by Jeet Thayil
It’s working, Xavier told Goody, the fluoxetine, going so well I’m beginning to bore myself. What he didn’t say was that he had been cutting down and taking thirty milligrams a day instead of the prescribed forty. He was feeling so much better that he wanted to cut down again by half.
They went to dinner in an apartment in Jorbagh on a terrace screened by tall plants. The apartment belonged to a friend of Goody’s, a former classmate who was editing a men’s magazine, a thin woman in knee-length boots, hollow-eyed and jittery, with an ostentatious postnasal drip that she wore like expensive jewellery. Slowly, with infinite patience, she loaded a needle joint with slivers of Manala hashish. And that was when it arrived, forked lightning in the sky for an hour, then heavy drops that wet the plants on the terrace and the lawn below. They moved the dining table into the shelter of the overhang and stood by the long windows and inhaled the year’s first shower, a smell of dust and packed heat and moist North Indian desert air that was nothing like the raw earth smell of the southern monsoon. After the heat, the rain shower was more potent than the hash. Goody felt a tint on the skin like a shading of red.
On the coffee table she saw a fish whose scales were shells of a peculiar pale rose. The fish moved in your hands when you held it. And the best thing about it, Goody thought, was that the mouth was a bottle opener. She saw it as something beautiful, a piece of art her friend had acquired somewhere, and tonight, smoking Manala cream from the Parvati valley, the fish was more than art: its function was its beauty.
She said, “Who was it that said things should either be beautiful or useful?”
“William somebody?” said an older man with a shaved head. “Shatner? Shakespeare? Reich?”
Monica said, “And where would you place yourself, Goody, among the useful or the beautiful?”
“Depends, doesn’t it, on which day of the week you get me.”
“And then there are the days when you’re ugly and useless.”
“Goodness, Monica,” Goody said, surprised. “I had no idea you knew me so well.”
Monica was twenty-five and clumsy in a way that felt dangerous. She moved jerkily in spasmodic bursts followed by fractured laughter. She was full of stories about the married executives and managers she slept with and worked for. It’s so easy to get them to do what you want, she said. You just tweak their egos. A little tweak will get you anything. Some famous old filmmaker will do exactly what you tell him. He’ll take orders from a twenty-five-year-old woman that he would never tolerate from a man.
“What else?”
“It’s a cliché but that just proves it’s true. Everybody has his price. Money or cocaine or sex. If you knew how many coke sluts there are in this town, chicks who hang with drug dealers for the free toot and dudes who do the same. It’s a free-for-all.”
Goody wondered if Monica had become a bit of a coke slut herself. The talk drifted like smoke. After dinner there were more drinks and then Monica dumped a small mountain of white crystal on the coffee table and made a line that ran from one end of it to the other, like a salt line or the line that landed the pink-scaled fish. She and the man with the shaved head started at opposite ends and then everybody took turns. Later Monica tilted her head and tapped her nose and talked about a recent journey she’d taken.
I needed to wind down, she said. I needed to get out of Delhi. You know how it is when you live here. You have to get out as often as you can just to keep your equilibrium. She went to Brazil and there she met an older man who spoke no English, a musician. He came up to her in a park and took her by the hand. They exchanged no words at all or none that she remembered; after all he must have said something to her during the course of the long night they spent together and she must have said something to him, but she could not recall a single thing. It was all too frenzied. They went to his apartment. He didn’t sleep or eat all night, all he wanted was cocaine and sex. His penis was too big for her and she had to push him away. She had to hold him at bay with both hands so he would not plunge too deep inside her, or he would injure her. At around three in the morning, sore and exhausted, she begged him to stop. He took a drink out of a thermos he kept by the bed. It was a drink the colour of blood and he did what looked to her like a sitting shavasana, that is, he inhabited the correct parts of the body in the correct order, the crown of his head, his third eye, his heart, his stomach, his balls, his calves and feet and toes. After the meditation, which only lasted about twenty minutes, he placed her on his penis and fucked her in a sitting position. He told her to move while he sat cross-legged. She did it gladly because it was a way to make sure he didn’t penetrate her too deeply. She came more than once, more than twice, more than three times and still he would not come. He took another drink from the thermos and when he licked her nipples and her lips she tasted herbs, kava kava maybe, or bhang, or fresh blood from a snapping turtle. He put cocaine on his cock and fucked her from the back and changed positions so he could look into her eyes while he fucked her, fucked her for an hour, and still he would not come. She thought she was becoming delirious because she heard a high voice singing in a language she didn’t know. It might have been German, the singer begging the horses of the night to run slow, oh, slower. How did she know this when the language was foreign to her? Her skin felt hot but when she touched her forehead it was clammy. Every hour he took a drink from the thermos without offering her any. She dozed. Toward dawn he fucked her again with his hands around her throat, Monica said, looking Xavier and the man with the shaved head in the eyes. When he came it was as if he’d spurted into my uterus the purest cocaine. I felt hot and cold at the same time. I growled like a dog, like a bitch in heat, and as it was happening I knew I’d fall pregnant. I knew there was nothing I could do to prevent it and of course I did, I fell pregnant, and when I got back to Delhi I had an abortion. The next day my car was stolen and I was knocked down by an autorickshaw. I lay on the road with blood on my dress. I couldn’t find my wallet. I’d forgotten how to use my phone. I couldn’t breathe. I thought, yes, I have assumed my true form. I am become transparent.
There was a silence and then Goody said, “You shouldn’t have had the abortion. Great fucks make great babies.”
Monica looked at her without speaking.
Goody said, “It would have been an exceptional child.”
They drove home in silence. She looked at the licence plates and didn’t count numbers; she was done with counting. Progress, snail’s progress, but progress all the same.
They parked in silence and walked up the stairs, Goody first, conscious of the jounce in her hips as she climbed. Inside she switched on all the lights and pulled him to the carpet in the living room. He groped for a condom but she pinned his hands and lowered herself on him. She imagined she was Monica and Xavier the Brazilian musician. Xavier held himself inside her and imagined she was Monica and he was himself, fucking her in Brazil or being fucked in Brazil; and Goody looked at him as if she knew exactly what he had been thinking and when he closed his eyes again she punched him in the belly. Look at me, she said. Then she pulled him on top of her and rode him from below, staying him, making him stop and go and stop again. He kissed her and blackness took his vision, the weird oracular half-pictures glimpsed for a second and retained without context or memory. In his blindness he saw the station at Bhooteshwar and the damaged sky above, a sky dripping at the edges like melted wax or a bowl heaped with dead coals and he heard cries like the cries of cats or infants among the bombed-out ruins of their former homes, a charred landscape in which the buildings were façades and nothing moved except shadows under a night sky on fire. He heard the voices of Bombay’s lost poets raised in unison and one among them spoke in Marathi and English and listed the names of the railway stations on the Western Line from Churchgate to Bandra. When he came he yelled some words in a language he did not recognise though he knew the words were obscenities, words of one or two syllables that entered his gullet like an obstruction and would not let him breat
he until he spat them out; and still she would not stop, she would milk him until he was dry.
The next day a truck arrived in the afternoon and six sweating men carried twenty-eight boxes to the top floor of their building. The living room became a miniature version of the container terminal. When the men left Xavier opened a carton and there in the Delhi barsati was a hint of fall in New York and the smell of the apartment on Central Park West. Any number of forgotten talismans fell to the floor, books, shoes, kitchen utensils, wool socks and hats, button-downs and corduroys. In the pocket of a favourite leather jacket Goody found a receipt from a New York taxi and a small plastic baggie with the top half-torn. She checked for residue but there was none. Had she used the heroin on the same day she’d taken the taxi, 3 March 2003, the date in fading blue print on the cabbie’s receipt? And why had she kept the bag and the receipt in her jacket if not as archival documentation? She stood in a narrow alley between the piles of boxes and scrutinised the time on the receipt and the amount paid. She held the bag to her nose and inhaled.
*
When their life unravelled it did so in a matter of hours. At one moment they were co-dependents with a shared life and past; and then it ended as effectively as if someone had thrown a switch. She came home to find Dharini in a towel, freshly showered and smoking a cigarette. Her hair had frizzed in the heat. Xavier was apologetically pacing.
“I know this is a bit sudden and all,” he said. “But Dharini is here in Delhi and she doesn’t have a place. I wondered if, you know, she could stay with us for a bit?”
Dharini looked at Goody and blew a little smoke and smiled. It was a frank appraising smile and she smoked inexpertly as if it was a habit she had only recently acquired. She had a round face and Chinese eyes that she accentuated with eyeliner. Goody thought it was the kind of face people stole glances at or stared at openly on public transport, on a crowded street, in a theatre, or a mall.
She said, “Dismas said Newton was missing me. So I emailed to Newton and came. He said you’d not mind. I hope it’s okay?”
Goody went to the kitchen and put away the items she’d bought, a box of green tea, half a dozen lemons, a small jar of cognac honey, and Xavier came in and launched into an excited speech. He was in love. He was sorry to have to say so but he was in love with both of them; it could not be helped. The girl was from a South Indian business family and though she was yet to be educated in culture – which a crash reading course would remedy in no time, a course he had already begun to administer – she would be good for him, for both of them. He knew this and he wanted Goody to know it too. If Goody cared for him she would see the truth in everything he had said. Goody tried to calm him down. She suggested they go out to dinner, all three of them.
At the restaurant Xavier ordered a bottle of Chilean red and drank most of it. Alcohol didn’t mix with his medication and she expected him to fall silent. Instead he talked and smoked and his hands shook freely. Dharini slouched in her seat, her breasts momentarily deflated and her legs pulled up under her, showing the restaurant her panties, which were white or whitish. High on the wall behind Xavier was a television with an image of, could it be Benny Time? Yes, Time being interviewed by a news channel. He was wearing his prime time smile. Goody decided to say nothing about it to Xavier, who was excitable enough. On an adjoining table was a group of young Indian expats. Goody assumed they were expats because they had New York accents and the men wore gas station shirts and trucker hats. They were arguing about bagels and why it was that H&H was no longer up to the mark. Too chewy, said one, or he might have said it wasn’t chewy enough. That’s what I’m talking about, he said. Goody couldn’t decide whether it was the accent or the pitch of voice that was more annoying. Or it was a combination of both and it grated in Hauz Khaz Village more than in Williamsburg, comparably trendy locations at disparate points on the globe. More was to come. A group of men in hats and narrow ties took the stage near the entrance to the restaurant and launched into reggae. The singer rapped about poverty and world hunger in a dollar-store Jamaican accent. Offstage he reverted to Delhi English. Goody realised that none of the Indians in the room sounded Indian except for Dharini. Xavier, possibly inspired by the faux Jamaicanese, talked in his lecturer’s voice about the sons of Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japhet. Dharini said little during dinner except to ask a single question. How had Xavier and Goody met? Xavier didn’t reply and Goody only remarked that everybody asked the same question.
Back in the apartment Dharini shut the door to the guest room and joined them in the bedroom. Goody put her charged cell phone in her pocket and said she was going out to buy rolling tobacco and condoms.
“Back immediately if not sooner,” she said.
“No need for condoms,” said Dharini, gesturing at Xavier who strolled energetically on the terrace and consulted a paperback edition of Preparations for Death by Saint Somebody.
It struck Goody that he hadn’t slept in at least forty hours.
“You never know,” she said.
It was a poor joke. Xavier was manic (uninterested) or depressed (incapable) or, for the briefest of moments, in the blissful state between manic and depressed (insatiable). Goody couldn’t remember the last time she’d had any. Well, she could. It had been the night of Monica’s dinner, so long ago it felt like another life though it had only been a month. And the sex had been brilliant. And her period was late.
Dharini said, “In Bangalore he left me saying he was going out to buy cigarettes. I hope someone does the same to him.”
Goody took care not to bang the door.
On the terrace Xavier was walking at a brisk pace and reading in a singsong voice from the saint’s book.
“The grave is the school in which we may see the vanity of earthly goods and in which we may learn the wisdom of the saints,” he sang. “‘Tell me,’ says chocolate saint Chrysostom, ‘are you able there to discover who has been a prince, a noble, or a man of learning? For my part, I see nothing but rottenness, worms, and bones. All is but a dream, a shadow.’”
Dharini was reminded of her father. Bhuvapathi and Xavier, two crazy old men and their fixed obsessions. On an impulse she grabbed her bag and followed Goody down the stairs. The street was deserted but for a sleeping watchman in a sentry box. She saw Goody at the far end of the lane and hurried to catch up. What would she say? She didn’t know. Maybe she would simply ask to tag along. She had nowhere to go, she was lost in the city. As she hurried toward Goody she saw a car with its headlights off, a big car with a blue beacon on its roof and tinted windows and chintz curtains in the back. Slowly it moved in the heavy moonlight.
What kind of moon was it?
Bright, shaped like a sickle.
She wondered where the car had come from and why it had stopped near Goody. She tried to read its licence plate but it was too dark. The front windows came down and Goody shouted something she couldn’t hear. Then a man stepped out of the car and caught her by the arm. Dharini screamed and kept screaming as she ran. The watchman came awake. The driver discovered it was not easy to drag a struggling woman into a car when another woman had come to her assistance. Dharini hit the man in the face and the watchman joined in with a short bamboo stick. The man said, no, no. He raised his arms against the blows. And now Goody too was hitting him – with a rock.
In the moonlight the four figures moved in a Butoh dance of slowness and death. Then one shadow detached from the others and jumped into the front seat of the car and accelerated away, the door on the driver’s side banging open in his haste.
4.
She needed to go somewhere calm, a place without testosterone where her dreams would be free of cannibals and saints. After the calamitous events of the night she wished for no further entanglements with the moon and the men, but this was a long-term goal. For now she wished only for quiet.
At night the city belonged to the men. You sensed them out there wild-eyed, sniffing the air with their intoxicated nostrils, using their meaty
hands to break and gouge and caress, the men who swaggered out of the cradle and into the fields, drunk and defecating, whose default mode was sudden rage. They were all out there, the fathers and husbands and brothers and uncles, the guardians and feeders, the predator-protectors, the men.
She hugged her knees in the black and yellow taxi. She put her feet up on the seat and took slow breaths and hugged her knees to her chest. Dharini lit and offered a cigarette, which she accepted hungrily. The elderly driver opened a window and she caught a whiff of something, not pollution but a kind of intermittent sewer stink: the city opening its pores and airing out its privates. She puffed and passed to Dharini, who passed back. They shared the cigarette like a joint. Bit by bit she felt her limbs loosen and her fists relax.
If Paro was surprised to see them she did not let it show. She brewed tea in an enamel pot and served it in old china. She advised against filing a complaint at the police station. It would take years to get to court and Goody would not be able to travel in the meanwhile. At the end of it Srivastava would be free, untouched by scandal, and being a well-entrenched political man, he would look for revenge.
“You shouldn’t worry,” said Paro. “The men of North India are well placed for karmic retribution.”
“I have no idea what you’re saying but I like the sound of the words.”
