The Book of Chocolate Saints

by Jeet Thayil

  “Nice to be in a place where skin colour isn’t the first thing people notice about you. I’m looking forward to growing my hair and relearning how to tie a turban.”

  “Look, I didn’t mean to turn up out of the blue.”

  “No apology required. I’ll tell her you’re here.”

  But she was already there, holding the door wide and motioning him inside. He followed her into a room that had the unmistakable feel of the Central Park West apartment. Stacked in deep rows against the walls and corridors and every available surface were numbered packages, canvases and photographs and indeterminate objects. She had put on some weight, which had changed the shape of her face, and her hair had turned white. She looked very frail.

  “You,” said Dharini, who was on the couch.

  “It’s me, it’s me. Hello, hello,” said Dismas, unable to stop repeating himself.

  Goody said, “The retrospective opens on schedule. Amrik brought down most of the New York work. He’ll be sourcing New’s Indian work and liaising with the National Gallery. Benny Time is in charge of the opening party. I hear he has big plans. Come if you can.”

  Her accent was newly Indian, all trace of London obliterated. She lit a cigarette and this was another bit of newness. As far as Dismas knew she’d never been a smoker.

  He said, “How are you holding up?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

  They went to the terrace where cane chairs had been arranged under a bamboo awning. The sun was starting to set and a sliver of moon was already visible. Then Goody told her story, slowly in the new accent.

  “He was like Superman on kryptonite, hated what the pills did but without them he was out of control. Mania or monotony, nothing in between. Made jokes about doing himself in, throwing a week-long bash at the best hotel in the city and no worry about expenses because he wouldn’t be paying the bill. He’d send everybody home and take himself home too. I asked who would clean up the mess and he said, you, who else? In that way he’s completely conventional, expects a woman to take care of everything. Well, I did, I took care of everything. I’ve done my job and now I’m through. I’m not insane enough to be an artist above all else. I’m not cruel enough. I’m not New.”

  “What happened to the man who was abducted?”

  “A conservative Pentecostal group called God’s Blood. They released him on a street in Fort Kochi but only after carving a swastika on his forehead.”

  “Conservative Pentecostals?”

  “Holy war is contagious and everybody wants in. The future is holiness. We’ll all be saints, to quote New.”

  She lit another cigarette, cupping a red and white lighter that he recognised before he saw the word ‘Kuwait’. She took a deep drag and exhaled and considered the smoke. Then she stubbed it out.

  She said, “I shouldn’t be smoking, I’m pregnant.”

  Silence for a beat and then: “He left something for you.”

  Her bare feet made no sound at all as she went into the apartment.

  Dharini caught his eye.

  “Answer your question? She’s not okay. She says she’s sick of art. I think she’s not handling it so well, the pregnancy.”

  Dismas shook his head. Pregnancy was an insurmountable word, moated and garrisoned. What could you say in response?

  He looked at the crowded walls and the books and furniture that had filled the last of the many rooms of Xavier’s life. He made a note in his head of the pencil drawings on the walls, self-portraits, X as satyr, as Aztec priest bathed in blood, as half-dog half-angel with mournful eyes.

  Goody returned with an office envelope on which she had written Dismas’s name in a neat cramped hand.

  Goody said, “It’s not the fact of not having him around to talk to that bothers me. I’m perfectly capable of carrying on a one-sided conversation, indefinitely if need be. What bothers is that nothing you say makes a difference.”

  “What do you say when you talk to him?”

  “We could have found a way, changed medication, changed towns, changed our names. We could have started over.”

  It was then that Dismas said what he had come to say and even as he offered himself as a replacement, or a substitute, he knew the futility of his suit. Goody went to Dharini’s side. The women looked at each other in silence. Amrik had stepped quietly out of the room.

  Goody said, “I understand something about you that I hadn’t understood before.” She turned to face him. “You’re a critic. There’s no worse thing that can be said about a man. When your book appeared a journalist called him for a response. That’s how he heard the things you said about him, self-promoter, self-plagiarist, and so on. And the made-up controversy about Moraes and Kolatkar and Ezekiel: not a shred of evidence, hearsay held up as truth, but so many people took it seriously. He knew why you did it. Murder sells books. He said you were your own enemy and he forgave you. Who knows, in time I might too.”

  *

  The cabbie had his radio tuned to Punjabi rap. He drove with one hand. With the other he tore open a shiny packet with his teeth and emptied the contents into his mouth. The sick-sweet smell of chewing tobacco, paraffin, paan, and lime filled the car. He was about to ask the cabbie to turn down the volume when he saw in the rearview that the man’s eyes were half shut. Maybe he needed the music to stay awake. The colony’s main gates were closed and they had to turn around and go back the way they came. Dismas looked out at the leafy streets cramped with parked cars.

  What was there to forgive? He had embellished a little and created a controversy out of coincidence. Compared to Xavier’s crimes his own were insignificant. She would forgive X but not him.

  When you’ve been driving for eighteen hours you’ll take whatever you can get to keep yourself going, the driver said, including this gutka that will give me mouth cancer.

  Why opt for eighteen-hour shifts, then, work eight-hour days like normal people, Dismas said.

  Saheb, said the driver, I am a poor man with a rich man’s bills.

  Pregnancy, a word that existed on its own, that could not be argued or negotiated with, a word that would not settle for less than everything.

  What can I possibly say in reply?

  The driver turned up the volume on the radio but it didn’t drown out the sound of traffic because now they were on a flyover on the ring road and hedged in by vehicles.

  What was there to forgive? How unforgiveable a crime was embellishment? Was it more of a crime than forgery or cruelty?

  I too am a poor man with a rich man’s bills.

  As the cabbie turned into Safdarjung, he opened the envelope and shook out a water-stained page. The words were smeared but legible.

  To Dis; or, Assertion of Provenance

  Dawg, just so you know, I didn’t need the money.

  I lied, but bad X was running the show, stab-

  Stabbing for revenge. Well, good X forgives you,

  Betrayer, though even he does not do it easily.

  O, Bambai, you are better than you know.

  May your base instinct expel itself like bad

  Blood and may you rise to shame, as I am un-

  Able to do; I sink daily, deeper into bad mud,

  Yea, verily I sink. Even so, I certify the Two

  Marys, signed Xavier 96, are comparatively

  Authentic, painted by the writer of this poeme,

  Newton, for Dis, retrospective acrostic dedicatee.

  If the posthumous jump in the price of Xavier’s work was any indication, one day the handwritten poem might be worth a lot of money. There was no doubt that the National Gallery show would be a success, critically and commercially, and there was no doubt that the value of the Two Marys would rise tenfold.

  He could feel it coming, a groundswell and detonation point in the Xavier bazaar. Not that he had any intention of selling the pictures just yet; he would hold on to the Marys and get started on his next book. He knew already the shape it would take. He’d borrow
a leaf out of Q Ball Li’s opus and write a memoir of his time in America composed entirely of the things he had bought. A life in consumer items. He would call it Shopping: An American Life. But first he would publish The Book of Chocolate Saints, his oral history of Xavier, using a representative sample of X’s poems. For that he would need Goody’s permission. She had the rights to his estate. It was a reason for them to meet again.

  He told the cabbie where to stop and reached in his pocket to pay.

  Epilogue

  And now as I prepare the final pages let me leave you with a picture of Goody Lol in the future where all of us will eventually reside. Not the far future, not afloat in the great river of forgetfulness and oblivion. I will draw her for you in the apartment in Delhi where, not long ago, the rooms had been full of commotion, so full it seemed an army of ghosts must camp there.

  Now it is just she, just the one ghost at a window facing a small park.

  In the room that used to be her study Ari is waking up. Soon Goody will go back to bed and stretch out for a moment beside her. She has been up since dawn, cataloguing the art Amrik brought from the Central Park West apartment. There is a lot of it, from video, 16 mm film and documentary photos, to installations, paintings, line drawings, and multimedia. There is the art they had stopped thinking of as art: wall drawings, a painted door, symbols carved into the windowsills and doorjambs, shelves that had been painted or written on, kitsch, psychedelia, a collection of door stoppers made into humanoid shapes, newspaper and magazine pages painted over with grids and figures, the converted advertisements, the unpublished poems and unclassifiable prose, enough to fill a good-size book, enough to load with ore the massive Newtonian retrospective that will now open in the winter.

  It is her job because there is nobody else who can do it and for now she is happy to be curator and archivist not artist.

  How little the surface has changed. Life has changed beyond measure, beyond repair, but here is the house and the street and the neighbourhood, untouched, unscathed, unmoved. Even the shoe rack near the door drives her to distraction. Running shoes and boots and dress heels that will survive those who wear them. It drives her to distraction but who is she to expect change? Hasn’t she come back to live among the wreckage of the past?

  The room’s dimensions are comfortably odd. The side that faces the street narrows like the prow of a ship. The flooring is different. The tiles are of wood not stone, as if the entire park-facing side was a late addition. Perhaps it was, perhaps when the building was first built this had been open ground. According to Mrs Rathod, the downstairs neighbour who can no longer meet her eye, the building began modestly and grew in stature. The theory is as likely to be true as anything and it explains why the room opens into a corridor that runs the length of it and no two rooms are the same.

  At a narrow window is a writing desk and chair that came with the apartment. She likes to imagine a woman fanning herself as she dreams of ships, a thin nervous woman with a ferocious way of scratching pen across paper who pauses in her writing to gaze at the dusty trees outside; Goody knows what it is to be her.

  The day after her return Mrs Rathod rang the doorbell. She was dressed in a pink tracksuit and high heels and a CD was on offer.

  “Some music for you,” she said, her eyes on the floor. “Something to distract you. Some of my favourites and three versions of ‘Ave Maria’.”

  She had declined coffee as if Goody’s condition was contagious. And she hadn’t let her heels tap too loudly against the tiles as she went down the stairs. She was considerate, Mrs R. She was a paragon of consideration, a rock to which the newly bereaved could cleave. Except old Mrs Ratface knew nothing about bereavement. She had no idea, for example, that grief could not be distracted. It was distraction. It was distraction multiplied exponentially until the bereaved felt she too had died. How could music correct such a condition? It could not. But late at night she listened to all three versions of ‘Ave Maria’ and put the one she liked most on repeat, the one by the soprano whose name was the song’s title. She took to playing it at all hours, so loud that Mrs R would surely feel the vibrations. For some reason it worked, the exalted keening and the slowness of the lament.

  It is only now that grieving begins.

  She had to put the perils of the past behind her; she had to give in. The giving in is the easiest thing in the world. And in the years to come she will feel she is finally past the grief, she has moved on as they say. Then all of a sudden grief will return, as fresh and red as ever.

  This morning she plays ‘Ave Maria’ at a low volume because she doesn’t want to wake the house. As always she comes out of the music heavier and more substantial if only to herself. As always she lights a cigarette and exhales slowly to watch the pictures in the smoke, to communicate with the dead.

  She is one by two; she has two brains, two pairs of lungs, and two sets of genitals.

  She has two hearts.

  About the Author

  Jeet Thayil, born in Kerala in 1959, was educated at Jesuit schools in Bombay, Hong Kong and New York. He worked as a journalist for twenty-three years before writing his first novel, Narcopolis. His five poetry collections include These Errors Are Correct, which won the 2013 Sahitya Akademi Award (India’s National Academy of Letters), and he is editor of The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets. Narcopolis was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Man Asian Literary Prize, among others, and awarded the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. The Book of Chocolate Saints is his second novel.

  Also by the Author

  by the same author

  fiction

  NARCOPOLIS

  poetry

  COLLECTED POEMS

  THESE ERRORS ARE CORRECT

  ENGLISH

  APOCALYPSO

  GEMINI (two-poet volume)

  as editor

  THE BLOODAXE BOOK OF

  CONTEMPORARY INDIAN POETS

  DIVIDED TIME:

  INDIA AND THE END OF DIASPORA

  libretto

  BABUR IN LONDON

  Copyright

  First published in the UK in 2018

  by Faber & Faber Ltd

  Bloomsbury House

  74–77 Great Russell Street

  London WC1B 3DA

  This ebook edition first published in 2018

  All rights reserved

  © Jeet Thayil, 2018

  Cover design by Faber

  Cover images © Izzet Keribar / Getty

  The right of Jeet Thayil to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

  ISBN 978–0–571–33612–8