The Book of Chocolate Saints

by Jeet Thayil

  “You’re here for the trial, I’m guessing.”

  “That’s right.”

  “It’s all over the news, radio and TV. They’re pleading insanity.”

  “Guilty except insane.”

  “Crazy like a fox. Guy knew what he was doing.”

  “Yeah, probably did.”

  “Are you a lawyer?”

  “No, I’m here for the solidarity. See what happens.”

  “Right.”

  “Because I’m a Sikh, like the guy who was killed.”

  “Balbir Sodhi.”

  “Okay, you know his name.”

  “Hey, I’ve been to his gas station a few times. Ask me they should hang the shooter no questions asked.”

  “Maybe they will.”

  “They’re calling him the American murderer. What he’s doing, he’s giving Americans a bad name.”

  “And Arizonans.”

  “Guy isn’t even from here, moved to Mesa from fucking Alabama.”

  “Can’t hang a man for moving here. Sodhi came from the Punjab.”

  “Shoot a guy in the back? Dude deserves to hang.”

  The driver introduced himself as Charlie Moon, Mesa born and bred, driving now for three years. He handed out a card with the name and number of the taxi company. Amrik sat back and watched the city go by. Even the sun fell at an angle that felt strange to a man just arrived from a fortified borough on the coast. The streets were calm and orderly, raked gravel and wide sidewalks and no trash blowing against the storefronts. The desert was everywhere. On the traffic islands and street corners were stands of saguaro, stoic stumps reaching upward. Everything was beige or pink, the houses, the saguaro, the gravel, even the animal figures in people’s yards: a hundred shades of pink and five hundred shades of beige.

  When you are displaced in the world, displacement is its own reward.

  He began to enjoy riding around the foreign city and looking at the sights and talking to Charlie Moon. Then they turned a corner and he saw a group of Sikhs in blue and red turbans. The headgear was vivid against their white clothes. A dozen men and women dressed in the Hindu colour of mourning. Amrik stepped out of the car and a guy with a chest-length beard extended his hand and introduced himself as Lakhwinder, brother of Balbir. He said, welcome, from where are you coming? The Punjabi-accented English sounded strange in the American desert and then it didn’t sound strange at all. Others came up to introduce themselves and shake his hand. There was a television crew and a woman who asked if she could speak to him later to get a comment about the trial, but he didn’t get a chance to reply because now he was entering the courthouse at the head of a crowd of people he had never before met and he fitted right in with his saffron turban and white shirt.

  *

  The guy in the video is having a bad day. He argues with his wife, his lawyer, with law enforcement officers of various ranks.

  He tells a policeman, “I didn’t do it, man.”

  The cop just looks at him and nods.

  He says it again, “I didn’t do it.”

  The cop asks him to state his name.

  The man says, “Frank Roque.”

  The cop wants to talk about his mood on September Eleven. Was he emotional? New York attacked, the Pentagon attacked, aeroplanes hijacked and thousands dead, the world trade tower down. How emotional was he?

  Frank snaps at him, “Towers, man, two buildings. Get it right.”

  “Okay, towers, what were you thinking right then?”

  “Ask the people who died what they were thinking. I don’t know.”

  “Sure you do.”

  “I don’t. How would I?”

  “You told everybody how angry you were.”

  “Who’s everybody?”

  Frank takes a breath and looks past the cop. You can see it in his eyes, the hurt and indignation.

  “If someone were to shoot somebody of Mid-Eastern descent.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why arrest me?”

  Now the cop takes a breath and looks Frank in the eye and holds the look.

  “Frank.”

  “I don’t get it. What?”

  “Frank?”

  “What?”

  “The guy? He wasn’t Middle Eastern. He was an Indian from India.”

  In the next scene Frank is talking to his wife.

  He says, “Wait, Dawn,” says it like he’s at a diner and calling the waitress to return an order of bacon and eggs because the eggs haven’t been done to his liking. “Can’t you figure it out? You need to be careful with these guys. They’ll get you to say something against me. They’ll use you to send me away. It’s how the legal system works, see? They turn people against each other.”

  He’s explaining the legal system to the woman who turned him in.

  He says, “Everybody hates me, that’s why I’m here.”

  Now, two years later, immobile in the defendant’s chair, Frank doesn’t look much like the man in the video. There’s a family resemblance, sure, but he’s got less hair and he’s put on weight and he does not come across as drunk or belligerent. The indignation has been replaced by extreme stupor. He’s so still he could be comatose and when he does say something the people in the courtroom lean forward in their seats. He rarely blinks. He never looks at himself on the video monitor. One morning he takes a piece of hard candy from his pocket and pops it in his mouth and for a few minutes he works his jaw, his freshly shaved chin sunk into the folds of fat on his neck. Then he swallows and takes a sip of water. It is the only time he shows any animation. When the jury comes in he is motionless again, a sad bland man with a heart condition.

  They are trying to determine whether he’s insane or faking.

  It’s a Tuesday in August and Frank is wearing a pressed short-sleeved shirt and tie. Under the shirt he wears a stun belt set to administer a wake-up jolt to the left kidney, fifty thousand volts of jumping juice if he makes a run for it or grapples with the bailiffs or whines one too many times about the colour of the jumpsuit they make him wear when he’s not in court (orange). The belt is black and charcoal with Velcro D-rings, cable reinforced so you can’t cut through it, primed to set off a siren that will stun you with electricity and sound.

  Frank’s lawyer is a man named Stein whose long hair bounces on the shoulders of his sharp suit. His domed skull is shiny in the courtroom lights and his bow tie is orange. He wants to talk about the drug Frank is taking.

  Zyprexa was the first atypical antipsychotic approved for use in the treatment of schizophrenia.

  He is reading from a printed sheet and Amrik can tell he likes the sound of the phrases. He is projecting, putting in some special rhetorical emphasis that he hopes will carry to every seat of the packed courtroom.

  For the long-term treatment of schizophrenia and acute mixed episodes of bipolar mania. To treat the symptoms of psychosis such as hallucination and delusion.

  Stein paces the courtroom with his hands in the pockets of his trousers, a dapper man on a stroll. He stops in front of the jurors and gives them a good look at the suit.

  “Acute bipolar mania. That’s the currently popular phrase for manic depression. Bipolar mania is manic depression is schizophrenia. It’s a medical term for clinical insanity.”

  He waits a beat and looks around at Frank who hasn’t moved, who’s slumped in his seat.

  “If they’re giving him medication for insanity he must be insane.”

  A bearish blond guy with a biker moustache, Stein’s partner, lists the side effects of Zyprexa: drowsiness in the day and insomnia at night, depression or agitation plus hostility, weight gain, constipation, blurred vision, stiffness in the fingers, skin rashes, difficulty in speaking.

  Before lunch the prosecution produces one of the many mental health experts who will appear before the court.

  “What would Zyprexa do to someone who was not schizophrenic?”

  “It would leave the person wooden and sedated, his eyes at half mast,” s
ays Dr Scialli.

  All heads turn to Frank, who doesn’t look up.

  Stein has made no mistakes so far but a wrap-up question at the end unravels much of the work of the morning. He asks Dr Scialli if Frank’s courtroom demeanour indicates a man of normal perceptions.

  Dr Scialli says, “The four-hour interrogation video shows his state of mind more clearly than any amount of conjecture at this stage.”

  By now it is clear to Amrik that Frank will be found guilty in a trial that will be known for its brevity. Sitting in the third row with the rest of the Sikh contingent he can see that Frank is uncomfortable in his own skin. He has exiled himself from his life by moving to a new town. It would have happened anyway. Even if he had stayed in Alabama the world would have changed around him. A sense of pity stays with Amrik through the day.

  He is invited to dinner at Balbir’s son’s house where the extended Sodhi clan has congregated and the men stand around drinking beer.

  “How come you came all the way from New York?” Lakhwinder asks.

  “Well, Lakhwinder, it’s a long story.”

  “Call me Lucky. Tell me anyway. We have time.”

  “Lucky, something happened that made me examine my life as a Sikh man in America.”

  “Yes?”

  “I used to work in finance. My office was four blocks from the World Trade Center. I was on my way to work when the towers went down.”

  “Okay.”

  “I was chased by two men.”

  “Chase you, where did they chase you?”

  “Through the streets and into the subway.”

  “Yes? Why?”

  “Same reason they attacked your father. They saw my turban and figured I was a terrorist.”

  “That’s it? Some guys chased you into the subway? That’s what brought you here?”

  “That’s why you came to Arizona?” says Balbir’s son, a quiet overweight boy who has started working at his father’s gas station.

  “It made me think about what it means to be a Sikh man in America. It made me want to do something.”

  “Okay, anything, it’s good you’re here.”

  Lakhwinder says, “More of us, more chance they hang him.”

  And Amrik’s saga is dismissed. He had wanted to tell his story and share something of himself but he might as well have been talking about turbulence on the flight out from JFK, airline food, jet lag, weather, whatever.

  “For Frank Roque? Not life sentence, he should hang. Eye for eye,” Lakhwinder says.

  “Death is too easy,” says Balbir’s son.

  A man in a white parka, his belly a small boulder, says, “For my community it is a slap in our face. Our brother was murdered and if they don’t execute his killer they are insulting us. They’re giving life to the man who took my brother’s life.”

  He blinks rapidly as he drinks from the Budweiser in his fist. His eyes are wet. The last thing Amrik wants to see is this mountainous Sikh bursting into the weepies. There’s enough emotion in the room as it is, enough bravado for a mid-size Bombay blockbuster.

  The men are heavily built, the dress code American casual, pressed jeans and collared shirts, parkas and sneakers. Within the basic armature there is a great deal of individual difference. Balbir’s son has a turban shaped like a ship’s prow. His beard is moussed and kept in shape with a net. Lakhwinder’s untrimmed beard spreads across half his chest and his turban is wound sloppily around his head. The wet-eyed Budweiser man’s bushy beard is separated into two long points, a sight that must strike terror into the local populace.

  Amrik’s father wore a netted beard and elaborate turban, a soft-spoken man whose ambition had been to get out of the Punjab. He would have gone anywhere, Iceland, Argentina, Papua New Guinea; but he had relatives in Queens who found him work in a grocery store in Jackson Heights. He married a girl chosen by his uncle and named their son after his adopted country. Amrik’s mother wanted a traditional name, something Punjabi, but his father got his way with their first-born. With Sukhwinder his mother got hers. His father became a Republican, because the elephant reminded him of India, and he stayed one all his life. How hard his parents worked, how happy they were with how little, and because they had been poor they did not take money for granted. They lived small lives with few comforts and thought themselves fortunate. Back home they were success stories. Even after all these years his father thought of the Punjab as home. He wore his Sikhism lightly: he said faith was a private thing and there was no point parading it on the streets for the world to see. He would as likely have talked about his wife’s lovemaking habits as he would the nuts and bolts of his faith. What would he say to these men?

  He’d say, Eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.

  The Court TV crew has also been invited to dinner. People leave their shoes at the door and sit cross-legged on the floor to eat – black daal, rotis cut into wedges, tandoori chicken and fish kebabs that are a bright unnatural shade of red. The Sodhis provide a quick house tour and Amrik understands that they are being savvy, working the media. Over dessert, the reporter asks Amrik what brought him all the way from New York to Mesa.

  He answers truthfully that he has no idea.

  “I guess I’m out of my mind,” he says.

  “Well, that’s something. I think you should talk to me, tell your story to the world.”

  She gives him a card, Cassandra Bird, Assistant Producer. Call me Cassie, she says, her voice with a drop at the end. But Amrik does not want to talk.

  He says, “And what brought you from NYC to Mesa?”

  “I did a bunch of stories after Nine Eleven about people suffering from post-traumatic stress without knowing it. I interviewed rescue personnel at Ground Zero who suffered from insomnia, respiratory problems, anxiety attacks, and they wouldn’t take sick leave. I spoke to a woman who’d lost her husband and her father. She was camped out there. She wouldn’t go home. I kept meeting survivors who didn’t come across like they’d survived, who—”

  “Right.”

  “I met a woman who was riding the subways all day long. She was a senior custodian in Tower One and lost her job, obviously. Rode the subways in a blue jumpsuit—”

  “Wait a minute! What was her name? Black woman?”

  “Don’t remember the name. Big woman, black, gave great sound bites.”

  “That’s her, Philomena Debris! I met her just after the towers went down. She gave me advice that maybe saved my life. Hey, this is fantastic!”

  But Cassandra Bird isn’t impressed.

  She says, “That’s what she does, she rides the subway and talks to people. That’s her disorder.”

  She takes a sip of sweet milk tea and coughs.

  “How does all that bring you to Arizona?”

  “Tell the truth, I needed to get out of the city. I was tripping on other people’s disorders. I’d done so many stories on trauma I was traumatised myself.”

  On the way back to the hotel his cell phone beeps with a text message from Sukh. No need 2B a hero ok?

  Amrik asks Charlie Moon to pick him up early the next day. He won’t go back to the courtroom. He can already see the outcome as a ticker on a screen. Sentenced to death. Balbir’s family telling reporters that only partial retribution has been achieved and the debt will be paid in full when Frank is hanged, electrocuted, lethally injected, clubbed to death, executed by firing squad, lynched in a public square.

  On the American flight out of Mesa he stands with his hands on his hips and examines himself in the toilet mirror. He looks at his careful clothes and groomed facial hair and tries to see himself as a stranger might. He understands that he is permanently displaced in the new America and the new New York.

  The return trip is worse. The other passengers’ stares are more pointed and the stopover in Texas is much too long.

  He orders draught lager at a sports bar and grill and flips through a bar copy of the Texas Times. His eye, newly sensitised to turban and Sikh and terroris
t, finds an article about the Sodhi trial. Victims of Mistaken Identity, Sikhs Pay a Price for Turbans. It opens with Frank Roque’s contention as he’s being arrested, “I’m a patriot. I’m a damn American all the way.” The phrase plays and replays in Amrik’s head and coalesces into a chanted anthemic damngoddamnAmerican, allthewayAmerican. The article is a piece of subtle alarmism. Sikhs are being singled out because they wear “distinctive turbans that resemble the head wrap of terror chief Osama bin Laden”. Sikh temples and homes vandalised nationwide. A gasoline bomb tossed into a window and a three-year-old hit on the head. A woman arrested for trying to pull the turban off the head of a man at a highway rest stop. The attendant wrestles her down and his explanation coins a phrase. “Turban rage.” The article ends with the following paragraph.

  An intense debate has begun among Sikhs. Should they shave off their beards and cut their hair? Should they differentiate themselves from Muslims? Or is this an act of cowardice?

  Amrik reads slowly and sips his beer and orders another. The aquarium light of an airport bar in the middle of the day in America. No conversation. TV bolted to the wall above the counter.

  There’s no way to justify it, warriors making a virtue of fear to explain themselves to white Americans.

  Don’t shoot me. Shoot him. Shoot the Muslim.

  He likes the way the lager is working on him. He takes a roast beef sandwich and another beer. Then he gathers his bag and newspaper and sunglasses and heads for security check. He takes his shoes off with a smile, and what’s this, the security woman, is she giving him attitude?

  “Sir, please don’t take off your shoes until you are requested to.”

  “You’re kidding me, right?”

  “Sir, do not address me.”

  And there are three of them now, two men and the woman, suddenly there, all heavy in the same way, bulk without muscle or tone. And it could go any way. One word, a moment of unthinking loudness or annoyance or anger and the whole banal exchange will implode. He can see it in their faces, how pumped they are. This is what they’ve been training for, the chance to take down some belligerent Middle Eastern dude, take him down and put his lights out. He’ll end up on the floor in a chokehold with his hands cuffed behind him. He’ll end up in a room waiting to be processed, waiting indefinitely, nobody the wiser.