by Jeet Thayil
She said, ‘Aapka naam, sir?’
‘Rumi, I mean Ramesh.’
‘Aap Mohammedan hai?’
‘No.’
‘My name is Zoya.’
‘Zoya.’
‘Zoya Shaukat Ali, Mohammedan.’
‘One minute, Zoya, I asked for your name?’
‘Ji, nahi.’
‘Then why tell me? You think I care? Why you asked if I’m Mohammedan?’
‘Aapka naam, sir. Sorry.’
‘My name is Ramesh. Understand?’
‘Haan, ji.’
‘You have coconut oil?’
‘Ji, sir.’
‘Take this off, and this, put oil. Go on, put more, more.’
‘Ji, sir.’
‘You smell bad.’
‘Ji?’
‘Your sweat smells bad, in fact it’s horrible. Why is that?’
‘Nahi, sir.’
‘Tell me why.’
‘Nahi.’
‘Because you eat too much meat.’
‘I, no, sir, I don’t eat too much.’
‘Not no, sir. Yes, sir.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Smell me. Go on. You see? No bad odour. Why? Because I eat only pure vegetarian. Use both hands. Don’t touch my nipples,’ said Rumi.
The girl said, ‘Handshake left hand se hotha hai, right se khana katha hai, sir.’
‘Right, left, you think you’re Hindu? Use the other hand, use both hands.’
He stared at her in disbelief and when he finger-fucked her she cried, ma, ma, ma, like a small goat.
*
The Annexe was a big room with a high ceiling and folding chairs instead of pews. NA meetings were held there and so was the weekly old people’s meeting. It was a large space with nothing in it except faded red matting and a cross on the wall, just the cross, no figure. First there was an introduction by Father Fo, the man who had allowed Safer to open a centre in his church. He appeared in the press and on TV because of his work with addicts and the elderly. Each year, during the fair, his name appeared in letters that were only slightly smaller than the letters that announced the festivities. First, Father Fo got up to sing ‘Lead, Kindly Light’ in an unexpected baritone. The boys in camo joined him on harmony. When the hymn came to an end, Father Fo thanked the singers who went back to their seats. Then he said, It gives me great pleasure to introduce a young man who will grace us I hope with more occasions such as this. Soporo took his time going up to the stage. He waited until there was complete silence. Then he looked around at his audience and said, I have a question for you and a confession and, to end, a lament. There was some scattered applause from the row of Safer boys but Soporo looked down at his hands and it stopped.
He said he had come to the meeting with an outline in his head of a talk concerning music and time, but, as he looked around the room, he realized it was an irrelevant topic that would interest no one, or not for more than five minutes, and later, if they remembered it at all they would remember it as a kind of silly puzzle. Again he stopped and looked at his hands as if he’d forgotten something. I think we have more important things to talk about today, he said. And then he talked about what freedom meant, that is, the play of free will as opposed to habits of the body, like smoking or injecting heroin. At the word heroin there was a slight change in the room, as if each member of the audience had taken a deep breath or shifted in their seats. I want to start with a question. Is it true that taking heroin is an example of free will at its most powerful? I believe there is a good case for this argument. All users know how addictive the drug is, and dangerous. OD, infection, crime, we know we’re risking our lives and yet we choose to do it. Here Soporo paused and stared at the boys of Safer, or at a point just behind them, as if he was reading from a teleprompter, and his argument took a sidelong tangent. He mentioned a commentator who said it was the painkilling nature of the drug that made it so addictive, that if scientists were to isolate and neutralize its painkilling element it could be taken with no fear of addiction. But why hasn’t a scientist already done this thing, synthesize a version of the drug that would provide only pleasure, that is to say, pleasure with no payback? Because then the scientist would be entering into the realm of ethics, into God’s realm, he would remove evil and leave only good, or, to put it another way, he’d remove the devil and leave only God, and this is something no government or religious institution will condone, much less pay for. The system depends on the idea of consequences for one’s actions, and consequences, as most of us know, is simply another word for the devil. But I want to talk a little bit about God. I want to remind you of the shock and fear that God felt when he realized he was not the only God of the world. How do we know he knew? ‘I am a jealous God and there is no other God beside me,’ he told the angels, and by so doing indicated that there were indeed other gods, or why would he be jealous? And as long as there is jealousy, how can there be freedom? And if God is not free how can man expect to be? Excuse me, Soporo said, and walked slowly to his chair. He took a bottle of water out of his satchel and came back to the stage, which was a clear area in front of the room. There was no pulpit or microphone. He took a drink of water and swallowed carefully and placed the bottle on the ground by his feet. He said it was possible that some day a scientist would take up the good work, but until then heroin would remain utterly addictive. Then he said, The interesting thing is that we choose it, despite everything we choose it and continue to choose it. Is this an example of free will in action? That’s my question. And, secondly: are addicts free? Are they in fact the freest of men?
*
He took a cab to Rajesh Khanna Park and kept it waiting while he went into the Tamil slum known as Murugan Chawl and bought a five-gram pack. The woman who sold him the smack had a baby at her breast and he sat on the floor and snorted a quick line off his wrist and then he made a joint. His ass immediately tightened and he felt better, or better than better, best, infinitely best. The woman was telling him about her brother who used to run the family’s heroin trade but had died from TB and drugs. Two of her brothers-in-law were dead from mysterious illnesses that she attributed to garad heroin, and her husband, also a garaduli, had fallen off a train earlier that year, leaving her with two kids, etc. etc. etc. The lament slid from his head like rain and he stared at her breasts, or breast, since only the single one was visible, one pathetic tit being suckled by the vampire baby leech that was fattening as he watched. It was less than a year old and its greasy black hair was plastered to its forehead and it had the face of an old sow, and its future was written on its forehead: fatherless childhood, adolescence of petty crime, garad or alcohol in his late teens, more crime, illness, the usual ending. Why did you have another baby? he asked the woman. You have no money, your husband was a garaduli, and you already have one mouth to feed, why another? The woman’s face was oily and her oily black hair was tied with a rubber band. She took the baby from her breast and held it to him. Hold him and you’ll know, she said. He saw a drop of off-white milk on her black nipple. She smiled shyly and pulled the blouse down to cover herself and only then did he look at the thing in his hands. When the baby’s eyes met his, it began to cry. He wanted to shake its misshapen dwarf hand, because the reaction was the first sign of intelligence he’d seen all day. He held it away from his body and examined it, the colour, untouchable, and the smell, ripe, a nauseating mix of talcum powder and Parachute coconut oil. He wanted to take it with him, but how? And what would be a fitting reward to the mother in lieu of her blighted offspring, how many rupees, a thousand, two? Something of what he was feeling must have communicated itself to the woman by a kind of aboriginal voodoo. Give it to me, she said. Give, give. The baby was crying in earnest now, its mouth wide and its eyes closed tight, and he was impressed by the amount of noise it produced. He knew the mother was moments away from shouting for help and then, in an instant, the male members of her criminal clan would be at the door. He gave the baby back and stepped o
ut of the room and walked along the open gutter to the street. In each of the hovels he passed a woman was cooking while her husband drank country liquor and their children puked or pissed in the approximate vicinity of the gutter. He negotiated small piles of watery shit and imagined a great firebomb that would end the poverty and desolation of Murugan Chawl, a big beautiful explosion that would engulf the entire slum and blow its inhabitants straight into the next world. Smiling now, he felt ready to take on the fuckers at the rehab, but first he had to make one last stop and he’d forgotten all about the cabbie, who was still waiting, pacing near his fucked-up piece-of-kaka Fiat. Chalo, he told the man, who got in the car without whining, and he directed him to Bandra East, to the slum near the station, so poor it didn’t have a name, where he picked up a gram of Charlie and treated himself to a quick equalizing line – or three.
*
Soporo said he wanted to make a confession. He took a few steps around the stage, distractedly, like a sick man, then he picked up the bottle and took another careful sip. Instead of a confession he made a joke. He said when he looked around the room at the sinners and the saints, the young and the old, he knew that as far as confessions went his was no big one. But here it is anyway, he said, because after all I’m in the right place for it. Then he explained that he was an uneducated man, or, if not exactly uneducated, certainly unschooled. When he was growing up in China he had every opportunity to study but he chose instead to work and eventually came to India with the intention of solving the mystery of what had happened during the last days of his ancestor, a Muslim Chinese admiral who died here. Instead of solving one problem he found another, he became an addict and he got lost in Bombay. But even in the lost years, or decades, he was reading. What did he read? Whatever came his way, he was unsystematic. He had no discipline and he could afford not to, after all he was not aiming to be a scholar. He read because it gave him instant gratification in a way nothing else did, and, as was the case with all addicts, gratification was the important thing. He liked history, travel, anthropology, cookbooks (which he read in the same way he read other books, for pleasure): he liked books with specialized information. At the moment, he was reading about a thirteenth-century poet who invented a particular poetic form, a form that was so difficult, so fiendish, that subsequent poets rarely attempted more than one example in their entire lifetimes, and almost no one wrote three or more, and this was still the case some seven hundred years after it was invented. The poem consisted of five stanzas of twelve lines each and a last stanza of five lines, with a strict, tremendously intricate rhyming scheme in which the rhyme wasn’t the sound of a word’s ending but the word in its entirety. In each stanza the rhyme words were repeated a certain number of times in a pattern that varied (though even the variations were strict) over the course of the poem. And though there were sixty-five lines there were only five rhyme words, imagine, which meant the poet had to be as inventive as possible beneath the strict framework of the form. For example, said Soporo, writing with his finger on an imaginary blackboard, this is how the rhymes occur in the first stanza:
a
b
a
a
c
a
a
d
d
a
e
e.
In the next stanza the e rhyme takes first place:
e
a
e
e
b
e
e
c
c
e
d
d.
And in the third stanza the d rhyme takes first place and so on until the final stanza when each of the words occurs once, for the last time. The arrangement and rearrangement of rhyme words allows each to be first among equals, even if it’s for one stanza only. It’s as ingenious a form as any you can name and certainly more demanding than most. Here, Soporo stopped and raised both hands in the air as if he was placating an angry mob. He said, Okay, okay, bear with me for a moment. The point is this: why did the poet invent such a difficult form? Did he have nothing better to do? Was he some kind of curmudgeon who wanted to make a difficult art more difficult still? Or was he simply perverse, which he must have been to some extent, after all he was a poet, and a good one. When asked, the poet said at first that he didn’t belong to those who may be asked after their whys. Then he said he wanted to make a form that was akin to wrapping himself in chains, because within the prison of the form it was pure exhilaration and freedom to write such a poem. So, there’s freedom and there’s freedom. Now, said Soporo, here’s my confession. I may take heroin again. I may do it tonight, when you’ve all gone home and I’m alone in my room, reading a book and drinking tea, or not even reading, just looking out the window at the street and the cars going by. I don’t smoke, I don’t drink, I don’t take drugs and I live alone. I look at the cars that are full of people and I look at my hands and wonder what to do with them and it’s a possibility, it’s always a possibility that I’ll go out and catch a cab and take it to a place I know. I may do it and I may not. Either way, I’m free to make a choice because it affects no one else in the world except myself, and that, friends, is the happy and unadorned truth of the matter.
*
Soporo said he was tired. He would have liked to talk for longer but he got tired quickly these days. He said there was just one last thing he wanted to do before they called the meeting to an end. He wanted to say something about planned obsolescence. The first English movie he saw was in 1979 or 1980 at Eros, which at the time was Bombay’s grandest movie theatre, located near Churchgate Station, as they all knew, and if they didn’t they certainly should. The movie was set in Los Angeles in the not-distant future, in fact, in the near future. As far as he could remember, it was about a corporation that made highly intelligent fighting machines, human-looking creatures built to self-destruct after a few years, five years, or four, because the corporation, being a corporation, was run by paranoid bureaucrats who didn’t want a race of super beings running around the planet. As the time grows closer to their annihilation, the brilliant killer machines, blessed or cursed with human sweetness and human rage, become desperate. They decide to find the head of the corporation, their creator, the god who made them in his imagined image, though in reality he is nothing like them, he is unbeautiful, intellectual, distant. They dream up a way to enter the fortress in which he lives and persuade him to reverse the death sentence embedded in their cells, the sentence of accelerated decrepitude, as they call it. This is defiance and the viewer sitting in his seat feels some of their exhilaration as the humanoids call their god to task. But even god cannot change their fate: once written it is irreversible. The leader of the renegades speaks softly to his maker. I want more life, father, he says. Then he kisses him and crushes his skull, as sons tend to do to their fathers. The group of beautiful machines dies one by one until only the leader is left, the most beautiful and dangerous of them all, and when it’s his time to die he makes an unexpected gesture of mercy. He allows the detective who has been hunting him to live, the venal human detective who has killed his lover and his friends, who has pursued them and shown no mercy, he allows this killer to live, saves him in fact, because at the last moment, as he sees his own life come to a close, he gives in to sentimentality. And which viewer does not feel a little of his torment? Here Soporo paused and his gaze wandered around the room and settled on the cross, as if he had never before seen such a strange object, and he repeated the words planned obsolescence. I wonder, said Soporo, if you’ve heard the phrase before, because I saw it recently and now I don’t remember where. But the idea is that companies design products with a short life, like the pretty computers I see these days, with the shiny logos, the biblical half-eaten fruit and so on, pretty objects that are built to self-destruct, so you buy another in a few years, and another and another, and in that way you feed the insect empire, the insects in their insec
t suits, thinking insect thoughts with their sexed-up insect brains. Yes, and finally, Soporo said, to end, he would make two points. First, nothing he’d said that day was original or new, they were ideas he picked up from the air, from things people said or didn’t say, from shreds collected long ago or a moment earlier, collective, shared notions or emotions. Second, he wanted to suggest an antidote to obsolescence, planned or not, and to decrepitude, accelerated or otherwise. His idea was a group lament, a gong, which, in China, meant something collective or shared. The lament he had in mind was a short one, and how could it be otherwise, since no lament could be long enough to express the grief of the world? His suggestion was that each person spend a few minutes thinking about the people they’d lost, those boys and girls and men and women who had been taken by garad heroin, and that they say the names of their dead ones, say them quietly or aloud, it didn’t matter, but say the whole name, because that was the way to do it, say the whole name and remember, that was the way to honour the dead.
*
There was a time, even after he’d moved into two small rooms at the rectory, when he was at Safer almost every day. Now he went only three times a week, for meetings and for housekeeping, to settle accounts, buy provisions, medicine, clothes and linen, and to fix problems when they arose. He was a kind of liaison between Father Fo and whoever was in charge of the day-to-day, which would be Bull. The arrangement left him free to do whatever he felt like, which, lately, wasn’t much. He was on the terrace talking to Charlotte the cook, telling her the same things he’d been saying for months, repeating them as if she was a child, which she most decidedly was not. Use less oil, he told her. Don’t overcook. When you’re cooking prawns put them in last and turn off the flame. Do what the Chinese do, high heat, bite-size pieces, a couple of minutes of cooking and, Charlotte, are you hearing any of this? And that was when Bull asked to see him. They took a stroll around the terrace while Charlotte chopped the veggies and marinated the meat and washed rice. It’s about the new turkey, said Bull. He’d run away the day before, taken off while they were on their way to Soporo’s lecture, and now he was back asking to be let in. The guy was a hard case, an asshole, part of the prison rehab experiment, Bull said, and he should be taught a lesson. Bull thought they should let him stew, let him spend a couple of days on the street and he’d return a changed man. Otherwise, he was going to be a lot of trouble, he was going to be more trouble than he was worth, Bull could smell it. Soporo grinned suddenly. He said, Suppose I’d said that about you when you first turned up here? Do you remember what an asshole you were? Bull said, You can’t save everybody, you know. Some souls are beyond saving. They went down to the third floor where Rumi was waiting on the other side of the staircase gate. He was nodding out on the steps. He opened his eyes when he heard Soporo and Bull, but he didn’t get up. I would let you in, said Soporo, but I’m told that it may not be a good idea. Rumi looked Soporo in the eyes and said: Please let me in. I give you my word it won’t happen again. I don’t believe you, said Bull. You’re not making the decisions here, said Rumi. You see? Bull told Soporo. You see what I mean? The guy’s beyond rehab, we’re wasting our time. Rumi said: Mr Soporo, I give you my word, sir. It won’t happen again. This time I won’t let you down. Soporo told Bull to open the gate, which was unlocked, and Rumi went up without another word. That day he didn’t say much. He ate his meals, did his share of work, slept well. In the following days, too, he seemed changed, as if he’d reconciled to the sober life. Later, after the terrible events that followed had been analysed and analysed some more, the inmates remembered how different he’d seemed in those days, how interested he was in everything, in the running of the centre, in its history, and in Soporo’s personal story. It was inspiring, he said, so inspiring that he wanted to know everything about the man. Then, three days later, he did it again, disappeared for a night and a day and returned just as dinner was being served.