by Jeet Thayil
Pity poor Ullis anxiously waiting across the street from the Asiatic Library, making devil horns and white power signals while passersby gave him a wide and frightened berth. Pity him obediently waiting in the doorway of a locksmith’s shop like a large furless creature unaccustomed to daylight. He’d been late getting there and had wondered for a brief wild moment if Danny would be waiting. Of course he was not. Rule number one in the dealer’s handbook: never be on time. Not even Danny the Rapper would consider breaking this commandment. Then, just as if Danny had read his mind or heard it on the junkie jungle telegraph, there was the buzz of a text: “10m bro”.
Above him in the trees the tailorbird scolded in real time, “Cut!”
Perhaps it was a sign from the world around him. Perhaps the bird was telling him to cut and run while the cutting was good. How many times had he waited for dealers in the crummiest corners of this or that city? If he could collect the time he had spent, what would it amount to? (Not much.) And what would he do with the time saved? (Waste it, of course.) And since he was in the mood for questions: What was the lure of the high? Now there was a question a sensible person would duck, simply because the answer was so plain, so ruinous. You paid in money and time for a drug that obliterated money and time. You received the peace of eternal rest. Your breath slowed to glacial increments. Your fears flatlined. You dreamed with your eyes open and you conversed with those you loved. You died your best death and you came back to life. Or you didn’t. It was the greatest of all lures. It was beauty. It was hope.
Twenty minutes later, a black SUV stopped to honks of protest from other cars. A small man under a giant Afro peered from the back seat.
“Sir,” Danny said, beckoning.
Ullis got into the car and the driver eased back inside the traffic.
“You are not looking so good, sir,” said Danny, who was not looking so good either. His skin had mottled into splotches of dusty cream and his eyes were red and glazed. “You don’t believe in sleeping, no?”
“No,” said Ullis. “Nice to see you too, Danny.”
“Man, why you wearing a suit?”
“I had to go to a formal occasion,” said Ullis as they bumped fists. “Nothing wrong with a bit of formality.”
“Bro, damn good crack,” said Danny mysteriously.
“Shall we get to the business at hand?” Ullis pulled out a wad of five hundred-rupee notes. To his surprise Danny waved it away.
“Keep for now. We going to my friend’s house,” said Danny, patting the iridescent pouch he wore across his belly. The pouch sported a trippy day-glo Grateful Dead design, of all things. Hopeless, subterfuge was hopeless. Danny might as well wear a placard that said, DRUG DEALER!
“Do me a favour, bro,” the dealer said. He offered Ullis a pair of earphones. “Check my new track.” This was a ritual when buying drugs from Danny. He touched play on his phone, and Ullis heard a spare beat and three-note piano line overlaid by tinny bass. Danny’s voice dialled in, cracked and grizzled, railing against God, hoes, racists and the dilution of the black bloodline. There was a percussion solo and a coda praising “Malcolm X / The man who hex / Goin’ off like SFX,” and there the track ended, just as Ullis was beginning to enjoy it.
“What you think? Deadly or what?” said Danny, grinning widely. “Go on, bro.”
“Deadly! Just, I think you shouldn’t have stinted on the ‘hoes’ and ‘motherfuckers’. I only counted about twenty. It’s hip-hop, too much is never enough.”
“You got a point though,” said Danny, as the car turned under a bridge. They stopped on a short covered street lined on both sides with parked lorries and handcarts. Danny gave the driver money. He said, “Man, wait right here!”
The road under the bridge was cobbled and terrifically uneven. Ullis noticed a bundle of black feathers, a dead crow collapsed into itself, as if its internal organs had been sucked out leaving only a vacuum of beak and eyes, and feathers glossy in the sodium light. Nearby a striped cat crouched, weighing its options.
They walked towards Opera House and passed a huddle of street vendors. There was a roadside ‘shoe repair expert’ and a locksmith. There was a cart selling Bombay sandwiches. Ullis watched as white Wibs bread was spread with green chutney and Amul butter and layered with paper-thin slices of tomato and onion and boiled potato. He felt a sudden flare of hunger, crushed immediately by the mutant meow-fed butterflies in his belly. They walked on.
The sun, brighter and hotter than ever, beat against air heavy with gas and laden with chemicals. Twelve more years. They turned into a gated house, and a uniformed guard led them to a small steel-lined claustrophobia-inducing elevator. To distract himself on the way down he recalled Aki’s exact words: Twelve more years and life as we know it is over. It had taken much less than twelve years for their life to be over. Looking around, he made the mistake of catching sight of himself in the mirror. Danny was right. He wasn’t looking so good. The sight of the emaciated strange-eyed man – dark shadows pockmarked by white stubble – made him want to exit the elevator, the day, his life, go somewhere far from mirrors and the rising sea, where he would relearn the lost and tender art of sleeping, where he would hear again his wife’s loving tirade break like the ocean around his head. Then, instead of Lowell, he heard Franz Wright’s whispery voice dripping into his ear a choice piece of cracked advice: the avoidance of mirrors represents one of humankind’s major ordeals among the stars … Ullis gazed obediently at his loafers until at last the steel doors opened at the basement. He exited gratefully and stopped short at the sight of a uniformed policeman. Danny-wards he looked for guidance.
“Hey, Damodar,” said Danny to the cop. “What up?”
“Danny,” said Damodar, whose blue cap was set at a jaunty angle. He knocked on a panelled door and it opened at once as if someone had been standing there waiting to be signalled.
“Welcome to the bunker,” said a tall man with watery eyes and salt-and-pepper hair. His heavy belly began at the breastbone. He pulled Ullis into the room with a sweaty handshake that left a red pressure mark on the back of his hand.
“This is Anis, our host,” said Danny. “Dom is a writer.”
“Oh yes?” said his host. “Which movie? Maybe I saw it.”
“Not that kind of writer,” said Ullis. “Unfortunately.”
“Dom is a poet and he know it,” said Danny, “sometimes he show it and sometimes he grow it.”
“Woah,” said Ullis hastily, “not true. I’m no poet.”
“Yes, sir, you are,” said Danny.
“You’re a poet only when you’re writing,” said Ullis.
Anis clapped his hands. “Poetries? Very nice, very nice, I also like. Rupee Crore is my favourite!”
“You mean Rupi Kaur?”
“Yes, yes. My girl Rupee writes milk and honey, bastard!” He produced a laugh like broken glass, thick with phlegm and pleasure.
“When you’re not writing, you’re just another chooth,” said Ullis. “I haven’t written anything in a long time.”
“Come with me, chooth,” said Anis, putting a meaty paw on his shoulder and steering him to the bar.
A dinner party at noon, the air thick with eau de cologne and cigarette smoke. Heavy gold curtains pulled against the light. Crochet doilies wilted on the fake French furniture. The walls crowded with tribal masks and paintings of jazz musicians. Candles flickered. There was music but it sounded indistinct, like noises from the bottom of the sea. The music and the voices and the dim undersea light, the smell of sweat and perfume and cleaning fluid: a vision out of the near future. A drowned nation, a league of drowned nations, a planet spawned by the devil and spurned by God, doom our only recourse.
But what right had Ullis to speak of God and the devil? What right had he to point fingers? Better to keep such ideas within the confines of one’s head right up until the moment that the sea was lapping at one’s knees. Say in about twelve years.
Reluctantly, he joined a group of men in
gym clothes drinking brandy at the bar. In the electric gloom of the basement, their sweaty excited faces were wreathed in scarves of blue and yellow smoke. They spoke a monkey jabber of yelps and curses. The only woman in the room sat at a high table in the corner, arguing with a man in cargo shorts. Smoky yellow soot covered everything.
“Come here, bastard,” Anis told a youth with a wispy goatee and a bombardier’s stare. He put meaty hands on either side of the boy’s face and kissed him on the lips. He crushed him in a bear hug. “Bastard!” he kept saying. “Ya bastard!”
Ullis looked for Danny who had cleverly vanished. He took out his phone and couldn’t remember why. Someone appeared with a tray. There were glasses of red wine and cigarettes in a saucer. He took a cigarette and put it back when he remembered that he’d quit smoking. He called Danny and heard a recorded voice speaking in an accent that strove to be British: “This number does not exist.”
He was in Hades. He was in Gehenna where numbers did not exist and humans became their demon counterparts. He was in hell and Danny was Virgil but Virgil was nowhere to be found. It was all of a piece, a fated trajectory he could not undo: his wife’s death in Delhi, the electric flames of the crematorium, the descent into Bombay, the expense of the spirit, the inevitable waste of shame. He might as well give in and submit with good grace. Make himself at home in hell’s smoky apartments.
There was the sudden sound of gunshots, Anis clapping his hands. “Victor,” he said. “Drink, bring!” Had he won a wager, an argument, a feud? Whatever the nature of the win, the drink was not brought. Anis stood swaying on his feet. Ullis imagined him toppling over like a tree in a storm. He imagined the crash would reverberate through the house, from the basement to the top floors. Anis focused on a man standing alone near the air conditioner, smoking. A pair of tortoiseshell reading glasses hung on a chain around his neck.
“Dinshaw,” said Anis. “Bastard, come here!”
He put his hand over Dinshaw’s mouth and kissed him very hard. Dinshaw’s cigarette fell to the floor, a burst of tiny sparks.
“Dinshaw, ya bastard,” said Anis, holding him in a one-handed bear hug. “Tell everybody, didn’t I give you two crores?”
“It was more than that,” said Dinshaw, struggling to free himself. “But it wasn’t enough. You still owe us.”
Anis pulled him to the couch and kissed him again, his hand between their mouths. The struggle continued, until all of a sudden Anis got up and went to the woman at the corner table.
“I was a partner at Izzy,” said Dinshaw when he saw that Anis had gone. He sounded exhausted.
“I remember Izzy,” said Ullis. He recalled a Berlin dive in the heart of a district of disused textile mills. He recalled the floor at the entrance to the club, a smiley face made of coloured tiles. “I think everybody remembers Izzy. It shut too soon.”
“Anis bought it from me and my partners. He stiffed us on the deal and shut it down.”
“That’s business,” said Anis, who had stealthily returned. “Just remember, bastard, legends fuck alone. They don’t bro up, okay?” He hitched his pants and squinted. Swaying on his feet, he glared at his guests as if he wanted to fight them one bastard at a time. He was a big man yearning for battle. And a drink.
“Victor!” he yelled. “Where’s Victor?”
At last there arrived a diminutive barefoot man in a frayed polo shirt and house shorts. He bore a glass of whisky on a tray. His feet were white with age and dust. Curly greying hair, a pointed face, a tiny gold cross on a leather thong.
Anis took the drink and said, “Victor, bring!”
Victor went into the kitchen where he put a dinner plate into the microwave. When it had warmed sufficiently, he adorned the centre with slender lines of cocaine. There were grooves on the side, on which he placed some short plastic straws. He brought the offering around. Ullis took a line and passed it on, and Victor asked what he would like to drink. He returned immediately with a large Grey Goose on ice. Ullis felt the back of his throat go numb from the cocaine and he took a sip of vodka to enhance the numbness.
If I keep drinking I will shed my thoughts like old skin. If I keep drinking I will be thoughtless and free. If I keep drinking I won’t have to speak ever again. I will die too and everything will work out, one way or the other.
He raised his glass and heard raised voices.
“If you touch me again I will call police,” said the woman in the corner. She was perched on a barstool. Her short dress and rubber slippers were a size too large for her, as if she had suddenly lost weight. She was speaking to a Delhi television pundit famed for his shock of white hair and his Maserati and the allegations that sprouted around him like toadstools in the shade of the #MeToo movement. Ullis remembered that his name was Shabash. Usually photographed in bespoke suits, tonight he was off-duty, wearing cargo shorts and an ABBA T-shirt. Another man leaned against the wall. A bottle of mineral water dangled loosely from his hand.
“I’ll vouch for this fellow,” said Dinshaw. “He’s a well-known impresario from Delhi. There’s really no need to call the police.”
“Ce? Taci!” said the woman. “I know who he is. Question is who are you?”
“Dinshaw’s my name.”
“Forget! I don’t care.”
“And you are?”
“I don’t care! He slapped me. Ce naiba faci?”
“You laughed at me,” said Shabash, running a hand through his thick white coif. “I’m not a dolt, you know. I expect better behaviour from my friends.”
The story emerged. Shabash and the woman had been deep in conversation when Anis, walking past, pulled down Shabash’s shorts and gave the room a glimpse of skimpy black Speedos. The woman was quick to guffaw. Shabash put his shorts back in place, his face a mask. Not a man to take lightly an assault on his dignity, and too much of a coward to tackle the true culprit, Shabash turned to the woman who had laughed at his humiliation and slapped her.
“I am Romanian woman from Romania,” she said, holding up her cell phone. “I am not joking. Touch me again and I will call cops.”
The man who had been leaning against the wall straightened up and said, “I am DCP with Mumbai police, madam. How can I help?”
Victor came by just then with a fresh plate of tiny lines. The woman and the policeman took a taste each but Shabash pointedly declined. When the plate came to Ullis he took two hits, one for each nostril. The powder hardly burned. The rush was clean and pharmaceutically sound, which meant the cocaine was top of the line. It had not been cut with lactose or crushed vitamins or mephedrone or ketamine. In short, it was Danny at his best.
He was sitting on the couch with his fingers in his ears in honour of the long-deceased Srinivas Acharya when he felt something sharp under his hips: a pair of tortoiseshell glasses, the chain broken during Anis’s frenzied bear hug. He looked around the room and found Dinshaw smoking at his spot near the air conditioner.
“Man’s a dick,” said Dinshaw, accepting the spectacles.
“I think that isn’t much of an exaggeration,” said Ullis.
“Boss, I know it for a fact. We were schoolmates at St Mary’s. He was the worst bully on the playground and he always picked on the smallest kids.”
“He hasn’t changed much.”
“I think he’s got worse. And it’s the booze, not the coke. For some people alcohol is poison, yes? Like mainlining fucking arsenic.”
“You’re probably right, though I hate to speak badly of alcohol. I don’t know where I’d be without it.”
“Want to hear something? I was having a little chat with Mara, the Romanian? Victor pulled me away, physically pulled me away and told me Anis wouldn’t like it. Like he owns her. Like he went to the market and bought her from her parents or something.”
“What are you bastards talking?” said Anis. Smoke issued from his nostrils in twin streams, a bull with a nicotine habit.
“Actually we were talking about you,” said Ullis.
&n
bsp; “Oh yes? What were you talking about me?”
“We were wishing you weren’t such a bully.”
Dinshaw’s cigarette froze in mid-air. Anis rotated his head from side to side like a boxer warming up for twelve rounds in the ring. He said, “Who are you anyway, man? You’re a poet, not scriptwriter! Means, like, you’re, like, nothing … like, nobody.”
“You’re right about that,” said Ullis.
“Of course I am right,” said Anis. “If you disappeared tomorrow who would notice?”
Ullis knew the truth when he heard it. There was little question that nobody would notice his disappearance, not from Bombay, not from Delhi, not from anywhere. The only person who might have noticed had been reduced to ashes in a box. He was alone in the world. Not that this was necessarily a bad thing. There was an advantage to being alone and anonymous: you were free to disappear if you wished. For some people vanishing off the face of the earth was an attractive proposition. He was about to explain this to his lumbering host when Anis picked up a bottle of whisky – Solan No. 1, of all the old-school drinks in the world – put it to his mouth and drank deeply. Was he preparing for battle? Why bother? Ullis felt as if he had been ground into the dust of the field and pulverised, never to rise again. He had been properly vanquished by Anis the Victor.
“Writer-ji,” Anis began. His veiny right hand bunched into a fist.
Above Ullis’s head a candelabrum of cigarette smoke descended by degrees. The lower it fell the more Ullis knew the truth of Anis’s words, that he had indeed disappeared without anybody noticing. He steeled himself for the Anissian punch. Truth to tell, he looked forward to it. A well-aimed blow might be the very thing to clear away the cobwebs of confusion and guilt and misunderstanding. A broken nose or split lip would focus his mind and steady its course. He waited but the blow did not land. Instead, a well-tended Afro bobbed into view. Like an angel of reconciliation, Danny positioned himself between the two men. Ullis imagined he saw the white afterglow of giant wings. Danny’s eyes, liquid and all-knowing, were the only source of tenderness in the room, perhaps in the entire city.