by Jeet Thayil
Keki Katrak, accounts executive, interviewed by Dismas Bambai at the India International Centre, New Delhi, October 2005
The woman said, they’re not ashes, they are flowers. She spoke the words as if she were reciting an old poem in the correct way, from the stomach, and her voice carried across the water from her riverboat to mine. She gripped the urn as the boat pitched and she spoke with such yearning that her husband flinched. She said, raakh nahi, phool thi. My Hindi has never been good enough but that is what I heard. And because the future is always with us and because we carry our death like ghost marks on the skin, at the very moment that she spoke to her husband of ashes and flowers I had a vision of her in a kitchen lifting her arms to protect her face from the flames. I watched her tip the contents of the urn into the water and I saw her being emptied from her own urn into the same river at a future moment. I admired how calm she was as she turned over the urn. And then I saw her husband glance at his watch and make a gesture of impatience.
That is my clearest memory of Benares. Of course I remember the poets and the conference, but it’s the river I remember best. I was a poet myself in those days. I hadn’t yet come to my senses. I thought the poet’s life was the way to live in this world. These days I write copy for butter and fizzy drinks and ice cream. I came up with a line that the agency guys consider a classic. “The snappy, zappy, slap-hap-happy apple drink!” You can smile, I don’t mind. The fact is I’m happier now than I ever was then.
Benares works in mysterious ways. First you check into your flyblown hotel and look around your flyblown room and then you run to the river. I have an affinity for water, even toxic water, even the toxic Ganga. For me it was a river out of mythology and therefore it was more real than the conference where I first met Doss and Xavier and where the idea for the Hung Realist anthology and manifesto came to life.
This was in January. I had taken one of those small Indian Airlines planes from Delhi to Benares, so small that it shook each time the stewardess walked the aisle. My seatmates were new to air travel. However, I am certain they were veterans of the railway journey. They carried their own snacks and they had no idea how to fasten their seatbelts. But they did not grip the armrests during take-off and landing as I did. As soon as the plane was in the air my neighbours wrapped shawls around their heads and fell asleep and the smell of lunchtime whisky was so ripe it made me retch. Thankfully it was a short flight and we landed near a concrete shed on the edge of a field. I had no luggage and went straight through to the taxi stand.
Later I walked to the ghats from my hotel. I put on sneakers and a low cap and I walked by the river. But it was twilight, a night without moonlight, and all I could see were oil lamps in the water and floating bodies freighted with stones. I saw them go by and imagined their names. Alone and floating, I thought. Bodies added hourly, a thousand bodies of the recently alive covered by the river in a sticky green mist. I watched until full dark. Then I walked back to my hotel and sat in a hall where tables and chairs were grouped around a dead fountain. People drank tea and ate fried sweets, their faces watery in the white tube lighting. I went early to bed and was woken before dawn by shouts and the sound of blows. There were men in the hallway whose voices carried straight into my room. I woke exhausted and got out of bed.
This was the sight I saw in the hallway. Two men had taken off their shoes to beat a third man who lay on the floor with his arms around his head. They beat him in turns and they aimed for his head or back or groin. The man on the ground was a cook and the two men hitting him were waiters. The cook had mixed up an order and the waiters had called him a sisterfucker, a standard insult heard in the kitchen a hundred times a day. But in return the cook had called them gandus and practitioners of gandugiri, insinuating that they had been born of the anal passage instead of the vaginal passage, which unnatural birth made them predisposed to the practice of gandugiri. This was a grievous insult and it had resulted in the beating that was being administered this morning many hours after the initial offence. The two waiters were breathing heavily and though the cook was already bleeding from his nose they did not stop hitting him with the heavy heels of their shoes. Whenever one stopped the other lifted his shoe and brought it down on the now unconscious cook, on his hands or his head. After some time the two waiters were no longer looking at the cook but at each other and when they stopped the beating they appeared embarrassed and spent, as if they’d been fucking instead of fighting, as if they’d been doing exactly the thing the cook had accused them of doing and that had driven them to fury in the first place.
I had a shower and changed and left the hotel in search of a boat that would take me to the conference venue. It was to be held in an auditorium at the other end of the ghats. The riverbank was packed with extended families washing with bars of Hamam soap. They scrubbed head, armpit, groin, and feet, in the precise prescribed order, and shed their sins together. Considering the state of the water I thought to myself that they were exchanging new sins for old. There was a sandbank on the far side where the water was cleaner. But here where the bathing took place the river was a drainage canal for sewage, household refuse, toys and plastic bags, and unidentifiable partially submerged fleshy remains.
I negotiated with a boatman whose wide-bottomed boat sat low in the water. I agreed to his second price. Slowly he poled. He squatted on his high seat with a beedi cupped in his hands. He took long pulls at the smoke and he let the boat drift in the slight current. There was a breeze mixed with stink. A boy of about sixteen drew alongside us in a sky-blue plastic armchair made of mineral water bottles that had been sliced open and melded together and lined on the inside with canvas. He sat back as if propped on cushions and examined a plastic syringe he’d fished out of the water. Throw it away, my boatman said, it will make you sick. Reluctantly the boy let the syringe go and we watched it float toward the bathers. The breeze fell and the sun dimmed to a deep glow. I pulled my cap low on my face and let the heat build on my arms. The ghats receded in tiers planted with beach umbrellas and painted gods. On the Babua Pandey Ghat I saw an Islamic sickle moon inlayed in Hindu saffron and elaborate Buddhist pagodas. On the Vijayanagram Ghat someone had built a model of the leaning tower of Pisa. The landing was candy-striped. I saw a sign on a burning ghat, FOR TUNA TEARE THE PEOPLE WHORESIDE ON THE BANK SOFT HE GANGA, and I could not unscramble the words or the images around them – the way everything tumbled together, the light, the pictures, the smell of smoke, the sound of water and voices. There was a sudden traffic jam. Two riverboats were going in opposite directions and our small boat was in the middle. We passed a skiff with a couple sitting apart. The woman carried a small clay urn and they argued about how much further they would have to go before she could tip the ashes into the water. The husband was in a hurry to immerse the ashes and leave. The woman wanted to find running water. And that was when I heard her say what she said.
Woh raakh nahi, phool thi.
Farzana Amanella Kaur, arts activist, interviewed by Dismas Bambai in Lado Sarai, New Delhi, October 2005
Do you know X was twenty-three and living in London when the Indian government annexed Goa? Portugal stole Goa from India and India stole it back. You would have to be a pretty disaffected Indian to say it belonged to Portugal. Or you would have to be from Goa, whose people were constitutionally recognised Portuguese citizens as long ago as the early 1800s. The point is Xavier was Goan before he was Indian and as far as he was concerned the annexation was a clear instance of postcolonial imperialism by the formerly colonised. He said so! Publicly! He criticised the government in the press and then he went a step further and said there should be a plebiscite for an independent Goa. He said the caste elites of Delhi were also its political elites and therefore they were stakeholders in the idea of empire. He said their real reason for wanting Independence was not to overthrow the British but to become one with them at least in terms of status. You can imagine what kind of response that suggestion evoked in newly independent Indi
a. X should have let it blow over because it would have blown over in time. Instead he wrote an opinion piece for a London newspaper in which he said he was ashamed to be Indian. He appeared on the BBC’s Tonight programme and an Indian guest on the show called him a traitor. They burned his effigy in a public square in Bombay. There was talk that Nehru would withdraw his passport. X applied for a British passport and was granted one. It was all extremely dramatic, a political crisis.
Really, it was X acting up as he liked to do. They should have humoured him but they turned against him. Even the poets turned against him. When his enemies really wanted to score a point they would describe him as a British writer. It was the worst insult of all. This is why you never saw him in the anthologies, why he was excluded from Eng. Lit. courses, why there were no scholarly studies or monographs or critical evaluations of his work. X was Indian, absolutely Indian, and he was a real poet unlike the frauds ranged against him, but you wouldn’t think so by looking at a school curriculum. I didn’t know him then. I met him much later. I read about this in the newspapers like everyone else.
Goa was the source of his material, the Christ material and the saints, all of it was rooted in the churches of Goa and it was a mutual kind of connection. Some years ago I was at a literary festival in Dona Paula, a small festival but absolutely chaotic and mismanaged. I went because an old friend was speaking. At the last minute her panel was cancelled or rescheduled and when I reached the hall where her lecture was to take place she was nowhere to be seen. Instead there was a discussion between an African-American writer and a rapper from Staten Island. They were talking about outsider art, a shambolic conversation in which each speaker’s only goal, it seemed to me, was to generate more words than his opponent or co-panellist. The audience drifted in and out like schools of shy fish. Near me were a group of schoolchildren, freshly washed boys and girls who had travelled from a village several hours away by road. They were in their uniforms and they carted humongous backpacks full of books. The event they’d come to see had been rescheduled at the last moment and they too had been forced to attend a talk between two writers concerning a topic about which neither knew a thing. This is the kind of festival it was. Chaos made banal. When the audience was invited to ask questions one of the schoolboys got up and raised his hand. Someone gave him a microphone. Apropos of nothing that had been said by either of the self-involved panellists he declared that he read only two poets, Henry Louis Vivian Derozio and Newton Pinter Francis Xavier. Then, his voice dripping with sarcasm, he said the genius of first-world literature was much too exalted a quality for a place as backward as Goa and a venue as modest and broken as the Goa International Centre. The poets of Goa, on the other hand, were as degraded as the broken mother tongues of their native land. This was their strength and their secret blessing, he said, and for a moment his voice stopped sounding angry and became almost kind.
I listened to this boy, this teenager, and thought, my god, there’s hope for us after all. Perhaps the young will save us from ourselves. To contextualise, this was during Newton’s dry phase, when he had stopped writing poems. I think it had been more than a decade since he had published anything. It didn’t matter to the young man. He was shaking as he spoke, as if he were suffering from delirium tremens or a high fever, and after his outburst he apologised and took his seat. I thought, yes, this is the kind of boy who reads Newton, a boy who takes pride in his wilful nature, whose fuel is hunger and anger.
Keki Katrak, accounts executive, interviewed by Dismas Bambai at the India International Centre, New Delhi, October 2005
How foolish I was to go to Benares on my own money to attend the World Poetry Conference, a misnomer considering the world was represented by all of four nationalities, mostly Indians, plus one Colombian in a beret, two Czechs based in the United States, and two Russians, a drunk who knew all his poems by heart and the one who knew everything about everything. Personally I’ve never trusted poets who memorise their poems. In the same way I don’t trust poets who drive. It’s a bias but there’s nothing I can do about it. The drunk Russian was a world-famous dissident who stood with his hands behind his back and shouted at us. He was as intractable as a house and he had no interest in anything other than food and drink. A big man with a big voice and the more he recited the angrier he became. You didn’t have to understand a word to know it was poetry. What else could it be? Poetry or religious threats or blind rage, nothing else has that quality of extreme duress.
I wasn’t particularly interested in the conference to tell you the truth. The official events are never as interesting as the things that happen in between and around. Mainly I was happy to be among poets I’d been reading since I was twelve or thirteen.
That first morning I went to a discussion about poetry in translation moderated by the Czech poet Agata Jagr. I came in late. At first, I had to stand because all the seats were taken. Onstage Doss was saying that poets should write in their mother tongue if they were concerned about being authentic. Authenticity was the first thing, he said. With fiction it didn’t matter, after all it was fiction. Xavier, he said, should have been writing in Konkani not English. Xavier replied that Konkani was his mother’s tongue not his mother tongue. His mother tongue was the language they were speaking, English. He knew no other. He said he was willing to learn Konkani but only after he had acquired English, the mastery of which seemed to be taking somewhat longer than he had anticipated. I noticed that his views were unpopular. By then he had already acquired the upper-class British accent that made his reply more annoying than it might otherwise have been. Doss said nothing and he didn’t need to. Between the two of them he was the sympathetic figure, the crowd favourite, whereas Xavier’s manner and accent made him the caricature of a Bollywood villain. Then Jagr said to Xavier, but hello, you are Indian. Why do you write in English? And Doss said, perhaps learning Konkani will make your poetry better. And Xavier said, you mean it will become more authentic, like food, because the ingredients are locally sourced? At which, Jagr laughed and said, on that note, shall we break for lunch? And Doss said, no, let’s finish this. I’m throwing this question open, this is a question to everyone. What is depression? Is it a feeling of sadness or a feeling of emptiness? At which point Jagr said, wait, this is a discussion about poetry in translation. But that’s exactly what we’re talking about, said Doss, poetry as a translation of feeling and my question is, what is depression, a sense of sadness or a sense of nothingness? Xavier said, only someone who has never known depression would ask such a question. Doss said, finally. Finally you’re saying something worth saying. Sadness, continued Xavier, can be pleasurable. Who does not enjoy the pain of melancholia? Emptiness, on the other hand, is intolerable. There is nothing pleasing about it. Doss said, now you’re speaking the living truth. That was when I put up my hand. After all, how could I be silent? This was my topic. When the moderator pointed at me I stood up and said that sensation is sweet even if it is the sensation of misery. Only the absence of sensation is unbearable, for emptiness is the sister of suicide. I don’t know why but Jagr took this statement personally. Her face changed colour and she started to make her closing remarks but all she could manage were disjointed phrases that had no bearing on the discussion we had heard.
When the panel ended I made my way outside and lit a cigarette. I watched the Colombian being photographed. He had the look of a man whose eyes were on longevity and legacy. He never took off his beret and he posed only with his left side to the camera and if the angle wasn’t to his liking he refused to be photographed. Someone came up to me and asked for a light. It was Xavier. Soon we were joined by Doss, who lit up a beedi. The two poets said they were going to walk to their hotel at Assi Ghat and I said I was going the same way. It turned out we were all in the same sorry hotel.
As we started to walk I realised I hadn’t eating anything all day except for a banana at breakfast. I’m type two diabetic. I said I needed a minute and sat on some steps leading to one of the gh
ats. It was full of people. We were upwind of the smoke from the central platform. Then I realised we were at Manikarnika, the burning ghat, and that four bodies were burning and others waited their turn. There was a heavy smell of ghee. No colour or women, only men in white kurtas come to perform the last rites. They were impatient to light the pyre and crack the skull and let the trapped spirit ascend.
I noticed that the sky was full of paper kites. It was strange to look up and see hundreds of bits of happy colour bouncing on the breeze while near us the dead were burning. I noticed Xavier was drawn to a particular pyre on which a slender body lay wrapped in muslin. The fine cloth was transparent, wet against the face of a young woman. Her features stood out in sharp relief and I could see the down on her cheeks. Xavier stared at the face as if he knew her from somewhere, as if they had been friends once and he was surprised to see her in this place lit by the fires of Hades.
I felt anxious and confused at the same time, a blood sugar condition that happens when I haven’t eaten. But when I looked at the pyres my problems seemed to be nothing more than a small mind’s small matter. I thought, you are meat and you will be cooked. This is all you know and all you need to know. At which Xavier said, yes, you are quite right, and moreover intimations of mortality have a way of clarifying one’s mind. I realised I had spoken my thoughts aloud and this made me more disoriented. I needed food but the thought of eating made me feel sick.
A group of men arrived to light the young woman’s pyre and soon the pouring of ghee began and the speaking of incomprehensible words that sounded to me like curses. I imagined them saying, go, wife, you are no longer of use and for each moment you wait you will have to give an accounting. Do this last thing for your husband: burn quickly. The smoke was heavy, a dense white fog that issued from a spitting core, the human fuse, it seemed to me, and for some reason my morbid thoughts gave me some comfort. Then Doss materialised before us. Where had he come from? It gave me a chill the way he appeared out of the smoke like a djinn and I think he was well aware of the effect.