by Jeet Thayil
“Admit it, this isn’t too bad,” he said, aiming for lightness because that was the important thing, a certain lightness of spirit even if the spirit was saying, je suis un vieux fou. And here was a voice in reply, non, tu es fou à lier.
Goody said, “Jet lag is preferable to other kinds of lag.”
“Jet lag is the time it takes the body to catch up with the mind.”
“Or the body to catch up with the body.”
And train lag is the opposite of jet lag, he thought. The mind slows down to meet the body. You sit in your seat and look out the window. There is nothing else to do and it is a kind of bliss.
They had facing upper berths close to the train’s metal roof and were subject at all times to raw draughts that tasted of cinders and coal dust. But they were in close proximity and heading north into the new unknown. He hoped it would teach them how to be with each other again.
“I’m already bored,” said Goody.
“Boredom is an upper-class privilege,” he said. “Count yourself among the fortunate.”
They shared the compartment with other travellers, including a family of three. The woman nodded as the train left the Cantonment station.
“On-time departure.”
“Yes,” said Goody.
“A good beginning is important.”
“Always.”
“I’m Purnima, Saraswat Brahmin from Mangalore,” she said. “We are Saraswats but rationalists. You’re maybe too young to understand how important was rationalism. I am talking about Partition time but today even more important! See, I am Purnima and this is Anand. We are rational and pious, scientific and pious. Now do you understand? We have no time for Sai Baba and the Shankaracharya and that Sri Sri Sri Sri fellow.”
“Purnima,” Anand said. “Please.”
“Saraswats are dying out,” said Purnima. “We are facing a full-blown crisis. We are borrowing from our children but we will not pay the debt. It will be paid in full by my daughter’s generation.”
“I’m sorry,” said Goody. “I don’t understand.”
“Too many Saraswats are marrying outside the community.”
“What about your daughter?” Goody asked. “Will she marry outside or in?”
The daughter’s thumbs froze on the message she was punching into her cell phone.
“She is free to make up her own mind but she’ll find it difficult to adjust outside.”
“So,” said Goody. “You’re a rationalist but not when it comes to your daughter.”
Purnima nodded happily. Puzzlingly, the daughter too was smiling.
Xavier watched as the city’s last outposts flickered past. Night had fallen. Karnataka was receding but not swiftly enough.
“Are you going out for a smoke?”
“Yes, Goody, a little stretch, a wee amble or pre-amble, a teeny shot of nicotine to get the blood moving and disperse the stress if you please.”
“What I want to know, what I cannot seem to get my head around, how did I end up living with a smoke factory?”
Purnima said, “This is the problem with us Indians, no sense of physical culture. Like they say on TV, we are like this only.”
Goody said, “Only we are like this.”
Xavier said, “Like, are we only this?”
Purnima clapped her hands and told Goody, “For seven lifetimes you must have watered the holy basil to get a husband like this one.”
“Seventy lifetimes,” Goody said, “I want my money back.”
Purnima said, “Tomorrow is my daughter’s happy birthday.”
“How old?”
“Twenty-one.”
“Keep her away from this one,” Goody said, nodding at Xavier. “He likes them young.”
Purnima said, “No!”
“Oh come now, please, I’ve not been right in the head.”
“Superfine excuse. I’m crazy, excuse me while I act the pig.”
Xavier backed out of the compartment. He lit a cigarette and smoked it down and lit another. He missed Dharini, if truth be told, missed her kindness and the uncomplicated way she met the world. Spending time with her was like sitting in a garden innocent of sin. The word ‘love’ never reared its treacherous head, few words did. This made for ease and comfort, communication brought down to its non-verbal essence, all possibility of misunderstanding sidestepped. She had given him nothing but sweetness. In return he had left her in a hospital where in all likelihood she still was waiting. And here was he, trapped in a battle unto death with Goody the Mahamaya whose purpose was to show man that Time, like Art and Life and Love, was little more than an illusion, perhaps the last illusion that remained before his consciousness surfaced from its pool of stagnant water. He pulled at the cigarette and remembered Dharini with a sense of regret.
Yellow lights swam up out of the dark as the train passed a small town or village. At a crossing he saw a dog with red eyes and a terrible wound on its back. It was a common sight, unremarkable in every way: maimed animals and humans in every small town and city. A subcontinent of the maimed and the soon-to-be-maimed, where if you got to the age of sixty or fifty without encountering horror you were unaccountably lucky. Even the air was against you, even the water.
To cope he lit another cigarette.
When he returned to the compartment, Daddy, Mummy, and Baby Saraswat had fallen into a deep family sleep. Goody was awake in her bunk, staring at the rusted grille of the ceiling fan just inches from her face. When he climbed into the facing bunk she turned on her side away from him.
Husband and wife were up at six to wish the girl happy birthday. They were boisterous morning people; they wanted Goody and Xavier to get up and join in; they wished to have a little party. Goody’s only question on waking was whether her bags were still under the bottom berth or if they had been stolen in the night. Xavier, badly slept and too tired to care, took his morning pill and went into the hallway for a cigarette. He opened the heavy outer door and stood smoking in the slipstream. The train was moving slowly but they were well into the middle of the country, Andhra Pradesh or Madhya Pradesh or some other desolate Pradesh beyond the ken of God and man. He smoked the cigarette down to the butt and shut the door and went back to the compartment where he took a seat by the window. One of the other passengers was also up, a man with an Army crewcut who was lounging in his bunk and staring at the women.
Purnima took a seat beside Xavier. His morning surliness didn’t appear to bother her. Anand worked in a bank in Bombay, she said. She too worked in a bank, but in Bangalore. They lived apart for the sake of their daughter. Xavier understood. Everything was for the sake of the daughter, who was awake now and blinking at him and tidying her hair into a coil. She seemed shy and awkward but there was something in the eyes. Was it intelligence? Or interest? And was she staring? He looked away before it became apparent to Purnima that his proximity to her daughter was every bit as dangerous as Goody had predicted. There was nothing he could do about it. Women his own age filled him with the opposite of desire, for a good reason. They were not desirous themselves. They were mothers and grandmothers and they had given up on the sexual life. They had given men a pause. He’d liked young women when he was a young man and why wouldn’t he like them now that he was a certified old goat? He’d aged but his tastes had not. There was no call to fight it. And besides, it wasn’t an either slash or choice. It was a multiple choice. He also liked mothers and grandmothers.
In his late teens he had been drawn mainly to older women, particularly those who might lead him astray. He had married the most unseemly of them all, Miss Henry of the throaty laugh and bi-lingual leanings, Soho habitué and lauded bohemian whose nude portraits were painted by the noted artists of the day, including Xavier. She had seduced him when he was eighteen and she twenty-nine and one of the first things she said to him was, darling, I’m not sexually attracted to the penis as a rule but in your case I will make an exception. They met at a bookshop run, after a fashion, by the man who would soon
publish Xavier’s first book of poems, who had also published the first books of Dylan Thomas, George Barker, and David Gascoyne, a man so spectacularly unfit to operate a business that he would run his father’s inheritance into the ground and wind up in a room at a hostel for homeless men where he would inevitably kill himself. Miss Henry had just begun work at the bookshop when Xavier walked in one morning on the verge of his great success. The marriage had been a drunken revel that spanned Greece, Israel, India, and the British Isles, and had lasted all of four years; and then Xavier left her for a woman who was her opposite in every way.
Edna was only five years older than he, soft-spoken and self-denying, with the complexion of a milky rose. Their lovemaking was almost entirely missionary and always at his instigation. She would shut her eyes and wait for it to be over. She never removed all her clothes and it occurred to him some time after the marriage had disintegrated that he had never once seen her naked. In the span of four or so years they had a daughter, they stopped sleeping in the same bed, and his drinking escalated to a bottle a day. She was the only one of his wives who had walked out on him. When she died he happened to be in London, on a week-long binge in a squat near London Bridge. He heard about her death from a reporter who had tracked him down for a quote. He hit the man in the face and walked to the off-licence for another bottle of Teacher’s and stayed drunk for three weeks, moving from the squat to a couch in Holborn, too full of shame to call his daughter. He dreamt of Edna still, vivid dreams in which he would try without hope to kiss her pale unforgiving lips; and he would wake in tears, unable to speak or get out of bed.
His third marriage had lasted longest. They had travelled the world as journalists and drunk their way through a river of whisky and an ocean of vodka. Lula’s classic celluloid features had survived the alcohol, the miscarriages, and the incessant travel. But she had had to give up her movie career because of Xavier’s unhinged jealousy of her leading men and directors. His behaviour had been self-destructive and humiliating. And then he left her for an unimpeachable reason: her screaming fits aimed at the neighbours in the voice of his mother during her final dementia. In his paranoia he had begun to wonder if she were doing it on purpose. Did she hope to drive him into the madness that had engulfed his mother? Toward the end she began endless renovations of the Bombay apartment they shared. The floor was misaligned, she said, and the workers would arrive for months-long corrections that had no discernible results. He began to sleep with his wallet in his hip pocket. He accepted whatever engagements came his way and he spent as much time as he could in New York, where his father had left him an apartment. One smoggy winter he checked into a hotel in Delhi. Word spread that he was in town and then began the clamour of the journals. He agreed to an interview request from a magazine with the unfortunate name of Closed by a woman with the happy name of Goody Lol.
He heard the ringing of a phone. The ringtone was a woman’s voice singing slow morning vowels that climbed unhurriedly into the scale, the notes full of wisdom and a kind of calm joy telling of a lifetime of riyaz at dawn. It was a birthday call for the daughter. Father, mother, and slyly smiling twenty-one-year-old took turns to speak into the instrument.
Goody descended from her berth and opened the packed food they’d brought along, homemade rotis and vegetables.
We are pure vegetarians, said Purnima, perhaps suspecting that Xavier, with his Christian name, was an impure one; but she consented to try some of the potato.
From the middle berth the daughter handed Purnima her phone. On the screen was an old photo of Xavier and an interview from the days when he still gave interviews.
“You’re famous,” said the daughter.
“Famous, famous,” said Purnima, scrolling. “You never told.”
“Depends what you mean by fame,” said Xavier. “I’m famous at Koshy’s and at Dewar’s. I suppose you could call me the pet laureate of MG Road.”
The daughter laughed silently, watching him all the while.
“Don’t deny your fame,” she said, her eyes shining.
She took the phone back from her mother and her thumbs moved furiously for a minute and this time she handed the phone directly to him. On the screen was a review of the New York show. Without reading it through he passed it to Goody.
“‘The poet of Hung Realism, at the age of 66, rings wily changes on his past,’” Goody read aloud. “‘Saintly figures collapse into their containing shapes, never to rise again. Unnamable colours threaten and brood. Although filled with retrospective grandiosity, the show is nowhere nostalgic. It suggests instead the flash and sizzle of a new career.’”
Goody stopped reading and counted.
“Fifty-one,” she said. “They call themselves an online journal of the arts and they’ve reduced your career to fifty-one words. How do you like that?”
“Criticism is a reduced tradition. One must expect truncated thought and half-formed expression.”
“The key to happiness is low expectations,” said Purnima’s daughter, winking mysteriously.
“Lowest,” said Purnima, “lowest expectations, best!”
The Army man ordered breakfast from the pantry and so did another passenger, a young Sikh. In berths in the corridor were two medical students on their way home for the holidays. As far as Xavier could tell they were talking about women possessed by ghosts and taken advantage of by temple priests and exorcists. Some people are more vulnerable than others to possession by a violent spirit, said one of the students. I’m using the word ‘spirit’ because spirits are different from ghosts. What’s different about them? asked the other student. Spirits are eternal and ghosts are not, the first student replied. Ghosts are helpless bundles of memory and rage stuck between one world and the next, yearning for release and for the sensations they enjoyed in their old lives. This was why so many ghosts were found in the trees of their village begging passers-by for a mouthful of rice, or a smoke, or a drink of toddy. The other student told him to be more specific. He couldn’t say some people were more vulnerable to spirits and leave it at that. Okay, said the first student, small children, particularly girl children, are more vulnerable than adults; and those who are grief-stricken or permanently disaffected for whatever inscrutable personal reason; and those who had recently suffered immense reversals of fortune; and those who wished to die and had wished to die for as long as they could remember. One minute, said the other student, maybe I should write this down since you seem to be an expert and all. Then she laughed.
The Sikh got up and introduced himself to the students. He was a salesman of dental equipment – “the latest, from Germany” – and he had brochures. He offered a brief capsulated version of his sales talk, with pain-inducing references to spoon excavators, retractors, cone burnishers, and probes (sickle and straight), and he ended with the promise of a soon-to-be-available high-speed air drill with a patented friction hand piece and a Christmas tree blur, though Xavier wasn’t sure he’d heard the last phrase correctly. Very difficult to pass the time, said the Sikh apologetically on his return. He wore a blue button-down shirt and blue turban day and night through the entire trip and he complained with pleasure about the inadequacy of the dining car and the inconvenience of train travel. Most of the time he followed the lead of his crewcut neighbour and stared at the women.
It was the one constant of travel in India, Xavier thought, the only thing that never changed. The sexual desperation that Indian men took no trouble to hide. Once on a holiday in a beach town in the south they had stopped for dinner at a restaurant facing the ocean. Immediately three men had squatted on the sand and stared at Goody’s knees, which were barely visible under the table. It was dark and there wasn’t much light on the terrace. What did they hope to see at that distance? She’d been wearing a dress and her legs were bare; this was enough. The men sat and smoked and looked in her direction. They would not go away. It happened everywhere. Men stared; they brushed against her; they scratched their privates and fondled them
selves; they urinated in full view. Goody got into fights. On a bus she slapped a man and nobody said a thing. They were used to it. She was on a bench at Wanker’s Park, sipping water and digging in her handbag for sunglasses when she noticed an old man in a white kurta standing a few feet away and masturbating in his pyjamas. He was seventy-five at least. He had white hair and a kindly face and he swayed on his feet as his hand pumped his pocket. There were people everywhere, couples on benches and joggers and park employees, but nobody objected. They were used to it. In England they had a name for it, Goody said, lewd behaviour, and it landed you in jail with the other freaks.
Xavier imagined the men dying horribly in cramped spaces. He imagined them tortured with spoon excavators and a pair of pliers in the back of a windowless van, garroted at a urinal, buried alive in a basement closet, electrocuted in elevators or on staircases. He fantasised crimes in which he would cut their femoral arteries and watch entranced as they were lifted up in great waves of blood. He invented murder scenarios in which knives played a larger part than guns. The only firearms he allowed were shotguns that took away half his victims’ faces and left sucking wounds in the chest and unpluggable excavations in gut and groin. He preferred hunting knives because he wanted to be intimate with his murders. And now he was imagining the castration and killing of the sullen Army man who did nothing but stare at the women in the compartment. Openly he stared with his hand in his lap.
That night the train stopped in the middle of nowhere for no apparent reason. He hauled open the metal door and stood in the doorway. On all sides the fields flowed outward into the dark. Pale grey trees and timeless village sounds. He heard a dog bark and the chirp of crickets and a well rope creaked and a metal bucket scraped against stone. He thought he heard an animal somewhere close, laughing or coughing.
Someone came out of the bathroom and stood beside him, Purnima’s daughter. They stared without speaking at the night. More shapes became discernible in the brush, small dogs perhaps, or children whose eyes shone with a sick yellow light. The air was close and humid. He brushed past her to go into the toilet she’d just vacated and she watched him and her face was expressionless. He nodded at her. Come here. Obediently she came and shut the door and held him close. He felt her heart beating through both their chests and he was surprised at the hunger in her kiss. There was a smell of metal in her hair. When he pushed his hand into her jeans her mouth opened in a sharp hiss but her eyes stayed the same, expressionless. Your beard is scratchy, she said in a stoned voice. Rub it here, she said, pulling up her shirt and indicating a spot on her belly. The train lurched. He got on his knees and she pushed her jeans down and held him tenderly by the ears. She watched him lap at her as if she had no idea who he was or how they’d come to be so intimately positioned. But she shook her head when he stopped to catch his breath. Keep going, she said. Don’t stop. He heard a whistle blow and the train changed its rhythm, speeding up or slowing down. Then she was pulling him to his feet. I want you to do it, she said. Do it now. As if she could not call what they were doing by its name. She bent over to hold the metal washbasin in her two hands and offered her behind. He unzipped obediently. He smelled urine and looked at the hole in the floor that was the toilet. The tracks blurred below. Another whistle blew. As he began to hoist himself into her he caught sight of his face in the mirror by the sink, his old man’s face with its white beard and broken nose, and he saw the girl in her disarray taking great gulps of the fetid air, her face rapt in yellow light. It was the face of an anxious child. He felt his erection dwindle. When he straightened up she hissed at him. Why? Why aren’t you doing it? Not like this, he said. And he kissed her chastely on the forehead and went back into the compartment.
