The Book of Chocolate Saints

by Jeet Thayil

  “Even if I have but scanned a few pages I can give you a considered opinion, if that’s what you want.”

  “That’s what I want.”

  “Use your ears and your eyes to make the craft shipshape. Indian poets think all you need to write poetry is feelings, and forget that everybody in the world has feelings, and the purpose of poetry is to get away from your fucking feelings. If you do not mind my saying so, you can write but you are crippled by your image of yourself as a poet with a capital P.”

  He was saying something about youth or truth when Goody returned.

  “It’s for you,” she said to Dismas. Her eyes were wide. “A woman, says she’s your boss and she doesn’t sound happy about it.”

  “Sorry, sorry,” said Dismas, his voice squeaky. It was his bipolar control- freak editor. How had she found the number? The fact that he was about to speak to Mrs Merchant made the nerves tighten behind his eyeballs and he noted also a contraction in the general region of his sphincter. When he picked up the receiver she was already speaking, yelling before he’d said a word.

  “On production day of all days. Haven’t I told you not to go off without permission? Have I or have I not? Tell me because I really want to know. Maybe it’s not your fault? Maybe I forgot to mention it.”

  “I left a message with—”

  “I want you in the office now, you get me? You have two pages to finish and that includes the letters page, one of the most important pages in the paper. I’m looking at it now and it is, let me see, how should I put it? Shit. Complete fucking shit.”

  “Sorry, Mrs Merchant,” Dismas murmured, hoping Goody couldn’t hear him.

  “I can’t hear you.”

  “I said, I’m sorry.”

  “Tell me something.”

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  “Who gave you permission to disappear?”

  “Mrs Merchant, I’m interviewing Newton Xavier the artist. I budgeted the story for this issue and I left a message with Pereira for you.”

  “Pereira? What makes you think I’d listen to a word he says? I don’t care where you are or what you’re doing. You come here and sign off on the page or I’m sending it just the way it is. You know what that means.”

  Dismas knew: abject humiliation at the Thursday morning meeting.

  “I’m on my way,” he managed to say before she hung up.

  “Already?” said Goody, when he went in to say he was leaving. “Newton, did you scare him off?”

  “We were in the middle of an interview, I thought,” said Xavier. His head was in his hands.

  “The editor wants me to sign off on a page. I’d really like to talk to you again whenever it’s convenient.”

  “It may never again be as convenient as it is now,” Xavier raised his voice. It was the first sign of animation he’d shown all morning.

  “It’s a question of my job,” said Dismas. “Sorry, sorry. I’d much rather stay here.”

  The front door opened as soon as he shut it behind him, Goody with a Mary in each arm, bracketed by versions of herself, and she also had his tape recorder, which was still running, and his sheaf of poems.

  “You’re forgetting stuff all over the place today, aren’t you?” She pronounced it stoof.

  He felt the touch of her hands when she gave him the paintings.

  Stepping out of the building he checked for sanitation trucks, speeding or stationary, and on the long walk to the subway he kept open a wary peripheral eye. A fine snow had begun to fall and many of the stores were closed. There was a small crowd outside a basement establishment that advertised yoga classes for dogs. DOGA: FOR YOUR PET’S DAY-LONG MENTAL AGILITY. He passed a phone store and reflexively looked for and found the model Amrik had been using. Motorola StarTAC. He dug out his notebook and made a note of the phone’s clamshell shape and 1.3 ounces of weight.

  On the facing page he had written a riposte to the hit single off the new Kelis album. He read it again and thought it serviceable enough for Indian Angle. “The nature of the beat is moderate, 113 bpm, but why so infectious? Because instead of a drum machine we hear the manjira, trad. Indian hand cymbals, the sound of bhajans imported into American pop.” He would always remember the scene in the video when Kelis went into the kitchen of a diner to entertain a mere cook, a short order fry-up man, not even a chef. The democratic impulse was nothing short of revolutionary. She was a titan of modern aspiration, a benchmark figure with only one rival in the field.

  On the subway he calculated that if the ride to Twenty-Third Street took ten minutes and the walk to the office five, he’d be at his desk in a little over half an hour from when he had spoken to Mrs Merchant. It wasn’t much but it was something.

  Near him were two men in hip-hop uniform, spotless footwear and new baggy jeans and tilted Yankees caps. Shopping for blue jeans at Macy’s, Dismas had discovered that hip-hop labels were as expensive as, if not more expensive than some of the high-end names he coveted. Functional clothing designed to absorb sweat and repel mud cost as much as designer eveningwear. Phat Farm, Armani, same difference. It was a revelation that made him see the B-boys and Thug Lifers in an empathetic new light. The men beside him were mirror images of each other’s clothing styles and the guy on the far side wore Timberlands so new they seemed box-fresh.

  “Seen Tupac’s new joint?” he said.

  “I seen it.”

  “You fillin it?”

  “I fill it.”

  “Straight-up XL fuck-off black, like Tupac. Classic, see what I’m saying?”

  Dismas shut his eyes to hear. It wasn’t easy. Subway noise lapped at his ears with a watery roar and in the thick yellow air sound was drained of all clarity. Mixed into ambient wind-borne knocking and the squeal of metal on metal, the voice retained none of its individual timbre, the tone control was off. Dismas leaned in and held his breath.

  What was the guy talking about?

  “Got to be black and no leather on it. Got to be nothing on it.”

  Some item of clothing, but what could it be?

  “I’m saying it got rules, fool, like everything. Like, if it’s cognac it best be Henny.”

  “Why?” said his friend.

  “Open it. That smell?”

  It came to him that the man was talking about hoodies, but this was nothing more than a peg for his ideas. In actuality the guy was engaged in an examination of shopping in all its infinite variety. He was a guru, a realised master of the targeted purchase. Here was the act elevated to art. Here was a pure product of America. Dismas had many questions for such a man – for example, which venue offered better value, Banana Republic or Club Monaco? – but Twenty-Third Street was nigh.

  *

  Dismas’s true reason for coming to America had been to get away from the caste-endowed divisions of his homeland and to avail of consumerism as an opportunity for social improvement. He graduated from Bombay University with a degree in economics and sociology. He’d scraped through with a pass and had no illusions about his academic prowess or lack thereof. He realised early that his talent was a modern one. He was a discerning and intelligent consumer of products, substances, and services. America was a Mecca for a man of his abilities and when the opportunity presented itself he applied for a ruinously expensive Master’s at the not-so-prestigious Central University of New York. There he managed to bag a partial scholarship available to needy foreign students. Expenses were another matter. As a student he’d managed to keep them down. He had shopped only when necessary and stayed within the spectrum of toiletries and clothes and music. Until he started to look for work Dismas had assumed that an MFA in comparative literature would get him a good American job with good American pay in a good-to-middling American university and then would begin his conquest of American retail and American leisure. But before he could find a university placement he ran out of funds and he was forced to take the first job that came his way.

  At Apna Bazar Cash & Carry in Jackson Heights he found a tabloid w
ith the unpromising name of Indian Angle. It was so shabby and so badly in need of a makeover that he knew he would get a job without too much effort. He cold-called on a Monday and was asked to come in early Tuesday for an interview. The office was on Twenty-Sixth and Sixth and the editor-in-chief was a skeletal woman named Mrs Merchant whose decades in New York hadn’t changed her Delhi accent or Delhi-centric view of the world. There was a sloped wooden stand under her desk for her feet and a dog dozed in a wicker basket by her chair. Dismas handed her a CV that said he had worked for the Times of Bharat during the years 1990–1995. The claim was true only from a distance. He had never been on staff or accredited in any way. The woman asked what kind of work he’d done. Art critic and cultural theorist, he replied, at which she had narrowed her eyes as if someone had released sewer gas into the room. A moment later he did smell sewer gas. Perhaps it was the dog. She asked if he had brought clippings and he took out a little plastic holder and handed her one yellowing bit of newsprint after another. She pressed a switch on her phone and summoned the assistant editor and the features editor/obituarist. Then she read from the clippings in a tone that sounded earnest at first, even admiring, until Dismas understood from the discomfort on the faces of the two editors that it was meant to convey contempt.

  “‘Papyrus palimpsests of a disappeared race, hard-won artefacts that embody a Rimbaldian punctum (“Il faut être absolument moderne”) transported at great peril across space and time. They tell us that modernity is an age-old idea. Each element in these crowded frames has the function of a prayer and each is a variant exegesis on an ancient prophecy, that the promise of beauty is inseparable from the promise of happiness.’”

  She put the cutting aside and took off her glasses to examine Dismas. Then she read from the next one.

  “‘In this artist’s fierce palette of ochres and reds we are witness to a world of ritual slaughter and fertility, menstrual ministrations and hymen hymns, the mystic grammar of a matriarch who embodies the tribe’s yearning for transcendence.’”

  She repeated the phrase ‘menstrual ministrations and hymen hymns’ with a little shake of her head, then put the clipping aside and picked up another.

  “‘What mysteries? What edicts? What frenzied hieroglyphs? These truncated tales in a tortured tongue are the dialect of a people whose entire alphabet consists of two or three consonants and a single fugitive vowel.’”

  She coughed and put the cuttings down.

  “Bravo, the Times of Bharat,” she said. “But what do we do with this kind of writing at Indian Angle?”

  Expectantly, the two editors looked at her.

  She said, “What do we do, people? I can’t hear you.”

  Pereira, features editor and obituarist, was the first to speak. “We spike it, ma’am?”

  “That’s right,” said Mrs Merchant, slapping the air with her free hand, “we spike it. And why do we spike it? I know you know so let me hear you say the words.”

  She cupped her ear. “I can’t hear you.”

  “Because it has no traction, ma’am,” Pereira said. “Because our goal is not to create deathless prose but to communicate essential information.”

  “Close but no biscuit. We spike it because it’s shit. I can’t hear you.”

  “We spike it because it’s shit,” Pereira and the other editor said in unison.

  “If you want to work here you’ll have to learn how to spike shit,” she told Dismas and nodded at the pile of cuttings by her elbow. “You can start with that.”

  Dismas looked at the cuttings and thought about freedom. There was no question that he needed a steady influx of dollars to be a part of the city’s rich inner life of consumerist discernment. Otherwise he would return to India with nothing to show for his time in the United States, time served in the penal sense, in confinement, because he was unable to participate in the glittering life around him that he could see but not touch; and it was an added injury that in America even a janitor, sorry, even an office custodian shopped at the best stores. For example, Indian Angle’s custodian Jose wore top-of-the-line Tims while Dismas had come to the interview in Converses.

  The next day was his official first day of work and he filed a story about a twelve-year-old Indian-American from Wichita, Kansas, who won a national spelling bee. The finals were broadcast live and it seemed to Dismas that the girl was affected or afflicted by the words she was made to spell. When it came to elegiacal she seemed to wilt, as if touched by a sudden melancholy, and when she spelt narcolepsy her eyes drooped of their own accord and didn’t open for eight seconds, and when in the final round her opponent, also Indian, misspelled guetapens she smiled guardedly, and when it was her turn with stichomancy her eyes darted from side to side as if she were reading lines on a page or lines from many pages, reading fast and at random. Her technique drew some attention because she traced the words on her hand before saying them aloud. Some commentators said the method was unconventional, if not suspect. They described her win as controversial, which struck Dismas as mildly controversial in its own right, or at least mildly comical, considering the commentators were white men whose subtext was that the girl had used some kind of mystic Hindu divining power that gave her an unfair advantage over her homegrown American competitor. Of course none of this appeared in print. In the Indian Angle tradition the story he wrote was anodyne and heartwarming. He put a headline on top and typed in his byline. It was only then that his self-bestowed name seemed real, only when he saw it in print. He was Dismas Bambai, intrepid reporter and investigator of spelling controversies; also, he was Mrs Chatterjee, the Auntie of Agon.

  In his first week as an employee of Indian Angle he also wrote the following articles for the issue dated 1-05-2001:

  Two thousand words on Bombshell Baby Productions, promoters of a weekly Bollywood Cruise with the memorable name of ‘Bhangra on the Hudson’. There was music by DJs Louder and Lasoon and Bombay street eats by Chef Sam Biryani (a minor figure from the Dongri mafia who had switched career tracks and expanded operations to New York). The story had started out in the classifieds and made it to the paper’s front page because Bombshell Baby’s proprietors were old friends of Mrs Merchant.

  A page three item about a small town that had been given a Gandhi statue by an Indian-American real estate company named American Desi Inc. Mrs Merchant spiked a paragraph concerning council members and residents who were unhappy that a statue to a foreigner was going up on public land; but the story ran to more than fifteen hundred words.

  Fifty words for the ALSO NOTED section in the back of the paper about the vandalising of Georgetown University’s Muslim prayer room in an ‘alleged’ hate crime. There was a mention of President Clinton’s Eid message to Muslims on behalf of the American people.

  Thirty-nine words on Pakistan’s involvement in the continued destabilising of India and the world. The piece was too short for a byline. He gave it a headline pulled from a quote by the spokesman of an Indian think tank: The True Locus of Terrorism Is Pakistan. On Saturday when the paper appeared he discovered that the copy editor had changed ‘locus’ to ‘locust’. The error struck him as correct in its own way.

  Two weeks later, with his first paycheque in hand, Dismas went to the Macy’s flagship at Herald Square and bought a pair of premium wheat nubuck Tims for $189.99 and a Kangol Two-Tone 504 for $39.99. He wore the cap back to front so the logo would face the world. He packed his Converses in a Macy’s bag and wore the Tims out of the store. He picked up the new Alicia Keys and a portable CD player shaped like a frisbee. All the way home he noticed others like himself, recognisably set apart by the bags they carried from various retail giants. The young father in baggy jeans and white T-shirt who proudly carried purchases from The Gap, Urban Outfitters, and Calvin Klein; the elegant older lady with the distinctive Barney’s bag; the couple with matching sets of Bed, Bath & Beyond. He was one among them, an extended family on a weekend outing, people from all kinds of ethnic and economic backgrounds bo
und together by the same great yearning. With his first substantial act of shopping since arriving in New York he felt American at last. Nothing else mattered, not his past, not his caste, not the weight of his degraded history. In this great country the only caste marks were the brand names you accessorised.

  Now, waiting for the elevator in the lobby of his office building, he wished for only one thing from the rest of the day: to make it to his desk without running into Mrs Merchant. The small lobby was crowded with office workers returning to their cubicles after lunch, receptionists and information technologists, custodians and CEOs, real estate specialists and day traders, all of them white except for the two custodians – one of whom was Latino, the other African-American – and the half-dozen ‘South Asians’ headed to the eighth-floor office of Indian Angle.

  “Are physicians to blame, though?” asked a man wearing pointy new lace-up boots.

  “Yups, exactly,” said the woman to whom he was speaking. “Pick on the softest target. What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “We were told to provide relief for pain no matter what the cost. The pressure on us to perform miracles,” said the man. “What did they think was going to happen?”

  “True fact,” said the woman in an undertone heard only by the man with the beautiful boots and Dismas. “But hold that thought, prospective clients in the vicinity.”

  “Three overtimes. End of the second Phoenix led by one, four seconds left,” said Jose, the Latino custodian.

  Dismas couldn’t see him but he recognised the voice.

  “Most a the times tied two-two,” said his friend.

  When the elevator doors opened the Indian Angle employees rushed in first, followed by the doctors and custodians. The small elevator was already crowded and Dismas thought of waiting for the next car but Mrs Merchant’s aged cadaverous face flashed in his head and he squeezed in at the last possible moment.