by Jeet Thayil
He drew a picture on the wall of his room. I saw it after she was taken away and I helped Frank wrap up the house. What a sight the boy’s room was. It seemed to me that nobody was living there because there were no toys or books or clutter. Just a desk against the wall and a narrow bed with a single pillow and above the bed a wooden cross. Like a monk’s cell it was. And there was the picture near the window of his mother naked in a tub, beehive hair and strawberry breasts and skinny arms, oh it was her all right, believe you me. I could see it right away and I knew he had the gift. No wonder she hated it. I heard her shouting. This is the picture the devil loves! Even in her madness she was fully Catholic. She cursed him with hellfire. Stinking brimstone upon your head! We heard nothing more for a long time and then I heard her screaming and the boy ran to my house. She has a knife, he said. What knife, I said. I felt stupid to ask but it came out of my mouth. He said it was the bread knife from the kitchen, of all things. I saw a cigarette burn on his wrist and I asked if she had done it and his reply made me sad. Yes, he said, but it was his own fault. Afterwards he had locked himself in his room as his father had taught him and when he saw his chance he left the house. I called Frank and told him what had happened. In the meanwhile, Burial had stopped shrieking. There was a moment of respite and we all took a breath thinking the worst was over, but it was not. There was a crash and a marble side table came sailing through the window to the lawn. Even then the boy was calm. He had a cup of tea and waited for his father.
After the men in white coats took her away father and son went to Bombay and then out to the wide world. Goa was too small for them. Snobs they were, snobs to the end. Be that as it may the point is the boy is eight when his mother tries to kill him with a knife. And the next year three things happen. His mother is committed to a loony bin, his father takes him to Bombay, and India becomes Independent. How can you not see the significance of these dates? Why do you think he had such a love for English history and literature? He knew more about London than most Londoners. It was his way of belonging to something. More important, it was his way of escaping his mad mother. I think he hated India because of her and once he left he wished never to return.
Fr Fo Hernandez, former teacher at Saint Mary’s School, interviewed by Dismas Bambai in Byculla, Bombay, July 1998
It was old Father Joseph who asked me to take in that Xavier fellow. Father Joseph, what can you do when he booms at you? What a voice! What a stentorian instrument! Booming, booming, for no reason at all and one thing you don’t do when that voice booms in your ear and your spine straightens of its own accord and you know you’re done for, the one thing you don’t do is say no. He’d be after you like a trio of blasted Furies. So of course I accepted the Xavier fellow although he’d missed a term and I knew from the outset he would be trouble. But let me be clear. I had no blasted choice in the matter!
And by the way, I knew this would happen. I’m only surprised it took so long. I knew someone would come nosing around wanting to know about his school days. There’s no getting away from the fact that we schooled him and we must be responsible in some way for the cock-up that followed. I’d say some self-examination is in order, some extended soul searching. Fact: he attended three Jesuit schools before leaving India for the United Kingdom. I myself am a Jesuit born and bred, so I think I may be allowed some leeway here. We teach by example. And what is that example? One, personal freedom, tempered by, two, an awareness of one’s social responsibility, and, three, an understanding of what it means to be fully human. With some of our students this teaching may have unforeseeable consequences. In effect they turn to the opposite end of the spectrum. Sensation, nihilism, excess. They turn against their training.
The day I got the call from old Father Joseph I felt a kind of stench blowing down the line from Goa to my office in Byculla, a wind-borne stench I could not identify. I will describe it as a combination of rotting fish and fresh flowers. And at that moment I knew the voice would bring only bad tidings.
“I’ve written him a recommendation,” said Father Joseph. “His father is a friend. See what you can do, will you?”
So loud I had to hold the phone away from my ear. And I knew the old man well enough to know that in Father Joseph’s world “see what you can do” means “you better get to it right away, boyo”. I held the phone away and still the voice boomed and the ill wind blew and I caught a whiff of fish and desperation. I told myself, you do what you must do.
I took him, missed term and all I took him. And the minute he arrived in my office and took a seat, his chin sunk into his neck, silent as the grave of the martyrs, the minute I saw him I knew. Something about the exceedingly slouchy posture and the shifty gaze that would not hold one’s own and his way of speaking as if each word issued from a mouth full of marbles, I knew only bad luck would follow. You see how right I was!
The first time I called him in was about a week after he got here. He refused to speak in class. When it came to written assignments he was good enough, perhaps even exemplary, but he refused to speak and so I called him into my office. At the time we still used corporal punishment. I believe it can be useful when used judiciously and I knew that one of my colleagues had marked his palm with a ruler. Not that it did any good.
I asked him to sit and when I saw the expression on his face, those resentful eyes, dear lord, I knew I was in for it. I thought of Father Joseph’s overbearing voice and I wished I had had the gumption to tell him no. No, I should have said, this Xavier fellow sounds like a bad customer to me. I don’t want him. You keep him. But it was too late to wallow in regret. Here we were, the miscreant and I, and we had to play our respective roles. So I asked him what he hoped to achieve with silence. Tell me, I said, I have an abiding interest in the circus of personality. He had no reply, of course. Whereupon I had an idea born from bitter experience. I’ve dealt with my share of bad apples and I’ve learned a thing or two. I called for tea for the both of us and placed sugar and milk near his cup. Then, as if I didn’t have a worry in the world, I went to work on drafting the speech I was going to make at a schools meeting the following week. In other words I left him alone and minded my own business in a companionable way. He added sugar but no milk and drank his tea and sat quiet for a time. Just as I was getting used to the silence and hoping it would continue blessedly all day, he said something in that infuriatingly soft voice I had learned to distrust, a voice that was the opposite of Father Joseph’s ear-splitting boom. I didn’t catch it because I wasn’t expecting it. I’m sorry, I said, what did you say? As if it was the most natural thing, as if we were two old friends having a bit of a natter. I had to pull my chair closer to the table. I had to lean forward to hear him.
“Father, why are there no museums in Goa?”
I may have spluttered a little. The fellow was asking a serious question. Well. All my training collected in my spine and I sat up straight. This was a real question even if it had been asked so softly it would take a bleeding superhuman to hear it.
“Of course there are museums in Goa,” I responded. “What makes you think there are not?”
But he had again lapsed into that impermeable, that irredeemable silence and soon I went back to my draft. I was using a red pen to correct and highlight before I made a fair copy. About ten minutes later he spoke again.
“Father, why are there no non-Christian museums in Goa?”
“Because Goa is predominantly Christian,” I replied.
For one thing I wasn’t sure about museums in Goa. I would have to investigate but of course I wasn’t going to tell him that. The more I looked at him sitting on the office chair where a hundred boys had sat, still and silent in his white shirt and blue tie, the more certain I was. I knew he was bad medicine. I could smell it just as I had smelled the stench of rotten fish and wildflowers the day this merry imbroglio had begun. I realised he had more to say and this time I knew how to get it out of him. I went back to my speech. I pretended that ghastly boy wasn’t staring
at me. When he started to talk I didn’t look up and I didn’t lean over. I let him speak.
“There is no sense of history in Goa,” he said, “that goes back further than five hundred years. For Goans the idea of time begins with the Portuguese and the advent of Christianity: there is no notion of a pre- Christian civilisation though there must have been one, wouldn’t you say? Is the idea of living history tied to the idea of religion and picked from the air as casually as we take our sense of sunshine or moisture?”
I was astonished. It was the longest speech I had ever heard him make and as it turned out I would never hear another that was comparable, at least in length. I should have ignored it. I should have made him sit outside. I should never have offered him tea. And once he made the speech I should never have asked him to write it up. And after he’d written it up I should never have sent it to a newspaper I knew.
If I had ignored it I might have saved us a lot of trouble.
Subir Sonalkar, journalist, interviewed by Dismas Bambai at Gokul Permit Room, Colaba, Bombay, July 1998
Poets, man! They’re the same all over. Mendicants, martyrs, lapsed monks convinced the world owes them an explanation or an apology or a meal, wine included. But fuck the dumb shit. I tell you this, if you’re planning a revolution or founding a new religion go to the poets. Don’t waste your time with fucking scriveners. Go to the source, the bards. At least you can count on them to be true to their essential nature. And what is this nature? Ruthlessness, I say! Enlist the poets and expect blood. There will be a lot of it. Enlist the poets and stay away from the novelists because novelists are feckless. They have no feck at all. They are yes-men hungry for approval and patronage, always looking out for their own best interests. As for playwrights, all they do is talk, talk, talk about the revolution and social justice, women’s empowerment, humanism, anarchism, but it never goes anywhere because that’s all it is, big talk, back talk, chitchat, gossip. They’re good at it because this is how they gather material. When it comes to putting words into action? They’ll be the first to disappear. You will also come across scriptwriters and screenplay doctors. Be warned. They live in their own reality and it rarely coincides with anyone else’s. I advise you to tread carefully with those bastards. Walk among them as if you’re in a den of goddamn vipers. Count on nothing and you’ll be okay. The only ones you can trust are the short-story writers because they’re like poets in at least one respect. They shoot their shot in one go and this leads to an understanding of luck and discipline. They learn early that discipline lies in waiting and allowing the circumstances for luck to arise. The point I am trying to make is that poets are born with certain unenviable traits. For example, paranoia. For example, they believe in persecution by persons of lesser sensibility. For example, they admire self-sabotage and the perverse. And for a last example, they are born with a capacity for cruelty, followed by an infinite capacity for remorse.
How do I know this in such intimate detail? Because for a time in the seventies I was a poet too, though I was never a good one. No good. I knew that and it might have been the thing that fucking saved me. Or it might be the thing that brought me to this table, sitting with you, lifting my endless glass of Old Monk to the murky afternoon light of Gokul.
I know it’s hard to imagine but once when I was young I wrote poems. I fancied myself a Maoist. I joined the CPI-M-fucking-L. I read Proudhon and as if I had come up with the idea all by myself I announced that property is theft is property is goddamn fucking theft. I read the usual poets. Baudelaire of course, or should I say Rimbaudelaire? Because Baudelaire led me to Rimbaud who led me to Mallarmé and inevitably I found Verlaine and Villon, to continue with the theme of theft, and Michel Butor, although I only read L’emploi du temps, I couldn’t find anything else, and Blaise Cendrars, Tristan Tzara, Robert Desnos, Jean Follain, Francis Ponge, and finally, unavoidably, Alfred Jarry, because Ubu Roi from its first word, “Shit”, is poetry, also Isidore Ducasse, obviously, which young poet does not read Monsieur Ducasse? Also, René Char, André Salmon, Max Jacob, and so on, the usual lot, as I said, and I read them exclusively for two years and more. It was my French phase. All poets have one but that’s hardly new and it’s not the point of this speech. What I’m trying to say is that once upon a time the weight of the world rested on my slender underfed shoulders. You see, I wrote poems.
Let’s say I gave the poetry life a go. Or the poetry life gave me a go and found me wanting. Ezekiel published me in the Illustrated Weekly of India though not in Quest and I did some reviews and opinion pieces for the newspapers. I was living in a one-room chawl at Crawford Market, a proper Bombay tenement with shared bathrooms and balconies where you saw entire families live their lives in a single room. I lived in a chawl named poverty. For me that is the essence of the goddamn poetry life. There’s a reason those words are so similar in sound and spelling and separated only by a V pronounced the Indian way, we.
POETRY = POVERTY.
I was half a name in the cultural life of the city and Frank Xavier was the editor of the best newspaper, the Back-Bay Dispatch. I wrote a weekly column for his paper and we became friends. This was after his wife had been committed to an asylum somewhere in the south. For a while he took as mistress an American photographer who tried to be a mother to the boy, except Newton was not interested in acquiring a new mother.
When the father showed me the son’s poems the first question I asked was about his age. Fifteen, he said, and I said, come on, Frank, pull the other one. Frank said he was not joking: Newton had just turned fifteen. I asked if he had helped edit the poems. Everybody asks that, said Frank, a handsome man who was always in a suit and tie, always elegantly provided with a glass of good whisky at his elbow. Come to dinner, he said, and judge for yourself.
They lived in one of those new apartments near Navy Nagar, wall-to-wall windows and a view of the sea. We had a drink and then Frank sent for his son, who arrived wearing a summery short-sleeved white shirt. I remember it was beautifully pressed. I noticed that kind of thing because I didn’t press my clothes. I was a communist. I also remember that he was smoking an unfiltered local brand called Cavenders. Frank smoked imported cigarettes and used a holder. They were quite a sight, father and son, perfectly poised and smoking in harmony.
How do you do? Newton said, like the perfect English gentleman he wasn’t. He was a skinny Indian kid who’d never been out of the country. It was unnerving to say the least, as unnerving as the heavy fucking silence he brought with him. Nobody said anything for a while and then, just to lighten the air a bit, I told him I liked his poems. He nodded and stared at the floor as if I had asked him to promise me, on pain of death, that he would never again write another word. He hung his head and smoked and stayed completely silent. I feel I should say a word about the quality of that silence. It was not the kind of silence that allows sweet meditation to flower and neither was it companionable. He was only a boy but his silence felt like oppression, a sense of the slave ship, the sharp stink of the lash below decks, also a sense of aphasic fucking bewilderment. He smoked and looked into the distance of the floor. Perhaps he was shy but I don’t think so. For me there was a kind of violence in that silence, a torturer’s sly pleasure. I felt it was up to me to say something because clearly the kid was beyond speech. So I asked how many poems he’d written. He looked stricken, as if I had said something unforgivable, as if I had asked a question about his mad mother or enquired as to whether or not he was a virgin (there was no doubt that he was, you could tell from the way the poems idealised women). He said nothing for a long time. How long I don’t know but it was an interminable stretch of murderous goddamn silence. Then he lit yet another unfiltered fucking Cavender. He said, about a dozen, maybe ten that I’m sure of. That’s not bad for someone your age, I said, relieved now that there was some semblance of a conversation. He nodded in a solemn way and said with an old man’s gravity that he would have had more but he’d just completed a book on cricket. A small press was b
ringing it out. I forget the title, something like The Green Grass of Home or How Green the Grass. Frank said the boy was thirteen when he started writing the cricket book and that was when it struck me. I said, are you the Xavier who writes the cricket commentary with the line drawings and Yeats epigraphs? Yes, said Frank, that’s him. First I was surprised and then it made sense to me and all of a sudden I knew he had written the poems himself with no assistance from his father or anyone else. I was a fan of his cricket pieces but I didn’t know how to say so without embarrassing us both. We talked about poetry. He said he was reading the Symbolists and we had a long conversation about the French poets and after that he said nothing more for the rest of the night. When we moved to the dining table his father allowed him a glass of beer. The food was Goan, pork and rice, cutlets and a salad and a heavy bebinca to finish. He smoked during the meal and sipped silently at his beer. I’ll tell you what else I remember. He had the most delicate hands and he knew it. And he had a way of holding a cigarette as if to show off his hands. It was the only sign of vanity I noticed.
Glory Pande, former live model, interviewed by Dismas Bambai at Bangalore Club, Bangalore, March 2005
I was one of the first women in India to model nude. I come from a family of writers and artists on both sides. My aunt streaked on Juhu Beach in 1974. She caused a scandal and she was invited to the best parties in Bombay. My uncle was a novelist and poet, three novels, four books of poetry, and a collection of essays. In his sixties he was accused of sedition for a novel he had written thirty years earlier, a novel that had known only moderate success until some right-wing busybodies discovered literature. My uncle said the charge of sedition was the best thing that ever happened to him. It restarted his career, made him a legend. My mother wore bell-bottom jeans in 1972 when nobody else had them. It was the first time anyone had seen an Indian woman in groovy pants. My father says she stopped the traffic on Flora Fountain, including the double-decker buses. So when I began modelling nude it really was not a big thing. The work was “artistic” as we used to call it. In other words, it was tame and tasteful. Until Newton came along, that is. I was live modelling once a week in the evenings and he was the youngest student in the class. He painted a series of pictures that were similar in a way, fully dressed women around a naked man. Eerie. I was nude, he painted me fully dressed, and it was the first time I felt as if someone had seen me naked. He was a boy and already there was something in the way he depicted the female form. Oh, I know what some people will say. I was treated like a sex object. I was a repository for male leering. The truth is simpler and more complex. I was in my twenties, yes, but he was in his teens and if I was objectified then so was the man in the paintings and the man was always Newton and he always painted himself with so much self-loathing, such violence directed against his own person, the blemishes placed under a magnifying glass as if he saw himself in the future when his youth and talent had faded. In one picture he made himself an old man with a broken nose and white beard. Uncanny when you think about it. I saw a photo a few weeks ago of Newton with a broken nose and shaggy beard, as if the early work was some kind of prophecy. And another thing about the “Portraits of a Ladie” series, he made himself ugly and he made me beautiful. If that’s objectification I have no objection.