by Jeet Thayil
Excuse me? Can we get some service? What’s happened to this place? Time was, they’d hover around your table until you wished they’d go away.
When I finished the ice cream I knew that the only way I was going to be able to deal with this was to find something solid I could focus on, something real. So I rummaged in my mirrorwork jhola bag and found the poems and got back to work. I used to carry the jhola everywhere, it was my true home. I had a couple of manuscripts I was working on, my Marathi–English dictionary, some letters and photos and my passport. I remember I was translating Narayan Doss’s My Name is Kamathipura series and I picked up where I’d left off, a poem about Shantibai, a woman whose unique selling point on the street were the acid burns on her face and breasts. I started work on the poems or I resumed work on the poems and it calmed me. I was able to forget the ice cream, the coffee, the persecution of zoophiliacs, the immense fact of capital punishment, the inescapable presence of California. I was able to forget everything and focus on Kamathipura 11th Lane and Shantibai. I stayed in California for a fortnight and I finished the translation and then I flew to Bombay, from Hollywood to Bollywood with the complete translation in my jhola. It was my Diwali gift for Narayan.
This was in the days before email. Now it’s hard to imagine such a time. I mean, what did we do before? We wrote letters and postcards. Except I hadn’t written to him, I had turned up in Bombay expecting my friends to be waiting for me and I met everyone except for Narayan. They told me he was on one of his trips, somewhere up north or visiting family in the interior or just lying low on some kind of bender. I waited for two weeks, for three. I met a publisher, met friends, studied the stray dogs of the city, but all the while I was waiting to hear from Narayan and I never did. It upset me. I was living in a hotel on Marine Drive and one night I heard voices in the stairwell behind my room. What should we do with her, they were saying. And in a voice that was pitched higher, in a voice that strived to differentiate itself, a woman spoke. She knows everything, this woman said. It was as if she wanted me to hear and then she said it again in a curiously flat way. She knows everything. It started to rain and I stepped out on the balcony of the hotel and when I looked down I noticed that everything was wet except for a rectangular dry spot directly in front and a woman stood there looking straight at me. I couldn’t see her face but I knew it was the woman I had heard talking in the stairwell. First I went back to my room and checked the locks and then I packed my things and sat on a chair and waited for dawn. I left the lights on. The next morning I left that hotel and checked into another. Later I changed my ticket and flew out of the city. I didn’t meet Narayan on the trip. When we met again it was in America. He’d flown there on some government freebie junket type thing.
Hello, we’re waiting to order. Can we get some service? At least one person on this table is white?
Philip Nikolayev, poet and editor, interviewed by Dismas Bambai at Ramanna Ashram, Rajouri Garden, New Delhi, October 2006
I started a business to make money and I worked from home but I was working all the time. That’s the thing when you work for yourself. You end up working harder than ever in your life. I did not stop writing. I continued work on a collection of immured sonnets and a series of linked essays and I continued publishing my magazine once a year. But now I also had a daytime job. It couldn’t be helped, I had a family to support.
One day in 2000 or 2001, I’m not sure when, in any case it was one of those apocalyptic years of the early two thousands, and the phone rang and a voice said, hello, is that Philip? I said it was. And the voice said, oh good, I’m glad to hear it because I’d love to talk with you about the mystic beard of Tagore-da. Then he laughed and I knew. I said, one minute. I put the phone down and went to the landing of my apartment where I’ve placed an armchair and a blanket and an ashtray. I took a look at my view, which is an inch of Harvard Square, a tree, a few buildings, some sky. Not much of a view but it’s mine. I looked at it for a long time and I took a deep breath. I inhaled the calm air of Boston, the ordered streets and evenly spaced trees, the groomed Charles, the mild manicured sunlight, the absence of car horns and shouts, the absence of a hundred layers of noise. What I was doing, I was inhaling the opposite of disorder, the opposite of the river and the ghats of Benares. When I was ready I went back inside and picked up the phone. I said, hello Narayan. He didn’t bother saying hello, instead he went into a kind of promotional lecture about himself. He mentioned a long poem, a small epic about the geographical features of Kamathipura, in which each street was numbered and dated in the manner of a gazette or authorised legal document or public journal published by the municipal government. Then he informed me that a Romanian magazine had interviewed him and the interview had been published in its latest issue and ran to more than three thousand words, possibly because the Romanian was more long-winded than the English. In the interview he said that Indian poetry had reached a stage of exhaustion caused by eight decades of battle over which languages were allowed and which, meaning English, was disallowed. After some more of this kind of boasting and chitchat, all of which had to do with his own life, because he asked nothing about my work, about my wife’s books, about what I had been doing in the years since we had last met in Benares, he got to the real reason for his call.
Isn’t B____ a friend of yours? he said. Yes, I replied, though the alarm bells were already ringing in my head. When Doss asked for B____’s phone number I gave it to him. What else could I have done? All he had to do was call the magazine where B____ worked, which was only the most prominent literary magazine in the country, and ask to be connected. So I gave him the number and forgot all about it.
A week later I got a call from B____. Did you give my number to this Indian guy called Doss, he asked. Yes, I said, I hope you don’t mind? I mind, said B____, and you should too. The guy calls me out of the blue and asks to meet for coffee. He said he was around the corner from the office and he was a poet from India and an old friend of yours. I told him to meet me at the diner across the street from the building because I was on deadline. And it was the truth, I was copy-editing the magazine’s lead review. I put on my parka and walked over to the diner and found him easily enough. He was the only Indian. Furthermore, he was wearing a suit jacket and dress shoes on a snowy New York day. I sat down and the waiter appeared with a pastrami sandwich for him and a beer. I ordered coffee. He didn’t waste much time. He said he was visiting the United States for the first time in his life, which was already evident to me considering it was winter and he was wearing a thin jacket. It was something he had always wanted to do, he said. Then he told me he was sick. He was dying of a rare blood disease. He told me the name but I’d never heard of it. I said that I was sorry he was sick and I hoped he would get better and so on. Then he asked if I would publish him in the magazine and he handed me a poem. I told him I was a copy editor not the poetry editor. I said the magazine already had a poetry editor and she was doing a damn fine job as a matter of fact. I said even if I had been the poetry editor his publication strategy lacked finesse. Then I let the strong coffee get the better of me and told him he had a nerve. I asked if this approach had ever worked for him, to say he was dying and ask someone to publish him? I had never met him before and I didn’t know whether he was insane or some kind of conman but either way I was furious. I handed back his poem, folded my arms and leaned against the red leather of the booth. I waited for him to defend himself and tell me I was wrong and produce a medical certificate that proved he’d been telling the truth all along, or simply to apologise for his foolishness. By now he’d polished off the sandwich. He took a last sip of the beer, a dark possibly imported stout as I recall, and then he excused himself and left me with the bill.
Zusi Krass, writer and translator, interviewed by Dismas Bambai at Shamiana Coffee Shop, Taj Mahal Hotel, Bombay, March 2005
He was sent to the United States by an Indian government body that managed to survive the end of socialism. I forget the nam
e but it was one of those crazed acronyms that Indians love. This one had a lot of Cs, it might have been CCCP or ICCU or PCPC, I don’t know. Let’s call it the Indian Cultural Commissars Regime. It sent deserving writers and artists to conferences and festivals in various parts of the world, although the government’s definition of deserving differed from almost everybody else’s. Mostly it benefited the poetasters, apparatchiks, and freeloaders, who used it as a way to promote their cronies. Narayan was selected on the basis of some untouchable quota, an unofficial system where one or two writers are chosen to represent the unrepresentable classes.
My mother was living in California. She’d moved to the United States because she met a man who made swimming pools and she wanted to learn how to swim, which sounds crazy but it’s the truth. After a year of correspondence and vacations in various obscure parts of the world they decided to move in together. I went to visit her in California in the fall of 2001, not my favourite spot on earth in case you didn’t know by now. They did have a hot tub, which I learned to like. I would sit in the tub and read.
Earlier that year I’d been at the University of Chicago and I’d looked at the papers of A. K. Ramanujan. Only one other scholar had ever studied them, a writer with a Spanish name. What interested me most was Ramanujan’s account of a two-day hallucinogenic experiment that he titled Mescaline Notes. For me, as a reader, the weird thrill was to connect the demure demeanour of the scholar poet Ramanujan with that of a man tripping wildly on mescaline. It was similar to the feeling I got when I read Aldous Huxley for the first time and came across those passages about hallucinogens written in dry, detached, boring prose. I made a note to ask some friends of mine why Ramanujan’s mescaline account had never been published as a book. I mean, wouldn’t it be a bestseller, wouldn’t it be the publishing event of the decade? But as with many thoughts that occur to me when I am up, I forgot all about it when I came down. I forgot Huxley. I forgot the unforgettable Ramanujan because I was in California in September and everything else went out of my head. I was in California and it felt wintry and uninhabitable because of the pictures I saw when I closed my eyes. I felt paralysed. All I could do was sit in front of the television and watch those repeating images, the building, the plane, the crash, the people falling like leaves. I didn’t want to go anywhere or do anything.
Some weeks later I saw a message in my inbox from Narayan Doss. He was in New York on an Indian government poetry junket and he wanted to know if I knew someone in the poetry world he could meet. I told him I would do one better. I’d don my Florence Nightingale getup and come to see him. If he needed rescuing I would do the needful. I asked my mother to buy me a ticket because by then I was eager to leave sunny happy California. At least on the island of Manhattan people were murderous to your face.
My mother booked me into the Chelsea and they gave me a nice room because Stanley knows my mom from the old days. We used to stay there when we visited New York and I always called him Uncle Bard. I loved that name when I was a kid. I thought of him as my bardic uncle with the long hair and funny face. When I say it was a nice room, yes, well, there’s nice and there’s nice by the standards of the Chelsea and what I mean by that is, I got a room with no KY stains on the wall and no used condoms in the shower. For small mercies we must be grateful. I checked in and sent Narayan a message and then I went into the lobby and looked at the paintings, the hundreds of paintings, good, bad and ugly, that Stanley had acquired over the years as payment or tribute or the spoils of war. But I didn’t see any of it. All I saw was Narayan’s face, the face of a boy, a wicked boy perhaps, the face of a corrupt cherub out of Caravaggio, the kind of face you don’t want to wake up with or give your heart to, not if you’re at all sensible.
Amrik Singh Dhillon, founder, Amrik Singh Dhillon Associates, interviewed by Dismas Bambai at the opening of 66, Gallery K. Hardesh, Chelsea, New York City, September 2003
I want to say something about poets and longevity, but I fear it might be a tale about the opposite, poets and the will to oblivion. Because here we are at a retrospective of a life in art and the artist is nowhere to be found. Has he disappeared into his own work? Is he taking a powder? Does he need assistance? I have no idea and I’m guessing you don’t either. I suppose what I really want to talk about is how I met Newton and how we became friends and how strange it is to say that we’re friends at all.
I don’t know where he got my number. He called and introduced himself as a Goan-American artist based in New York. I’d never heard it put that way, ‘Goan-American’. I didn’t know it was even a category. I thought, if Goan-American is a category maybe Sikh-American is one too. Why doesn’t he describe himself as Indian-American, like everyone else? I knew who he was because he’d been in the news in the days immediately following Nine Eleven. A newspaper called him for a comment and he’d said something about America’s pigeons coming home to roost, which didn’t make him the most popular person in New York City, I think it’s safe to say. I have my own Nine Eleven story and he must have sympathised on some level. I think that’s why he contacted me. He called at about seven in the morning on one of those milky New York dawns, cold and quiet. I’m an early riser. I was on the treadmill getting started on my morning and he said, do you think we could meet? I have a professional question for you. He said a friend needed some help. What, do you mean right now? I said. He paused as if that wasn’t what he’d meant at all. Then he said now was fine. So we met at a Starbucks on Curry Hill and the first thing he wanted to know was whether I had gotten over what had happened to me. At that point I wasn’t over anything, I was still in the middle of it. I suppose I was in denial. I told him my experience had changed my idea of my self in relation to my surroundings. I was beginning to understand that my skin colour and beard and turban marked me as a foreigner in a city I’d always thought of as home. It was like waking up from a dream or waking into a dream. Otherwise I was like any other New Yorker trying to process the fact that a distant war had landed in my backyard. Newton was quiet for a while, we both were. We sipped our coffee and thought our own thoughts and then he told me about his friend, a poet who was in town on a trip sponsored by the Indian government. His friend wanted to defect to the United States. Was this at all a possibility? Of course it was not. To defect to the United States you had to be a chess prodigy or violinist from the Soviet Union or Cuba. India was not considered a repressive nation, I said, on what basis would he request asylum? India is both repressive and regressive when it comes to caste, Newton said. My friend wants political asylum based on his status as an untouchable in a society where caste determines one’s destiny, political, economic, and social. I said I didn’t think such a category of asylum existed because if it did it would open the floodgates. As I thought, said Newton. When we got up to leave he invited me over to his place the next day, a Saturday.
That night I went to my parents’ house. My mother had just had a cataract treatment done, a new procedure without surgery. It entailed a huge amount of pills that had to be taken several times a day. My father had an alarm on his watch and all evening he was at her side telling her when to take the pills. My brother Sukh and I drove to a place off Maria Hernandez Park in Bushwick and got fish and steak tacos to go and that’s what we had for dinner. My parents had no say in the matter. According to my father Mexican food is Indian food gone wrong. But when the tacos were on his plate he had no complaint. On the way back home I picked up the Post and found a story about the guys who’d tried to attack me on Nine Eleven. There was a photo and their names were in the caption. There was also a story about a Sikh man who’d been shot to death in Phoenix, Arizona. The killer had mistaken him for a Muslim because of his turban. The story got to me. The murdered man’s name was Balbir Singh and he looked a little like my father, or my uncles, and it made me wonder about the country I was living in, a place I had always taken for granted, where freedom of worship and expression was enshrined in the constitution and difference was celebrated and immi
grants made welcome. I didn’t bring it up at dinner. My mother is anxious enough after what happened to me.
On Saturday morning Sukh and I took the six into town and I showed him the story in the Post. He had a gig that night and he got off downtown with his gear. At around eleven or ten thirty the doorman took me up to Newton’s apartment. I rang the bell and nobody answered. I rang a few times and I was thinking I’d call him on my cell phone when his partner Goody opened and said Newton was asleep. He’d had a bad night. I waited in the living room while she put on coffee. I was sitting in a kind of plantation chair with extendable leg rests and I noticed there was a prone figure on the couch. I saw the back of a youngish man in shorts and a T-shirt and just then he pushed himself up on his elbows and stared at the couch as if he was trying to remember something. He felt under it and found a short bottle of vodka that he uncapped and lifted to his mouth and drank without once stopping for breath. I could smell the vodka from across the room. He didn’t know I was watching him. I saw him down the vodka and I felt the bile rise up in my throat in a wave of acid reflux. I knew I was looking at someone who wanted to die, whose only ambition was to die, someone who would soon be granted his ambition while the world watched in horror or glee. He drank most of the bottle in one swallow and then he replaced it under the couch and passed out again.
