they were reading to each other and not to the handful of people who drifted in and out. They were responding to the pitch of each other’s voice, to the timbre and the rhythm. I listened in the same fashion. I put my mind aside. I knew it was not a question of understanding but absorbing, through the skin if necessary. Moraes was the first to take a cigarette break and when he returned he asked someone to bring him a stool. He was shaky on his feet, he said, and he preferred to be seated. I thought he read too softly, as if he was speaking to himself in a language he hoped no one would understand, or not understand too easily. Jussawalla started with a joke. He said the old rule about poetry readings was that as long as the audience outnumbered the poets you were doing okay. Then he looked around, shrugged, and read a poem called ‘Land’s End’. Hoskote and Taj struck me as the only ones who took the event seriously: there were no jokes, only earnestness. In Hoskote’s case this was understandable since he was the youngest poet there. Xavier said he had written nothing new, or nothing new that was worth reading. Instead he would read some pages from his notebook, a list of words and phrases beginning with the letter D, words, he said, that might evoke some particular meaning for the Age of Rage. I made a note:

  Despair

  Disease; dis-ease; deceased

  Destruction (see Self-)

  Dropsy & dengue

  Dukkha

  Disgust (see Self-)

  “Dark street by which once more I stand”

  Decadence & the dandy

  Disturbance, thy name is

  Doomsaying the doomsayer

  Daft, doped & delirious

  Depressives against depressants

  Dumb as in deaf & dumb as in dimr />
  Diabolic, a daily diet of the

  Die if you do, die if you don’t

  ‘Dilrubba O Dilrubba’

  Degeneration; degradation; derangement

  Dolor’s delinquent daughters

  Decrepitude & defeat

  Dawood, the don of Dubai

  Disaster the master

  Distress the mistress

  Damn the diminuendo

  ‘Dulce et Decorum est’

  Delhi dour ast

  ‘Dum Maro Dum’

  Dimple

  Devilgod

  Drowsy dullness

  Drowning, the song

  He went on but I decided thirty was a good number at which to stop. Meanwhile, the skeletal poet whose name I can never remember appeared to be nodding off, or he might have been speaking with his eyes closed and his mouth stuffed with cotton wool, or perhaps he was speaking in slow motion and the words were out of sync with his mouth. I don’t know. He too had decided against reading poetry. Instead he improvised a lecture about Nosferatu, starting with the Murnau version and ending with Werner Herzog’s, which he said was a secret portrait of the junkie as vampire, not as a caricature of evil but as an addict filled with self-loathing to the point of paralysis. Afterwards they gathered on the front steps of the Jehangir, those famous steps that seem so wide in our imagination but in reality were cramped and narrow. I noticed that they didn’t meet each other’s eyes. They said a few words, one-syllable salutations or off-hand farewells, and then they slipped into the moist Bombay night, the same night that had swallowed so many lost poets. They each went off alone because they were always alone, those boys, they had no talent for companionship. They were martyrs to a cause and for that if for nothing else I will always be devoted to them.

  I believe Xavier’s obsession with saints is in reality a bewildered or vengeful or helpless nostalgia for the poets of Bombay. In certain ways the lives of the poets and the lives of the saints are similar: the solitary travails, the epiphanic awakening and early actualisation, the thwarting and the mercy, the small rewards, the false starts, the workaday miracles, the joyous visions and fearful hallucinations, the flagellation of the flesh and the lonely difficult deaths. I don’t mean to be a psychologist but it seems fairly clear to me that his saint obsession also had another source. His mother.

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

  Wait, before you go I want to tell you about my last conversation with the writer known as God. It wasn’t long afterwards that I came back to this place. I wasn’t sick or hallucinating, that’s an important point. It was not a hallucination. Call it a visitation. And remember I’m a doctor, I know how to stay calm when I’m examining someone’s internal organs, I know how to be precise and economical with my hands, I know I’m at the institute of mental health and I know I’m mad, but I can’t be completely mad, can I?

  I thought it odd that God chose to appear in the guise of the writer, the Hindu writer with the name of a Christian saint, Nai Paul or New Paul. I made it a point to note every small thing about him in case it came up one day. I noted the old turtleneck under his denim shirt and the fact that he was still handsome in a tired sort of way. I noticed his teeth, which were small and so pointed I thought of injections, and his eyes, which were full of exhaustion, and his fat stomach and dark skin and shaped goatee, so different from the ragged beard my son wears these days.

  The writer sat at the counter of a bar in a high-ceilinged room and I took the stool beside him. I noticed he was making a face. It was difficult to tell what kind of face because the corners of his mouth were always pointed down. A man of constant sorrow, I thought to myself, with the face of an ancient sea turtle.

  I said, “There’s something I’d like to ask you.”

  “If it isn’t the recurrent dreamer, in which case I must be the recurring dream,” he said.

  “I wasn’t dreaming then and I’m not dreaming now. May I ask you something?”

  “As you see, I’m at your disposal. One thing.” He drummed lightly on the counter. “My boredom threshold has fallen to zero, so don’t ask the standard question because then I’ll have to give the standard answer, which is breathe. Or with my customary bis, which is breathe, which is breathe. Or in Persian, zhivaya zhizin. Zhivaya zhizin, do you see?”

  All I saw was the lumbar back brace he wore over his denim shirt. I remembered the bad back he talked up in interviews, the heroic bad back he blamed on the hard labour of making the world. I understood that the wearing of the brace was a kind of vanity. He would not wear it under the shirt. He’d wear it for the world to notice and admire.

  I said, “Are you having fun or is it just work?”

  “Let me answer your first question first, for if we do not proceed chronologically we do not proceed. I can tell you that the next to be taken will not be you. That is what you wished to know, is it not?”

  “Who will it be?”

  “Don’t ask questions if you don’t wish to hear the answer.”

  “Newton? Do you mean my son?”

  He shook his head. Did he mean no or did he mean he would not tell? There was no point asking. He would not reply; he would outwait me; his patience was endless.

  “How do I protect my son?”

  “You do what you know you must.”

  He raised his hand and the bartender tripped over with two purplish drinks in tall glasses. Japanese umbrellas floated among blue cherries, seaweed, stinging nettles, and assorted psychedelic morels.

  “Sir,” the bartender said, beaming, “your usual.”

  I looked at the identical drinks and said, “How did you know I wanted one?”

  The writer said, “You do? Bartender!”

  He took the umbrella out of a glass and took a sip. He liked it; he didn’t like it. It gave him pleasure; it gave him none. He wanted another; he did not. When he put the glass on the counter it was empty. Immediately he picked up the second drink. The bartender appeared bearing two more purple cocktails. Putting on a pair of horn-rimmed sunglasses the artist known as God slid one to me. I noticed he was wearing a Panama hat and a neck brace. Where had they come from?

  “The point about boredom is,” and he paused to slurp at his second drink and order two more, “the point is, boredom is necessary to give time its forward momentum and springy, bouncy rhythm. Time moves in direct relation to the proportion of boredom it moves against. The more boredom, the less movement; the less movement, the more give. In short, it is a productive and calming condition, if you get my historical-continental drift. I knew this from the start and used it to my advantage, to my advantage.”

  “Advantage in what, though?”

  “The genre-spanning work of my middle period, of course, after I announced the death of the novel and before I, the writer, brought it back to life with my late master fictions, master fictions. Exile, home and the world, post-colonial post-caste anxiety, the backward society and the centre, shabbiness, the arrival of enigma, these aren’t empty slogans for me; they outline the inescapable map of my world. Let me ask you something, one minute.”

  The bartender placed more cocktails on the counter.

  “Okay, but this is most def the last one or there’s going to be a tsunami.” He took a sip and set the empty glass down. “Let me pose a lickle question. What do creation stories have in common other than sex?”

  I took a cautious sip of the drink, which tasted of fish and molasses.

  I said, “Nothing?”

  He laughed and all conversation in the bar stopped. The laugh was famous, heard a thousand times a day or a thousand times a minute, simultaneously in every corner of the world, a thick laugh, the laugh of an army riding into town to murder, rob, and rape.

  I felt the hairs rise on my upper arms.

  He said, “Let’s consider some of the newer stories, only because the older ones will be incomprehensible to you. Here’s one. The earth emerg
es from chaos fully formed, the earth and all her amenities. She lies with a god who gives her six sons and six daughters, not counting the last, the thirteenth, for important reasons that I’ll get to in just a minute. One of his sons castrates the god and throws him into the sea. How is the castration accomplished? Who is the son’s accomplice? Is it his mother, the earth? These questions are not answered. However, some facts are knowable. A god has been murdered who engendered all mankind. Foam appears from his mutilated testicles and from the foam the thirteenth child is born, a daughter who will continue her father’s interrupted work.”

  The bartender approached but the goateed writer waved him off.

  “Interrupted, as I was saying,” he said, “always interruptus. Then there’s Tem, alone in the vastness, so bored he creates the world from his copious seed floating among the stars like interplanetary battleships. Or to take another story from around the same time, god – and this is god with a lower case g, unlike yours truly who is always upper case – gives birth to a hermaphrodite, a she/he in one capacious form (they are difficult to create, by the way, because of the intricacy when it comes to nerve endings and hormonal redistribution, and because an overabundance of sensitive orgasmic instrumentation must be compensated for with an overabundance of anguish). In any case the hermaphrodite – interesting, do you think, that Aphrodite occurs in a word for a two-sexed being? I digress, I digress, but it is my prerogative, how do you think you were made? – the hermaphrodite fertilises him or her self, the male part fertilises the female and they have a brood of sons and daughters. The children proceed to destroy each other or sleep with each other, which, as you know, may be one and the same thing. And then? Well, then they populate the earth with life forms, stunted and not, followed by the usual denouement. There you have it, two versions of creation. There are others. For instance, a goddess, one of yours, I believe, masturbates the universe into being and her masturbations, in their frenzy, in the froth of their ovulations, are so violent that the universe appears where before there was only silence. As a complement, she invents language. Think of it, a world and a language in one masturbatory moment. How ambitious if not foolishly taxing for any god. Language, not for communication or expression or to articulate the great conundrums, et cetera, et cetera, but purely as foreplay, pre-orgasmic utterance, alphabetic sex toys, not the twenty-six letters of English but the fifty-two letters of Devanagiri, and she inscribes each one on a skull, fifty-two skulls in all, which she wears around her neck like a rosary. All of which brings me to the question that is the point of this explication. May I?”