The Book of Chocolate Saints

by Jeet Thayil

  “We were told to make them grade pain from one to ten. Relief was the point. Quality, satisfaction, everything depended on it,” whispered the man with the boots.

  “Whenever a doctor cannot do good he must be kept from doing harm,” said the woman.

  “Hippocrates?” asked the man.

  “Nobody mentions him no more, it’s all Larry Bird this and Magic Johnson that and Michael Jordan the other, you know it?” said Jose.

  “Muscles are the real bad guys when it comes to pain in the long term. That’s the thing that causes harm, not us.”

  “That’s the game, here today, gone today.”

  “Users are losers. Opioid heads are born every minute, addicts just waiting to happen. Only explanation. Why shoot the messenger?”

  “She brings the same thing every day, black daal, rice, and raita,” said a woman, in Hindi.

  “Must be going through financial difficulty,” said a wide Bengali in a starched black sari. She too spoke in Hindi but for the words ‘financial difficulty’ enunciated clearly in English.

  “Nahi, yaar,” said a third Indian Angle employee. “Diet it is. Die-yet.”

  Dismas took an exploratory breath of the close fragrant air and smelled Indian spices and fresh dry cleaning and lavender disinfectant or perfume. The Bengali stood immediately behind him. He could feel her sari rustling against his shoulder blades. Why was she so close? Indians have no sense of personal space, he thought, as his penis came to life against his trousers. He clasped his hands in front of him and glanced up at the numbers flashing much too slowly past three, past four.

  “How you can eat same-same every day I don’t know,” said the woman behind him.

  “The pain lobby is as powerful as the gun lobby.”

  “Dead if you do, dead if you don’t. What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Greatest game ever? Uh-uh. All I know’s from Havlicek’s bank shot, fifteen feet, dude, fifteen! And the set-up? It was sick!”

  “Are you the only black Celtics fan on the planet?”

  It occurred to Dismas as the Bengali’s ample bosom brushed his kidneys once and then again that he had noticed her around the office and had never thought of her in any terms other than the maternal and the collegial. She had two children and a husband half her size. The children were as loud and badly behaved as Indian kids everywhere and the husband was a quiet dandy who wore pinstriped suits and polka dot ties. The woman always had house keys hooked to the waistband of her sari and the keys jangled in his earshot several times a day. They had exchanged few words, once when she wanted to borrow a stapler from the news desk and another time when she brought around Diwali sweets. He didn’t know her name or her designation. Still, a casual brush in the elevator and here he was with an unruly lump in his trousers. Not that he wanted to follow where the penis led. He had no doubt that the moist folds of her belly and ass crack were coated with talcum powder, that her fingers smelled of methi and masala, and that her idea of sex was hurried missionary coupling in which she lay as still as possible. What would be the point? You may as well come in your hands. She was the exact opposite of Goody, who, he had no doubt, was loud, inventive, and demanding, but there appeared to be some kind of communication mismatch between his brain and his penis. He considered pinching the tip to bludgeon it into submission but the opioid-enabling physicians were much too close.

  He was first out the door on eighth.

  There were other establishments on the floor but the Indian Angle office dominated by size and the number of employees it managed to squeeze into limited floor space. The receptionist’s desk was pushed up against the reporters’ desk and the one-man advertising department shared a corner with the tea boy. Everywhere was clutter and noise. Natural light was not allowed to penetrate into the warren of rooms. Even before the elevator doors opened Dismas heard the mix of voices speaking simultaneously in Bengali, Gujarati, and Hindi, a mainstream cacophony in which other languages also made a fleeting appearance, less assertive tongues such as Oriya, Malayalam, and Khasi. The only language notably absent from Indian Angle’s rank-and-file chatter was English.

  “Mrs Merchant asking for you again,” said Sheri-from-the-Islands at the front desk. “She upset. I mean, she allus upset but today she more upset than usual, man.”

  “Did she say what it was about?” Dismas asked.

  “Never did but she been calling, calling, asking where you gone missing.”

  “She knew where I was.”

  “Man, maybe she did and maybe she did not, but she keep calling. Told me one, two, three time, I gotta call her the minute you walk in that door,” she said, picking up the intercom.

  Stepping into the main room he heard laughter that sounded forced or false and then he heard a male intern’s dry sobs and from the compositor’s room the sound of traffic or bhangra. He smelled chicken masala and fried fish and the indelible smell of methi and asafoetida, smells that had seeped into the walls from years of lunch and dinner heated in microwaves and eaten off newspapers on the desks. It was no microcosm of America. There were only Indians here. Many employees went from Friday to Monday without speaking English or seeing a white person. They lived in the middle-class ‘South Asian’ ghettos of Edison and Jackson Heights and came into contact with America only on weekdays while taking public transport to and from Manhattan; and even then America existed dimly, deniably.

  Having made it unmolested to his corner Dismas booted up his computer. As with most of Mrs Merchant’s rants the severity of the tantrum had little to do with the nature of the crime. He had no idea what he had done wrong. The Xavier interview had been approved. He would have come to the office and made his pages in good time. What had been the reason for her meltdown? He opened a page and started work but such was his agitation that the screen resembled an arrangement of pygmy squiggles and markings. What did it all mean?

  Shyam Pereira, the paper’s obituarist, immigration expert, and features editor, placed his hairy forearms on Dismas’s desk. Behind thick glasses his eyes were mild.

  “Listen, agony auntieji,” said Pereira, tucking his flower-printed shirt into the high waistband of his trousers. “Joshi and me have a little bet going. He says you don’t have the immigrant mark. I say you do. Joshi thinks you’re not brown enough. I think you are. He says this is the true reason why Big Bitch is always picking on you. There’s only one way we can settle this. Do you have the mark or not?”

  He nodded and smiled and waited for a reply. His question was genuine as far as Dismas could tell. He was asking about the vaccination scar that Indians of a certain age carried on the upper bicep like a bar code. Pereira had befriended Dismas in his first week at the office. He had seen Dismas’s distress and understood and with jokes and asides he had tried to make things better. A seasoned New York hand above reproach in his work whose byline appeared more often in the newspaper than anyone else’s, even Mrs Merchant left him alone. In Dismas’s eyes Pereira was the cleverest man he knew. Just then the editor stepped out of her cabin.

  “Here comes Big B,” whispered Pereira, his eyes wide as he backed away.

  Pereira called the editor Big Bitch to differentiate her from Sam, her pet Pomeranian. The animal had a cabin to itself and was not to be disturbed at any time. If you woke it up by accident and it bit you, you had to apologise to the dog in the presence of its mistress.

  As she walked past, Mrs Merchant motioned to Dismas to follow. It was a long-established Mercantile tactic. She disliked talking to employees in private: she preferred to have an audience when she was humiliating someone. She stopped at the news desk, near Pereira, the paan-chewing Joshi, a computer guy no one knew the name of, and Sheri-from-the-Islands.

  “It’s past two. You should have put up the new page,” she said to Dismas.

  For some reason she had decided not to chew him out about the Xavier interview. That would come later; it would not be forgotten; it would be filed away for the future.

  “It’
s just that I needed to discuss one of the letters with you,” said Dismas.

  Sheri-from-the-Islands vanished and the computer guy busied himself with his screen. But Joshi and Pereira paid rapt attention.

  “Well, what the fuck are you waiting for?” said Mrs Merchant. “I’m here, in case you haven’t noticed. I’ve been here all day. Does everything have to be spoon-fed to you people?”

  It wasn’t true that she’d been there all day. Mrs Merchant never arrived at a fixed time and never before eleven. Most likely she slept late, had a lazy breakfast, and spent the morning shampooing her Pomeranian or giving it a pedicure or taking it to DOGA classes.

  “Tell me,” she said.

  Dismas explained that a letter had arrived for Mrs Chatterjee, Agony Auntie, from a woman who had lost her husband at the World Trade Center. In the woman’s dream her husband would call her on the phone and say in a surprised voice that he was at the door of the family home but he had no key. He was waiting for her to let him in. The woman had been having the dream or variations of the dream for so long that it had almost become a comfort. She wanted to know if she needed therapy or not.

  Mrs Merchant folded her arms.

  “The husband,” she said, “is he Indian?”

  “No,” said Dismas.

  “Listen.” Mrs Merchant shook her head and a bit of skin flapped on her throat. “Listen, you’re Mrs Chatterjee, Indian Angle’s agony auntie. Your job is to make up funny or heartwarming stories for our readers who are Indians, in case you didn’t know.”

  “This is a compelling story, Mrs Merchant. It brings up some important current questions.”

  “What does it bring?”

  “What the city is going through and what the loss of the towers means to the American idea of freedom and the pursuit of happiness. How lasting will be the impact on the city. I think the letter even suggests a view of the future as an unrelieved landscape of economic malady.”

  “Malady? Did you say malady?”

  “Mrs Merchant,” said Dismas.

  “Malady is a twenty-dollar word for a two-dollar item. What’s the rule about using twenty-dollar words around here?”

  “Don’t.”

  “Exactly, well done. Don’t.”

  The editor-in-chief sighed and looked at the faces around the news desk.

  “Let me ask you again. This woman, is she Indian?”

  “No,” said Dismas.

  “Is the husband Indian?”

  “No,” said Dismas.

  “No Indian angle, no story. For fuck’s sake,” said Mrs Merchant.

  “How many times do I have to tell you people, find the Indian angle?”

  Joshi and Pereira found their voices after she left.

  “Agony auntie, find the Indian angle, no?” whispered Pereira. “I think BB is in heat today. Go to her office, yaar, put her out of her misery. Even old ladies need servicing once in a while. Just don’t service the wrong bitch!”

  Joshi laughed and his shoulders shook convulsively, while Pereira looked silently at Dismas. Then he laughed too, quietly, into his fist.

  Dismas went to his desk and opened up the Agony Auntie page and started filling in column inches. He found the letter from the haunted woman, signed ‘I-too-died-that-day’. There was no question that it was real. He put it aside for the moment and got to work making up a letter. His only instruction from the editor had been to make sure that he used Indian English as much as possible. In this way readers would identify with the column and think Mrs Chatterjee was a real person. He put his fingers to the keyboard. On the screen text appeared.

  Dear Mrs Chatterjee,

  I got married six years ago and moved to America where my husband has been living since college. My parents-in-law live next door to us. They are nice but not as nice as my own parents, who still live in Haryana in our village. Sorry. I should not say that my parents are nicer but I can’t help it. It is the truth. Anyway I’m writing to tell you that lately I’ve been hearing Indian birds here in America. Last night I thought I heard a bulbul outside my door. When I went to check, my husband said I was mad. He said, “There are no bulbuls in New Jersey, you crazy lady!” Is it true? Are there no bulbuls in America? What about mynahs?

  Yours sincerely,

  Birdbrain

  Dear Birdbrain,

  There is no chance that some poor bulbul or mynah will be wandering so far from her domestic route – just imagine – that she’ll land up in the frozen tundra of New Jersey. I’m thinking you’re suffering from severe case of homesickness. Either you buy ticket back home for a month holiday or rent DVD of Kuch Kuch Hota Hai. It is very wonderful way to forget homesickness. I do it all the time, especially when Mr Chatterjee and his parents are in the house.

  Yours,

  Mrs Chatterjee

  He measured off inches and typed in the letter from the woman whose husband had died in the towers. It was something of an occasion, the first real letter Mrs Chatterjee had received. He started to write a reply and managed to bring in an Indian angle; and although it seemed to him the angle was flimsy, nothing more than a trifle, he hoped it would get past Mrs Merchant’s beady eye.

  Dear Mrs Chatterjee,

  My husband died in the staircase of Tower One, as I told you in my last letter. Why didn’t you reply? I talked to a counsellor appointed by the state. She told me to try analysis. Well, I did. I tried it. I’m writing to say it was a failure. The analyst said he would never have guessed I had just lost my husband because I seemed so composed. I wanted to say, listen, bozo, how would you know? You’ve never even seen me before. Obviously I didn’t go back. Instead I thought I would write to you. My question is, will it get better? Or will I always think of him with a sinking in my chest? Will time heal me? Okay, sorry, that makes three questions.

  Yours sincerely,

  I-too-died-that-day

  Dear I-too-died-that-day,

  Woman to woman, I must quote to you what our wise Indian men of the mountains say. Now it is true they have many unfortunate habits of personal hygiene and some terrible so-to-say substance abuse issues but you can always count on them for perspective. One such holy fellow said, “Time heals not a damn thing.” This maybe seems like a cruel thing to tell someone who is grieving but it is not so. It is liberating. Once you’re not expecting time to make things better you begin healing. Automatic. The same fellow also said, “At the moment it may seem that the future does not exist, but I assure you, madam, it does.”

  Yours feelingly,

  Mrs Chatterjee

  When he looked up Sheri-from-the-Islands was at his desk.

  “You better be running up there quick, mister man,” she said. “It Wednesday today. It making her mad.”

  He minimised the page he was working on and hurried across the office to the editor’s cabin. She was standing in the middle of the room with her arms in the air while a young Chinese tailor measured her waist. Her face was folded at a frightening angle, as if the muscles had atrophied. She was attempting to smile.

  “I hope you got something explosive from the painter? About his comments after September Eleven?”

  “I didn’t get a chance, Mrs Merchant.”

  “But why not?”

  It was hopeless. She had pulled the plug on his interview before he got started and now she wanted an explanation.

  “Meet him again,” she said, pirouetting slowly, a cadaverous flatfoot ballerina. “If you get him to talk it’s a page one byline. You know that, don’t you?”

  Her tone was polite, almost tender, and when he brought her the completed letters page she passed it without comment. Even the letter from I-too-died-that-day was passed. She ran her eye over it, then she nodded, ticked the page with a pencil, and it was done. The editor’s extreme change of mood was business as usual at New York’s Indian newspaper of record. Dismas suspected it was strategy, a way to keep the employees unsettled and always on their toes. The obituarist Pereira had another explanation. He sai
d the tailor was a known gossip popular in her set and Mrs Merchant didn’t want to be maligned as a slave driver among her socialite friends.

  That night he dreamt heavily and when he tried to transcribe his dream in the morning he came up with two lines about a man in a watchtower. He wrote some more and in a day or two he printed out a long poem in rhyming couplets. The model for the woman in the poem was Goody. He put the printouts in a shoebox and forgot all about them. More than a year later the poem would have disastrous consequences. Here is the unpromising opening couplet:

  All day I drink with my eyes on the river,

  At night I drink and fear for my liver.

  *

  The Loathed, Dismas Bambai’s fictionalised memoir of the Bombay poets, part crime thriller and part gossip sheet, begins with an account of meeting the celebrated painter and poet Xavier in New York City in the early two thousands. The future author becomes an irregular visitor to the artist’s cluttered apartment on Central Park West. The week after their first meeting Dismas is arrested and Xavier bails him out. As they walk along the streets of lower Manhattan, Dismas worries that the arrest will adversely affect his immigration status. The older man suggests the visa he has secured, the Alien of Extraordinary Ability category reserved for writers, artists, and academics. Then Dismas asks Xavier about his comment to the New York Post that September Eleven was a case of “the chickens coming home to roost”. Xavier replies that he had only articulated what people all over the world and in America were thinking. And in any case he was quoting Malcolm X. But because he had said it in the vicinity of the World Trade Center’s ruins he had been singled out for contempt and controversy. Since then he hadn’t spoken to the press. Not until Dismas turned up at his door.

  Xavier didn’t attack The Loathed until after its success when he and Dismas had separately returned to India and when the book’s visibility in airport bookshops and lifestyle chain stores made it clear that it had met with a considerable success. He told a reporter the book was “a malevolent fiction with an eye to commerce and a nose for stink”. He said Dismas was “a loathsome type of insect who invented everything, everything. Why would I say I liked his poems? I never even saw them.” The piece ran in the national newsmagazine Indus under the headline The Poet and the Pest. Xavier’s accusations served to help the book’s renown and it was serialised in the same magazine and soon went into reprints. A reclusive theatre director in Poona produced a one-act play based on some of the events described in the book. Experimental and low budget, the play ran to unexpectedly full houses at Juhu’s Prithvi Theatre. It won a cult following that made the director briefly notorious, his long grey hair and Arun Kolatkar moustache recognisable in caricature on Amul Butter billboards all over the country. The director then disappeared into a life of womanising and alcoholism. A production house in Andheri made a film version of the book that won an award at a festival in Goa, which nobody noticed. When the film won a second award at the Sundance Festival it came to the attention of a mostly independent New York-based production house that made a new version in which they changed the setting (to Paris) and the characters (to a group of Brooklyn expats) and the story (to a romantic comedy). Dismas Bambai made a little money and a lot of enemies. The book was written partly in the first person and billed as “the autobiography of an era”. Its most scandalous passages discussed the sex and artistic lives of Dom Moraes, Arun Kolatkar, Nissim Ezekiel, and Newton Xavier, all of whom were identified by name; also identified were the men and women who orbited around these figures. Its most controversial passage suggested that someone had murdered Moraes, Ezekiel, and Kolatkar. “Who was he, this diabolical murderer of poets,” wrote Dismas, in the melodramatic style he favoured, “this dastardly assassin who has never been imagined, much less hunted or apprehended? Was he a failed poet whom the three men had spurned? Had he extracted his revenge in a bloody spree over a few months in 2004? Was it the Pathar Maar, the Stone Killer, returned from Delhi or wherever he’d been hiding for two decades? Or was it a kind of extreme literary criticism that hinted, nay, proclaimed that the best work of the three poets was long past and it was time they were put out to pasture, by force if necessary?” After the film appeared, some journalists woke up to the book’s news potential. Editorials and reviews condemned the fact that the nation’s most prominent poets had been “vilified and besmirched”, according to the Hindoo, and “taken down a peg or two”, according to the Times of Bharat. Only the crime reporter of a soon-to-be-defunct tabloid with a tiny circulation and a tinier readership, the Tea-Time Herald & Dispatch, hinted at a false controversy aimed purely at increasing sales. Inevitably, the week the reviews appeared the book hit bestseller lists around the country. But all that was much later. Before Dismas and Xavier became antagonists they were friends and the friendship began with an arrest.