by Jeet Thayil
Xavier didn’t say hello to Ram Khanna. He launched directly into a lecture or speech. You don’t know what to put in and what to leave out, he said. And if you don’t know that, how will you paint a still life? For example, you cannot put a telephone into a still life and you cannot put a computer into a still life. Do you see? Then he nodded at Ram Khanna and went into the house. I apologised though I had done nothing wrong and I went inside too and got myself a drink.
Friends were there. Manjit Bawa, Manu and Madhvi Parekh, Vivan Sundaram. I think Arpita Singh was there, though I might be mistaken. On a stage on the lawn were dancers from Mizoram. Waiters in white served bamboo-smoked pork and the bar had a lawn all to itself. I lost myself for a while saying hello and making chitchat. A Delhi winter party can be fun if you know what to expect. Everybody dressed up, the braziers glowing, a bar that never runs dry. After a while I ran into Ram Khanna. He took me aside and said, why didn’t you tell me you were bringing Xavier? But it’s a party, I said, why would I tell you I’m bringing somebody? Ram Khanna looked at me for a minute with his arms crossed. He was in his horn-rims phase and he looked a little bit like a tall owl. He said, why would you bring him here? You wouldn’t invite him to a party at your house, would you? I said, of course I would. What kind of man do you think I am? He gave me another of those looks and I decided the only way to get through the night was to tank up at the bar. Vadra was there. He had an idea for a show he was putting up at the National Gallery. Political appointee, crony of the chief minister, but he’s been running the gallery for so long he learned something by accident, maybe by osmosis. He was planning a retrospective of the Delhi school and he wanted my Kashi series. We talked about it for a long time and I gave him plenty of ideas and then I got bored and walked around and saw Ram Khanna again. He said, where is your friend? He said he hadn’t seen him since we arrived. I realised I hadn’t seen him either and I thought I’d better look for him, but first a stop at the dinner buffet. It was the usual Ram Khanna spread, North Indian winter food, several kinds of rotis, mutton and chicken, two or three types of daal and sweets. I was in the buffet line serving myself kadai paneer when I realised that the woman next to me in the low-cut blouse and sunglasses was my former wife. I shouldn’t have been surprised. She’s a Delhi art critic and of course she would be at Ram Khanna’s annual bash. We exchanged a few words for politeness’ sake but I couldn’t take too much of it. Whenever I see her all the old feelings come back and it makes me confused. Worse, it makes me sober and the whisky I’d taken burned off in a flash. I’d worked hard on getting a buzzy buzz and it had gone out the window. I was annoyed and I put my plate down and decided I would find Xavier and go home. First I checked the outer area, then the rooms, including the kitchen and the bathrooms. I went upstairs and worked my way along each floor and stuck my head into each room. I felt as if I was in a studio set and there was a different movie being made behind every door I opened, including a soft-core featuring a former Lucknow courtesan and one of our better-known arts impresarios. I was thorough about it and in the end I had to admit he was not in the house. He had left without saying a word to anyone. But this is Xavier after all, a man who had made a cult of listening only to his own counsel. I went downstairs and told Ram Khanna that Xavier had left. I told you, said Ram Khanna, I told you he is a man who cannot be trusted with the basic courtesies. Is that how you say hello to a man in his own house? You don’t know how to paint a still life? The more Ram Khanna warmed to his subject, the more people gathered around us. Then Ram Khanna started to tell a story about a friend from his college days who was newly arrived from the boondocks. Xavier sold his friend a painting by Raja Ravi Varma that turned out to be a fake, an original Xavier fake. There was silence for some time and then somebody said the painting was probably worth something today. It was a skinny woman in a striped sari. Her hair and jewellery were the same shade of silver and she had a way of holding her cigarette, like it was a fountain pen. Ram Khanna was about to make some cutting remark about the way his poor friend had been treated when one of the houseboys came running and whispered something in his ear. Ram Khanna motioned to me and we trooped after the houseboy who led us to the top floor. The woman in the striped sari followed. We found a crowd spilling out of one of the rooms. The boy took us through to the balcony. I took a deep breath and looked over and I already knew, a part of me knew what I would find. He was fast asleep on a narrow ledge and it was a long way down, believe me. Ram Khanna turned to me with a strange smile on his face and said, you brought him, you take him. I leaned over the balcony and touched Xavier’s arm and he came awake instantly, that was the funny thing. The other thing was that he hadn’t been drinking. He’d just decided to take a little nap on a ledge four floors above the ground and when he opened his eyes he found a crowd of faces peering at him. Give me your hand, I said. He waved me away and grabbed the balcony railing and swung over easy as you please. Ram Khanna clenched up like he was going to punch him or grab him by the lapels, but Xavier didn’t give him a chance. Thanks much, he said. I had a lovely time. Then he walked carefully down the stairs. I went with him of course, followed by the woman in the striped sari. On the way down she introduced herself to Xavier as the editor of a new magazine named Closed. She was a student of his work, she said. In the eighties she had bought a painting from his Chocolate Jesus Period, a tableau of Christ’s brown body being lowered from the cross. She said she bought it for the quality of the tiny cuts criss-crossing Christ’s legs and torso and arms. Cuts inflicted by the tip of a sword, careful lines that leaked black blood. Would he, she said, consent to an interview? She knew he was busy and she knew he didn’t like interviews but she would send her best arts correspondent, a young woman who had studied at Goldsmith’s.
For god knows what reason, maybe he liked the striped sari, maybe the nap had put him in a good mood, for whatever reason he agreed. The interviewer of course was Goody Lol and the rest is history or maybe biography or maybe a sexy soap opera.
Farzana Amanella Kaur, arts activist, interviewed by Dismas Bambai in Lado Sarai, New Delhi, October 2005
I heard he had left her and I went to see how she was. Kuthalingam let me in. Master gone, he said, shaking his head. She was sitting up in bed with a thriller. That hadn’t changed: she was still addicted to thrillers, a leftover from the days of Newton. Come in, darling, she said. She had moisturiser on her face and she was reading and it seemed to me she was glowing.
And she was sipping from a steel glass. She winked and said, it’s medicine, darling. At least she didn’t pretend with me. She wouldn’t use a real glass, that was unthinkable, but she didn’t pretend. In the couple of hours I was there she rang the bell a few times for Amma, Kuthalingam’s wife, who would bring more medicine. Kuthalingam came in at one point to complain to me that the financial situation was dire and he had suggested that she take a paying guest. That way at least there would be a regular income. Sometimes it seemed as if Kuthalingam and his wife were the true owners of that high-ceilinged old house in one of Bombay’s oldest localities, and Lula was the paying guest who rented a room. Well, it was true that there was no income. I found out later that when she needed cash she would sell some of the art she and Newton had collected on their travels, a painting or a bronze or one of the antiques. Kuthalingam would sell them and I can only guess at the commission he charged himself.
I’d brought along some periodicals, including a movie magazine in which there was an article about her, a speculation, what happened to Lula Xavier, you know the kind of thing, and it was headlined, A Lifelong Battle Against Beauty. The writer said Lula set no stock by beauty, that she had always been at loggerheads with Bollywood because she didn’t understand them and they didn’t understand her. She read it through carefully, right to the end. Then she said, you know I agree with almost everything here. I don’t understand them and I never will. I said, that’s because you were always beautiful, Lula, for you beauty was a given. No, my darling, she said, i
t’s because I never thought beauty was any more of an attribute than one’s blood type or the shape of one’s feet. I saw no achievement in it. She was quiet for some time, flipping back and forth and looking at the pictures they had published, including pictures from the day she married Newton. Then she said, the only thing I don’t agree with is the title. Darling, my lifelong battle wasn’t against beauty, my battle was and is against stupidity. That is the true enemy! Look at what they’ve done to Bombay. Look at how violent they are, sweetheart. Isn’t violence a failure of the imagination, after all? And that failure, isn’t it stupidity?
I asked whom she met and whether she would like to go out for dinner one evening. On occasion, she said, she met her daughters from her first marriage, but those occasions were few and far between. She said, oh dear, what do you do when your daughter tells you to fuck off? What? You have to fuck off, darling, there’s no other option. For me it was always a bit of a thrill and a shock to hear Lula talk that way. You never expected vulgarities to drop from her flawless classical face.
She was drinking too much and she kept falling and hurting herself. Once she needed eight stitches to the head because she fell in the shower. I went to see her and I asked her point blank, Lula, are you trying to do yourself in? She looked at me as if I had just put the idea in her head and she found it most alluring. Don’t do it, Lula, I said, I shall miss you terribly. You know what she did? She nodded as if she were considering the idea, not doing herself in, I mean. She would think about it and let me know. She would weigh the pros and cons of staying alive.
When I went to see her the first time after he left and she was sitting in bed sipping from her steel glass? She told me she had been expecting it from the time he began travelling to New York and staying in the apartment his father had left him. She said he left for an extended trip in 1990. He had a new show opening, he said, and he left her alone for six weeks. Sometimes he’d be gone for weeks and months. So one day when he mumbled something about an affair she was not surprised. You do know I’m seeing someone? That was what he told her. Her reply? Well, I hope it’s a psychiatrist, darling, because you know you need one. She expected him to leave but she didn’t expect the notebook and the sketches, dozens of sketches of the same woman, Goody.
I asked her if she would ever forgive him. She said forgiveness didn’t come into it. I’m grateful he left, she said. I only wish he hadn’t taken so long to make up his mind.
Goody Lol, artist, interviewed by Dismas Bambai in New York City, November 2003
Everybody asks the same thing. How did you meet? I should think there are more interesting questions but apparently not. Is it the gossip quotient? Is it a way of keeping the social network oiled? Or some kind of leery male curiosity? I find it annoying, to be honest. But I’ve told the story before and I’m sure I’ll tell it again. Be warned. It is longish and it begins on a foggy winter morning. Delhi fog, which isn’t fog at all but mixed pollution and wood smoke.
The year I’m talking about is 1996. I remember because of the music, angst-in-my-pants from North America. Bands named after food items, pumpkins and honey and jam, suicidal white boys trying on grime like a flannel shirt. Newton was still in Bombay, living in Lula’s Colaba apartment. I’d just returned from the UK. I was a student at Goldsmith’s, part-time job, English boyfriend, moderate debt, the usual trappings. But you can’t be a student forever and so I came back, boyfriend in tow. I was fresh off the plane. Not acclimatised to Hindustan or Delhi or Vasant Kunj. I suppose I was floating toward decompression, working freelance for a magazine and floating.
If I considered my surroundings at all I imagined a place out of mythology. Say the Wild West or Afghanistan. It was the kind of neighbourhood where a chance interaction might take your life. The pub signs said patrons must leave their guns and ammunition at the door. The highways were dirt strips in the desert. You saw no life forms for miles. Sudden storms picked up handfuls of dirt from the road and flung them in your face. On the main road were camel-drawn tractors and horsemen among dust-laden trees. Villagers carried country-made revolvers that misfired and the security guards’ weapons resembled flintlocks or muskets. Accidents were commonplace. Murder more so. Once I saw an old man in an autorickshaw being shot at by a chap in a car over some small traffic dispute. Instead of stopping, my taxi driver sped away. I saw four riders on a single bike and the last was a fullgrown langur monkey holding on tight like the men. After some time I began to see the men of Delhi as monkeys or cattle, inarticulate and easily riled. In my first week a man on a scooter stopped on the other side of the street, rode across the road, and followed me against the traffic. I was walking home from the store. It’s a long walk and he kept after me the whole time. I picked up a rock and told him calmly that I would kill him if he didn’t go away. The man looked respectable, as if he had a decent job and a family with at least one female member. I could see him considering his options and then he turned and sped off without a squeak. I put the rock in my purse. I liked the crustiness of it and the roughness against my palm. I was floating toward decompression but now I was armed.
That morning I stepped out of Block A, Pocket C, and wound a scarf around my neck for the cold. Two men on a bike went past. They wore black jeans and black windcheaters and their helmeted heads were turned in my direction. The helmets too were black and they reminded me of insects, black two-legged insects riding an insectmobile, predators from a far galaxy hunting for earthwomen to abduct and impregnate. Fucking gross Delhi men, I was covered up in two layers and an overcoat and still they stared. What did they see? Or was it the smell of clogged blood matter? Male animals are attuned to the scent of female menses, to female confusion, to any kind of female vulnerability. It’s a bastardly biological imperative. Being chaps and sons of bitches they had sniffed me out from a distance on a windy morning. I watched the bike go very slowly up the street and I put my hand in my purse and I felt better the minute my fist closed around the rock. The bike didn’t stop. I closed my eyes and an image flashed. Two helmeted insects bent over a tied woman. They would leave the helmets on, I knew, leave the helmets on and take turns and they wouldn’t stop until I was dead.
People driving on the mud-made outer roads of Vasant Kunj would have seen a girl with a deep fringe, a forlorn figure speaking to herself, because I used to do that, I number-spoke. I remembered numbers like others remembered faces or scents. Twenty-eight, I said. And I said it three times rapidly, because three is a good number and the insect bike’s licence plate ended in twenty-eight, unlucky twenty-eight, the date of my mother’s birthday and my own.
I hurried on to the general store near the wine shop and grocery, the only businesses in that entire one-donkey outpost of an outpost. At the counter the proprietor drank tea from a thumb-sized glass. He’d just woken up, a plump man of about sixty, unshaven in an oversized wool sweater and too-tight monkey cap. The ensemble was so outré it was almost chic. I nodded at him and felt an impulse to reach across and squeeze his penis in greeting, because, don’t ask, it was a vision I had sometimes. A world in which men and women fondled each other dispassionately when they met, as if they were handling fruits and vegetables at a store and deciding what to purchase. Except if someone tried that with me I’d bludgeon him, make no mistake. I picked up household essentials, batteries, light bulbs, a carton of milk, a packet of paneer, and the only unexpected thing in the entire establishment, Clarins sunscreen, SPF forty. Then I found the most essential item of all, at least for me that morning. Menstrual pads.
(Why is it that people never talk about periods? Why aren’t a woman’s periods taken into consideration by employers? Do you know that tampons are taxed like luxury items while men’s razors are considered essentials? Do you know that male murderers get caught more often than female murderers? Women are used to getting blood off their clothes.)
I added the pads to my purchases and as the proprietor rang them up I saw it again. The first digits on the receipt were a two and an eig
ht.
(My analyst Garima once called it the magical child syndrome. I heard the words and I recognised it as my own condition and before even Garima explained I knew it was a condition from which abused children suffered. Sometimes, in the privacy of my own head, I call it the digressionist’s complaint.)
I walked home with the bagged groceries and, though the men on bikes and in cars turned to look me up and down and weigh each body part like meat at the butcher’s, no one stopped. This was a good thing. My hands weren’t free.
At the building I went up three flights and walked into the flat. The English boy was snoring gently. He wore a faded Air Force Academy T-shirt and his man breasts sagged. His boxers were open and I wondered if I might someday grow to cherish if not love his reluctant wrinkly penis. It seemed unlikely considering I never saw his penis or I saw it so infrequently it might have been a dream penis with no practical benefits. I made tea with milk and sugar for him and placed a cup by his side of the bed, doing my wifely Indian duty though there was no point really. Sam was not Indian and I was not his wife. There was little chance I’d ever be his wife or the mother of his children and yet I was the one who went out for groceries and I was the one who cooked and I was the one who worked and paid most of the bills. The worst of it was that I did it uncomplainingly, as if my expensive education and ongoing self-education mattered not at all. When it came to the important things I was as powerless as a village woman whose only purpose was to please the bastard man.