by Jeet Thayil
The day after the Agra launch he was in one of the city’s few coffee shops when a picture of Xavier flashed on the television above the cash register. The sound was turned off and his first instinct was to turn away, as if by looking elsewhere he could change or delay the news. He brushed bagel crumbs off his shirt. He asked the waiter for iced water. Then he turned back to the screen and read the words scrolled across the bottom, X’IAN PAINTER NEWTON XAVIER DISAPPEARED, FEARED DEAD. They had summed up his life in three bullets.
Don Newton Pinter Xavier, painter and poet, disappears.
Co-founder of Hung Realists. Co-founder of Autists Group that included Husain, Souza, Padamsee, Mehta, and Ara.
Posthumous retrospective opens in New Delhi next month. National Gallery calls it ‘most important museum show of the century’.
Disappeared, feared dead. It had the ring of an epitaph. Delhi wasn’t far from Agra. This was the time to go to Goody and pay his respects. He would make his case and hint gently at X’s fecklessness. But the man’s disappearance had robbed him of something, some closing push and necessary drama. Even in absence Xavier was the better thief, thought Dismas, as he finished his breakfast.
To skip his own party, what an instinct for showmanship!
He asked the counterman to turn up the volume. The news about Xavier had been usurped by an interview with a French music producer who had first arrived in India as a hippie in 1973. He had lost or given away his passport and had stayed on in the country for years. Dismas listened with some suspicion. The man spoke in English and there were Hindi subtitles, but the subtitles did not match the words. Soon after he arrived in India, the producer said, his guru introduced him to a woman from Kerala. Go with her to the mountains, the guru said, she will be your guide. But the subtitles said it was the Frenchman and the guru who walked to the Himalayas. There was no mention of the woman. The producer said that he and the woman walked from Kerala, through Karnataka, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, and Nepal, thinking it would take a month or two, maybe three months at the most, but they walked for a year and more. They made a strange couple, a white man in a dhoti, his long hair twisted into a bun, and a matronly South Indian woman with a nose ring and sari. People teased them. They sang Hindi film songs, ‘Mera Naam Joker’ and ‘Awaara’. It didn’t bother me because I didn’t understand Hindi in those days, said the Frenchman, in English. It bothered her. The subtitles said: We had many wonderful adventures! Indians are very hospitable! They invited us into their homes and fed us with their own two hands! A year and three months after they began the journey they came to a forest in the foothills. At first the woman was frightened because there was no village nearby, no electricity, no humans for miles. She would cry when I went to fetch water from the river, said the Frenchman. Don’t go, she’d say, don’t leave me alone. Now there were no subtitles at all: the translation had stopped altogether. After a few months in the forest the Frenchman left the woman and returned to the city. He found a job and got married. He forgot his life of wandering. He bought a house and became a father to two daughters, a man of the world, a businessman and householder, but he never forgot the journey to the north with the woman from the south. Some years later he returned to the spot in the forest where he had left her. She was now in her fifties and she welcomed him as if he had left only a moment ago, as if he had set off that morning to fetch firewood. She made milk tea for him. She put out a bowl and cried, mongoo, mongoo, and a mongoose family gathered and sipped the tea. Birds ate from her hand, a deer visited, and a snake. People came too and some of them said she was the first female hermit of India. But I think of her as a saint, said the Frenchman. Now the subtitles reappeared. Indians are saints! Dismas changed the channel hoping for a music station that with any luck would be screening the new Rihanna video. There was an update about Xavier on Channel Zee and another on Doordarshan. An unnamed friend to the artist had suggested that his disappearance was in fact a suicide.
Later that day among the sand-coloured rooms of Fatehpur Sikri, Dismas heard the echoing voice of a pair of drunks. They glared at a group of Muslim travellers from the hinterland who threw coins on the empty crypt where the bodies of the prince and his lover had been buried. Sab Mussalman hai, the drunks told each other. Sab, Mussalman. They were guides, resting up between spiels aimed at the foreign tourists. They didn’t care about the locals and they cared nothing for Mussalmans. They treated the crypt like an echo chamber into which they flung their voices. The louder of the two shouted Om at two-second intervals. In the mausoleum the sound fell like a projectile.
Dismas walked around and fell into melancholy. He bought a thumb-sized replica of the Taj Mahal and an illustrated history of Fatehpur Sikri and he listened to the fictions of the tour guides.
“This flower was made hundreds of years ago, please touch it, you see? It is alive!”
“This is the dovecote from where pigeons carried messages to the generals and brought back news of the battle for Akbar. This one was the dovecote of the most prized pigeon of them all, Akbar’s favourite, the Hindu pigeon Birbal.”
“Here is the entrance to a secret tunnel built by Akbar to connect Fatehpur Sikri to Delhi, Lahore, Kabul, and Peking. If you stand here you can see exactly where it was blocked up by the British.”
From Agra Fort facing east he caught a view of the Taj through the fort’s jaliwork. He saw a slice of silvered river and blue sky, and the dome and its minarets rising into filigree. He took a picture through the jaliwork and zoomed in to the top of the main dome and that was when he saw it. The culmination of the dome was a bronze spire and at the very tip was a sickle moon, its horns pointing upward to God. But the Muslim moon had been placed so that a lotus shape bisected its centre, Shiva’s trident. You needed a telephoto lens to see the Hindu trident at the pinnacle of the Taj Mahal.
At the entrance to the mausoleum he paid a fee and took off his new red leather wingtips and left them, reluctantly, on a pile of discarded footwear. He climbed the marble stairs in his socks. From a parapet he saw a vista of river and scrub dust and he examined the great dome. The marble had recently been whitened and to see it up close was to see that time had worked very little damage on the stone. The colours of the jasper inlay jumped out at you as if they’d just been set. No two inlays were alike. The dome itself was so white it was without feature but the eye took it in small sacramental sips, the frozen teardrop that marked the deaths of so many. Nearby, a mason squatted on scaffolding and repaired slabs of black stone that had fallen from the siding around the marble. He cut each stone, working the rough edges straight. His name was Abdul Wahid, he said, and before taking up the job of repair at the Taj he’d been working for three months in Delhi on the Q’utb Minar. Was Dismas from Delhi too? What was his country? His name?
Then, suddenly intimate, he asked, “Are you Muslim?”
Dismas made his standard reply. He was from Bombay.
“Ah,” said the mason, as if this explained his foreignness, his friendliness, and his interest. Dismas might have said he was from Pluto.
“The spire on top of the main dome, isn’t it Hindu?”
“What?”
“Doesn’t it look like a trident?”
“Many men made this thing.”
“Many men over many years.”
“They were brought from everywhere,” said Abdul Wahid. “They worked hard.”
“Many did not survive.”
“It depends from which direction you are looking, depending on your position it is Hindu or it is Muslim.”
The Taj Mahal is refinement and cruelty, X had said. Only the Mughals could have built it.
Pinter. Not Francis but Pinter. Had the TV station unearthed his birth certificate? How had they discovered the name?
On his way out Dismas was relieved to find his new shoes unstolen under a pile of second-rate footwear. He let the crowd carry him out of the Taj. Now he was in a hurry to leave for Delhi. At the hotel he packed and made quick
arrangements at the reception desk. Dusk was falling as the taxi left the hotel and followed the course of the Beas from Manali down to the plains. The river was to his left, a silver thread banked by high crags where palm trees sprouted at impossible angles. What tide had brought the trees? How had they survived in this climate? Late at night as the taxi neared the city the river’s silver faded to a dull trickle and disappeared into the filth of the Yamuna. They entered a wall of sound and particulate matter. And soon, the early part of the journey, the river, the displaced palms, his anxiety, all seemed false, like memories of a city he had never visited.
3.
The maid called him to the phone. It was Dhruv, the teenage son of his Delhi hosts.
“Listen, Uncle Dismas,” he said. “You better get down here right away.”
“I don’t think so, Delhi in June, it’s brutal out there.”
“I’m in a gallery at the mall in Saket. Art gallery. There’s a exhibition here and you’re in it. You knew Xavier, huh, the artist? That’s awesome.”
The gallery was full of media, women in saris and men in suits, and outside it was forty-five degrees. Dhruv was in the front room where the show’s title was projected on a wall:
Ties & Binds
Photographs, Sketches, Fragments, 1992–2006
GOODY LOL
Dhruv motioned to a picture captioned, ‘Dismas, 2002, New York City’.
“Goody Lol,” he said. “Sick.”
“Is she here?”
“Not in person. There’s a video interview on permanent loop. Can I talk to you sometime about Xavier? I write about art for the Noida Tribune.”
“Impressive,” said Dismas, in a tone that implied the opposite.
“How come you missed the funeral?”
“Funeral? He disappeared.”
“They found him. Someone recognised him from the news.”
“What was the cause of death?”
“Heart attack. There were six people in total at the funeral. I hear he had more enemies than friends.”
“Goody?”
“She was there, couldn’t miss her. So, how did you meet him?”
“Called him up.”
“You can do that? And then?”
“And then I went to meet him and met Goody.”
“You did, you surely did.”
Dismas looked at the image, his tied hands behind his back, shirtlessly leaning against the reflected lights of the city; and he felt no connection to the man in the picture.
“I want to hear all about it, how you met him, what he said.”
“Buy The Book of Chocolate Saints, my next book, an oral biography of Xavier. It’s all in there.”
“I hear he staged his death like performance art.”
“I wouldn’t know. Why don’t you talk to Goody?”
“She doesn’t, yo. Talk, I mean. No photographs, no autographs. Check the video and you’ll see what I’m saying.”
The photographs were studies of solitude and sexual frustration, frail bodies stretched against walls and curled on the floor, dwarfed by the tiny spaces in which they were placed. The photographer’s gift was to make even a small area seem large and forbidding. A young Sikh on his knees in a doorway, white light streaming into the room, hair loose and body twisted, his hands bound by a length of crisp black cotton. The light in the photograph was concentrated on the man’s oxblood kurta and the black fabric on his wrists. The caption: ‘Amrik, Albany, 2003’. A woman sitting on a rock, her head bent in such a way that you saw only back and hips. The grainy black and white gave her skin the same texture as the rock, as if the entire assemblage had been carved out of one element, even the elaborate ties and knots that ran from her throat to her groin. It was captioned, ‘June, Central Park, 2002’, and he recognised the woman as the waitress in the Fourteenth Street diner where he and Goody had once had coffee. There was a picture of the same woman on an unmade bed, her knees drawn up to her chin. She had stuck her tongue out at the camera and thick kajal smeared her face like fright make-up. A double strand of hemp was looped twice around her eyes. The camera’s focus was so acute that you saw the exact status of the peeling paint on the walls, the aged light fixtures, a wire snaking its way across faded bed sheets. The room was standard American motel, dull furnishings and generic fixtures: ‘June, New Jersey, 2002’. He had met Amrik and June in life but in Goody’s hands they were rendered unrecognisable. They had been snatched from time and flash-frozen, made anguished and monumental.
The bulk of the exhibition, titled ‘Equality’, was a group of portraits of bound men; men in elaborate silk sherwanis and churidars suspended from ceiling rigs like human chandeliers; working-class men in uniform, in overalls, in underwear, tied to bathroom fixtures and doorknobs and heavy furniture; men in business suits divested of trousers and hogtied; men in suits, tied up and supine on the broken pavements of an old city; men roughly tied up and hanging by one leg from the ceiling, the rope-work coarse and rushed; and in one enormous portrait, two dozen paunchy men in white Y-fronts, tied to each other by the elbows and made to stand against a concrete wall, glaring suspiciously at the camera.
How had she managed to convince so many to submit to her lens? He knew the answer because he too had been her subject. She had put them in poses calculated to humiliate but all they had seen was a woman photographer and a camera. Their egos had filled in the rest.
The work from 2004 and 2005 was on two walls, one for each year, portraits of Xavier taken indoors and out in all kinds of light. And a curious thing, as the eye followed the portraits to a wall left entirely blank, a story took shape: X leaving his life one frame at a time. There were two portraits of Goody in costume and playing dead. The titles were in Xavier’s hand but he had signed her name. And there were line drawings, damning self-portraits in which she made herself appear misshapen. You could see the speed with which she’d done them and there was something of Xavier in the confidence and off-handedness of the line.
He went to the video screen. A rotund young man waited on a narrow pavement in a residential Delhi neighbourhood. She stepped into the frame and pulled a dupatta around her head like a veil. When she saw the interviewer she stopped short and shook her head.
“I don’t want to talk to you,” said Goody.
The man said, “Please, madam, just two questions.”
“Don’t beg, it’s not worth it.”
“Madam, how has life changed after the tragic sudden death of one of India’s greatest artistes?”
“Artist, not artiste,” Goody said automatically, walking away.
The interviewer followed.
“Alleged suicide or alleged murder? A great mystery surrounds.”
There was no reply. The interviewer hurried behind her and the camera followed.
“What about the controversy regarding authorship of his last works? Some are made by you?”
“That’s a laughable allegation.”
“Is the photography project ongoing? Critics have said it is controversial but original.”
“There’s nothing original about it. It’s not originality I’m aiming for but documentation and anonymity.”
Cut to the interviewer on a narrow pavement in a residential neighbourhood. Goody steps into the frame and the conversation repeats itself.
*
The monkeys roamed in marauding packs, their ponderous heat-scarred bodies bleached in the desert sun. How did people manage? The city wasn’t fit for habitation. He was living with family friends in Safdarjung and most of the time he stayed indoors under a fan, sweating, looking out over the rooftops of the city. He saw bedraggled crows, dust storms, fever visions of parched langurs. He reduced movement to a consolidated minimum: no action unless absolutely required and only when combined with other action.
He put it off for a day, for two days, but then he gave in and took a taxi to the Defence Colony address he had noted in the video.
A familiar face answered the door.
“I know you,” said Amrik.
“I know you too. Aren’t you a long way from home?”
“Home? Maybe, maybe not,” he laughed. “My first time in India. I have family here I’ve never met.”
“In Delhi?”
“Delhi and points north.”
“And how’s it going so far?”
