by Jeet Thayil
When he shut the notebook I told him to pay the bill and take me to his hotel. We held hands in the cab to Connaught Place and kissed in the lift. He told me I tasted nice, strange but nice, a taste he couldn’t place. I laughed and told him it was the taste of clitoris. In the room I looked at myself in the mirror. I told him, take off everything except my panties and scarf. Watch, I said, and turned to lick his face. He stood behind me and watched the images in the mirror shift and coagulate. Squeeze my ass, I told him. I was cupping my breasts and he was too and it was hard to tell who was doing what to whom, there was so much going on, so many hands. My breasts were sore from my period but I squeezed them together and watched him stare. Never fails, I said, cleavage. Months later he told me that his future paintings flashed then in his head with such clarity that his erection disappeared. I didn’t notice. I squatted on the carpet in my boy’s shoes and guided his hand and came quickly because I’d been well primed. His hand came away redly smeared. But he was soft and would not be revived.
“No,” he said. “I need control or the illusion of control.”
“The illusion,” I said. “Because you’re not in control, I am.”
I fell asleep and when I woke much later he propped me on my hands and knees. I told him it was my second most favourite position. When I started to moan he cupped his hand against my mouth because he was of the silent generation, uncomfortable with articulation, comfortable only when the sex was silent and furtive and conducted in the dark, neither party able to see clearly or speak or fully undress, a generation so far removed from mine they seemed like a species unto themselves.
I fell asleep again and woke to sheets marked with lines of red. Some lines were tiny and delicate and there were also solid clots of blood jelly. One side of the room was spattered, as if there had been a murder, and I found it hard to believe I carry so much unnecessary blood matter. Xavier slept facing away from me and this little thing made me miserable.
(I’m always surprised by my need for intimacy and that I expect it only from men. From women I want sex. So strange, don’t you think?)
From his hotel I went to Closed and filed the story in plenty of time for the deadline and it was then that I realised I had forgotten to show him my own work and I had forgotten my appointment with Garima. I was sitting at my desk staring at the phone when it rang.
“I’m sorry, Gudiya, I should never have gone out to walk the dog. If I hadn’t everything would have been fine.”
“Why do you call so late?”
“I don’t know why you came back to this country. Nothing works, nothing changes. I don’t know. Gudiya, I’m sorry.”
“That you certainly are.”
“If I hadn’t gone out everything would have been okay.”
“No, it wouldn’t have. He did it when you were there too.”
“When I was where?”
“While you were in the house. You would be cooking and he’d be in my room with his fingers in my pussy. Do you know how old I was?”
“Stop it,” my mother said.
“I’m not sure, but it goes back as long as I remember. I would have been two or three. Do you know he got into my bed and pretended to sleep? Every chance he got, whether you were in the house or not.”
“Stop it.”
I hung up and read the story through once more. It was good enough and I sent it to the editor.
I want you to know something. The story was no puff piece. I portrayed him warts and all. For example, I mentioned that every important event in his life seemed to have at its centre religion and women, and women came first. He said he had learned about colour by looking at flowers and women. He said the predominant subject matter of art and the only complete formal motif was the female form. He said the problem with Cézanne was that there were too many apples in his work and not enough women. I quoted all of this and I posed a question. How can we take such provocations seriously? Obsessives are divorced from reality, I wrote. When a man professes too much admiration for women you must wonder if in fact his true response is fear.
I knew he would hate the piece and I wouldn’t hear from him again. But when the story appeared I found an email from Newton in my inbox. Was I free for lunch? I replied with one word. Then, for a year we communicated by email and telephone while he worked up the nerve to leave Lula. For a year he asked me to move to New York with him. He can be persuasive if he wants.
BOOK FOUR
X, 66
Saint Santosh
of runners, sailors, romancers;
voice of the robbed & drowned;
found himself in a foreign town,
distracted by the eyes of dancers;
enjoyer of denim & rhythm;
soccer star of the Republic of Kerala,
whose motto, Kiss My Posterior,
is repeated in graffito, lore, & drum.
Saint Dharini
of Noon Wines, Infantry Road, Bangalore;
a/k/a Ari; d/o Bhuvapathi,
student of planet, moon, & star;
her own arenas of study
were social science, fashion, the cosmos;
nimble with numbers; Internet savant;
kind child partial to the tearless rant;
tough enough to outlive the loss
of her father & of me.
from The Book of Chocolate Saints: Poems (Unpublished)
1.
Those who enjoy mental health turn away from the mad. An axiom. Those who are healthy turn from the sick. Another. Goody didn’t think about Xavier’s small eruptions until much later when they were impossible to ignore, when his broken nose sent a stream of gore to his chin and crisp white shirt. Broken precisely at its apex the nose would precede him for the rest of his life, a weirdly flattened appendage that reflected the untidiness in his head. But that was later. At the moment his condition, or one of his conditions, was anxiety rooted in the sky. He could not bear to fly, a strange problem for a man who had done so much of it. The longer the haul the more extreme his unease, and this journey was eight thousand miles across continents and time zones, an odyssey that made him re-evaluate his position viz. the world, made him feel like a stranger in evening dress wandering the streets of a foreign town, mute, without memory or personality, hypnotised by a shop window or the sight of a family having dinner in a restaurant. He told her he could not fly without his lucky boots of heavy pointy-toed leather, uncomfortable, yes, but they kept the plane in the air. He could not fly bootlessly and he could not look out the window, he said, and when the plane taxied into position for take-off he made the sign of the cross discreetly with his thumb, twice in rapid succession.
She said, “Admit it, you’re scared and you revert. You go back to God by default.”
They were flying Kuwait Airways from New York to Bangalore via Bombay because Xavier’s research showed that the airline had never had a crash in this sector. But the service was no frills, no smiles, no nothing, and the aircraft was elderly and there was a seven-hour stopover in Kuwait, accommodation not provided.
“And, New, you’re a famous painter. You’re allowed to fly business once in a while.”
“Might I point out that the flight isn’t any shorter in business class? Also, exit row’s in economy. In case something happens you are closer to the outside.”
Kuwait International was a throwback, medieval, a quick return to the world that was Not America. Goody felt heat exposure on her skin. She felt unprotected, at the mercy of testicle soup and testosterone stew, a target of reptilian male psychosis. Everything gleamed with money but behind the gleam centuries-old tribal systems were in place. She folded her arms around herself and let suspicion show on her face.
This was her new position: assume hostility at the outset. She walked along the display aisles and stole a lighter, white plastic, a disposable artefact of international travel emblazoned with a slogan in red, I ♥ KUWAIT. She clicked the lighter and watched a group of young Arab women in one-piece leather m
asks, the peekaboo hoods and oiled straps a sexual signal in any language. Shepherded by a man in a white robe they left a heavy wake of perfume, and there were similar groups everywhere, three or four women guarded by a man. The men were bored and randy; they stared at other women, at Goody.
She told Xavier, “They’re probably fucking each other, the women.”
“One can only hope.”
At the airline counter she picked up coupons for dinner. The attendant wore a short-sleeved shirt buttoned to the top. It was too hot for buttoned collars even in New York, never mind Kuwait. Maybe he was still living in the eighties when people wore air ties. Or was it the nineties? Goody had been too young to note the flannelled moment and there was no point checking with Xavier. For him the eighties and nineties were a single decade that blurred one into the other, a hyphenated intoxicated feast.
They wheeled their luggage trolley into a lift and went up two floors to the dinner buffet, a narrow amalgamation of generic colour and overcooked North Indian curry. The apples in lieu of dessert rotted in a bowl. Xavier looked seasick; he refused to touch any of it. The peeling paint, the dim deadman’s light, the neglect and general decrepitude amounted, he said, to a preliminary taste of India. Even the weather had been adjusted: there was no airconditioning. He stared at the previous day’s New York Times and noted that the weather forecast – “Hazy sun, mixing with clouds” – seemed already to describe a faraway country.
Goody said, “Pick it up, old man, we have a long way to go before you get to pack it in.”
“Remind me, why are we making this desperate journey back to the land of our ancestors?”
“Because America is finished, history is moving backwards, and India is the future past. Quoting you. Also, you own property in Bangalore.”
“Last but not least.”
“Um, no. That would be 66, your life’s work, coming soon to the National Gallery.”
They went to the main terminal to wait and Goody fell asleep in her leather seat. When the flight was called Xavier patted her lightly on the knee and she came awake in panic. He examined her eyebrows as if he had only just noticed that they were shaped differently, the left brow acutely angular in relation to the right.
She said, “I dreamt we were married. People on the street carried placards that said you were cheating on me. And the worst thing, the worst thing, they misspelled my name.”
It was midnight when they took off.
Xavier had insisted on the aisle. He wanted quick access to the lavatory, quick access and return in case of turbulence. Goody sat next to a Punjabi woman whose kajal had smeared from tears. Of course she was crying, Indian woman flying alone from Kuwait to Bombay because of an emergency or family tragedy, why wouldn’t she cry? Goody wanted to take her by the hand and weep in solidarity. How many weeping women in how many aeroplanes rushing homeward to the heartbreaking denouement?
The cabin lights dimmed but it was still bright. She felt Xavier’s fingers tighten around hers as the plane gathered speed and tilted and became weightless, rubber wheels lifting unsmoothly from the tarmac. It shuddered and rose, rose and shuddered, and the light became brighter: the moon, fat and full and glued against the sky, an oversized dinner plate.
He gripped the armrests for the entire flight. The movie was a Bollywood melodrama in which a woman was separated from her two small children and treated cruelly by her dead husband’s family, and at the climactic moment when the widow beat her chest until her bangles broke and it was clear that she had lost or was losing her mind, Goody was surprised to see Xavier in tears. He had forgotten his fear for the moment.
New York–Kuwait–Bombay–Bangalore, so many flights the take-offs and landings merged into a single hum of engine noise and vibration, until they arrived at an apartment off Infantry Road, a yellow space in a faded beige-on-beige Soviet-era block, the small apartment that his father had bought for Beryl. She had furnished it but never lived there: she preferred the asylum. The building was badly maintained and gloomy but the second-floor apartment was full of light, the rooms furnished with items his mother had acquired on one of her furloughs from the asylum, heavy side tables and teak almirahs stocked with old-fashioned crockery and bed linen. There was a four-poster bed and no writing desk. In a tin trunk in the kitchen they found clippings of articles Xavier had written, as well as gossipy magazine items and interviews that spanned the decades.