The Book of Chocolate Saints

by Jeet Thayil

  They were close enough to walk to Cubbon Park, to the teeming mall world of MG Road and Brigade Road, but to walk was to risk one’s life. There were no pedestrian crossings. The traffic was murderous and the air full of carbon. Goody felt it in her lungs, in her throat, in her eyes, the city bursting out of its skin and putting a new face on top of the old. The makeover wasn’t working. It was still a toy town of toy cantonments, club architecture, good weather, and bad roads.

  One night they saw a car brake to a stop in front of an autorickshaw. A ponytailed man exited the car and pulled the rickshaw driver out of his seat and bounced the man’s head off his vehicle’s windshield. The man cowered and the driver of the car slapped him, then dropped him on the road and got back into his car where classical music had been playing all along, a piano sonata nearing its climax of moonlight and grandeur. The ponytailed classical music lover bowed his head and paused a moment before he drove off and soon the rickshaw-wallah drove off too. Neither man had uttered a word. The sonata’s muted notes hung in the air like the exhaust fumes that sat in layers on the street, visible only under the sodium streetlights.

  The suicide capital of the country, said Xavier, if not the world.

  “There should be a sign, with an arrow. You Are Here: Suicide World. That smell in the air isn’t carbon or chemistry or emanations from the construction pit. No, Goody. What it is? Hysteria. Rilke was off point. Nobody goes to Paris to die. This is the place. Look around you, this is the place!”

  *

  They went to a wedding reception for the son of a state politician. The politician was the only Syrian Christian face in the Hindu national party’s local operations. The man suffered from a syndrome that made him “anxious to please his captors”, said a friend of Xavier’s.

  It was a fine day, cool and bright. Goody wore a dress and Xavier a stingy-brim black straw he’d found in the East Village. He trimmed his beard and put on a tie, a wide striped silk number.

  Guests crowded the lawns of the bungalow and men in white walked among them offering trays. Goody took a glass of champagne and Xavier a Virgin Mary. He had assumed a strict non-alcoholic regimen since the Chelsea opening and Goody’s two-word ultimatum: no more.

  The luncheon party was in honour of the politician’s younger son who’d recently married an American woman, a PhD student of divinity working on a dissertation about Islam. She was travelling to Hyderabad to study the city’s mosques, she said. She was small-built and scrappy and she’d brushed her hair to a shine. She had a mind, which wasn’t surprising, and she wasn’t afraid to show it, which was.

  “Do you like India?” someone asked.

  But the divinity student did not make the expected reply.

  “There’s a lot I don’t like. And there’s a lot I don’t understand.”

  It was clear to Goody that this was one of the things she was unable to understand, a lunch party that her father-in-law had insisted on calling a wedding reception although she and her husband had been married several months earlier at the Manhattan City Clerk’s office. Goody liked the woman’s seriousness even if it verged on the absurd. The American stood slightly apart, examining the crowd around her. She blinked in the powerful mid-morning sunlight as if all this had nothing to do with her, the three hundred guests sipping champagne at noon, the blur of faces and names, the rich array of appetisers, main courses, desserts, the white linen and silver cutlery, the waiters’ formal white sherwanis and turbans – and the unimaginable tab for it all.

  Goody told Xavier, “Like she’s thinking, I’m a divinity student for god’s sake. What am I doing here?”

  They overheard heated conversation from a group of men who stood in a loose circle with glasses of whisky in their hands, conversation so loud you were obliged to eavesdrop.

  “You’re living in one of the best countries in the world.” The man’s accent was brittle, almost American.

  “Easy for you to say, you’re a NRI.”

  “And you? You are Sunni, Shia, what?”

  “Like I always say, NRIs are more loyal than the king, more Hindu than the Hindus. Why is that?”

  “What does it stand for anyway, NRI? Not Really Indian?”

  “Answer my question, Sunni or Shia?”

  “I am a peaceful person until provoked.”

  “We are all peaceful, babu. That’s the problem with this country. Too docile we are, like cows chewing on grass. What we need is a dictator, someone who doesn’t mind breaking a few eggs. With a corrupt system there’s no other hope.”

  “The system is not corrupt. Our infrastructure is sound and the engine is running. It is the motorman who is corrupt.”

  “The motorman, conductor, catering officer, supervisor, passenger, all are corrupt.”

  “Sunni or Shia? First answer my question.”

  “All are corrupt. That is the first principle of democracy.”

  “Money talks, look at Japan.”

  “Yes, yes, exactly. Look at Japan.”

  “Look at China.”

  “What about China? They are corrupt too.”

  “Yes, but once in a while over there someone is shot. In public. And there’s a big party, bigger and better than this one.”

  “Admit it, if you have money in this country there’s nothing like it. The Indian middle class is king. We live much better than the middle class in the west.”

  “Where is the middle? Even our servants have servants.”

  “In San Diego, Sunday was laundry day. Full load, detergent, wash, dry, sort, stack. Here, throw it in the bin, finished, everything comes back washed and ironed.”

  Goody and Xavier wandered into the house, where a flatscreen television emitted a murmur of voices and theme music. She looked around for the remote. Where was it? Buried under the tidewrack of newspapers and magazines on the coffee table, but where? She gave up and raised the volume by hand. On the screen a coiffed man of forty held a cordless microphone, then the man disappeared and there was a photo of a floor lamp with an image of the coiffed one on the base. A rapid voiceover: This beautiful earthenware lantern worth Rs 4,375 or more, now at half price. Let your loved ones share in the light of Benny Time. A video followed of Time speaking to a sea of faces, his accent unidentifiable.

  “New, come here,” said Goody. “It’s your friend Benny Time!”

  Xavier crossed the room to take a look at the screen.

  Time said, “In the midst of darkness, who will shine a light? Say Jesus.”

  It was like falling asleep, he told her, listening to that voice from the past, Benny sounding just like his old man, Father Time of the Church of Time.

  A turbanned servant came in to say they were wanted in the dining room where toasts were being drunk to the bride and groom.

  “I do rather want to watch this, don’t you?”

  “New, focus, focus, it’s a social occasion and there’s a toast being made. Come with me.”

  She led him to a room where a woman was saying, I’m Glory and I’ll tell you a story. Glory told jokes at the rate of one a minute, in Goody’s rough estimate. The laughter from the crowd was rude and knowing. She’s done this before, thought Goody. She knows her audience, and what an audience, what a bunch of bozos.

  Later Goody and Xavier stood by the unlit fireplace and examined the art, two large gilt-framed oils of a couple seated in leather armchairs, the man in a suit, the woman in a sari.

  “Hideously perfect,” Xavier whispered.

  “If I’d known,” said a voice behind them.

  It was Glory, who had snuck up behind Xavier and put her hands over his eyes. Up close Goody saw laugh lines and expensive cleavage.

  “Hello, Glory, nice to see you or not see you.”

  She took her hands away and spun him around.

  “If it isn’t the prodigal painter returned from his travails around the world.”

  “This is Goody.”

  “Nice to meet you, my dear. I’m one of the first women who ever p
osed for Newton. It was a scandal in those days. He painted my portrait and enhanced me.”

  “That sounds about right. New has an incredibly fertile imagination.”

  “He made my boobs much bigger than they are. Years later when I got married my husband was most upset. I thought, how sweet, retrospective husbandly jealousy.”

  “I hope you sold it for a lot of money.”

  “Sell it? Are you mad? I wouldn’t part with it for the world. It’s in the bedroom away from prying eyes and my husband’s gotten to like it. Especially now, considering I’m old and grey and fighting the forces of gravity.”

  “But you’re looking splendid, Glory, splendid. Not a hair out of place and that glint still in your eye.”

  “Newton, such a charming liar. And do you remember Nayantara, my maid? Her boobs were bigger than mine in your painting and in life. That one I sold.”

  Goody said, “Glory, you mustn’t call them boobs. They don’t look like mistakes to me. Knockers, mammaries, sweater pups, the twins – anything but boobs.”

  Glory put her hands on her hips and examined Goody.

  “Oh Newton,” she said, laughing, “I like her. Now come along and meet your host.”

  He was the suited man in the oil painting, Cherian by name, wifeless for the moment. When he laughed his eyes turned wet behind his tiny glasses and Goody saw that he was already drunk. He waved his hand and sloshed the beer in his mug and spread his feet and addressed his remarks to Goody and the ceiling. Glory had disappeared and Xavier was on a couch in the corner, sipping listlessly at his tomato juice.

  “Only God knows what my religion is,” Cherian said. “I go to church even though I’m swadeshi through and through. If I had my way our churches would be swadeshi.”

  Goody said, “Swadeshi churches.”

  “Yes,” said Cherian, “Christianity is an Indian religion and English is an Indian language.”

  Goody watched Xavier get up from the couch. He turned in a small circle and sat down again.

  “Be lee you me,” said Cherian.

  Goody said, “What about this televangelist, Benny Time?”

  Cherian dropped his voice and said, “What about him?”

  “He’s here all week long at an airfield on the outskirts,” Goody said. “I’ve been watching the news.”

  Cherian laughed; he too watched the news.

  “Is it true,” Goody said, “hundreds of thousands of people? And the rumours about mass conversions?”

  Cherian stopped laughing.

  He said, “This is the kind of Christianity that gives Christians a bad name. Why convert Hindus and Muslims? Worship and let worship, allow a million flowers to bloom in the house of God. It’s a big house and there are windows and rooms for everyone.”

  He took another sip, his big-lipped mouth loose around the glass.

  He said, “Mr Time is like a glutton in a restaurant who cannot concentrate on his dish because he’s looking at other people’s food.”

  He used his belly as a shelf for the whisky-soda and there were wet stains on his shirt where the glass had sweated through the fabric. Like the other men at the party, he wore a white long-sleeved business shirt tucked into belted trousers, but his clothes were stale and his shoes had mud and bits of grass sticking to the sole. As he drank his talk became pauseless and confidential. He said he’d studied divinity as a young man and spent a year in Africa working as a priest. Then, in a moment of clarity, he’d given up the priesthood for ever. Goody asked if he had left the church to marry.

  “No, no,” he said. “I left to join Lipton. In six years I became the deputy director. Now I’m starting a campaign against tobacco multinationals, big campaign for the economic wing of the party.”

  She noticed that he never referred to the party by name, as if there were only one party in the country or only one party worth discussing, and it was a matter of pride that he was its token Christian.

  “I hope you know,” he said, lowering his voice, “that I was living outside India when I turned swadeshi.”

  “Just like Gandhi,” she said.

  His smile vanished and he became serious, his eyes wet behind the small frames.

  “Exactly,” he said.

  *

  He collected suicide trivia and reeled off dates and figures from the top of his head. Immolation by kerosene or diesel, hanging by dupatta and ceiling fan, bloodletting by razor blade and box cutter and kitchen knife, the mixing of rat poison with Coca-Cola, self-murder by long-distance train, leaps from short buildings, drownings in restricted bodies of water, and the usual self-shootings, overdoses, and death by traffic. He said there were two a week on average, two successful suicides, usually women in their teens and twenties but also entire families who drank insecticide or set themselves ablaze; and the cause was creeping hysteria, the certain knowledge that the future had passed and you would never catch up. There were nets in the mall to catch the despondent; if they survived they were prosecuted, because attempted suicide was against the law. He took her to an office complex on MG Road and showed her the city’s first suicide net, which had frayed alarmingly over the years. He explained with the air of a guide that it was the site of Bangalore’s first jump inside a tall building. Goody looked dazedly at the patchy walls and broken light fixtures. I know it doesn’t look like much, he said, but it is an important site. Think of the young woman watching the tower take shape as she walks past every day. She attends the official opening, the cutting of ribbons, the dedication, the speech by a minister or deputy minister, and back in her room at the hostel she calls her parents and describes the building, exaggerating its height, making it a story about the city’s improbable growth. Then, days later, or weeks later, or hours later, she takes a lift to the thirteenth floor and stuffs a handkerchief in her mouth and throws herself into the atrium where she lands at the feet of a three-man string section, the cellist wondering for the rest of his life if the sound he heard when she hit the floor was really a one-word review: ugh.

  “Would you agree,” said Goody, “that your study of suicide qualifies as an unhealthy obsession?”

  “There’s a difference between obsession and awareness. How can you live in a place like this without thinking about suicide? Prediction, Goody, Bangalore’s suicide rate will only increase. By 2030 all who live here will want to die.”

  She wondered if he was disintegrating, bits of his personality flaking off and slipping away. He spent hours sitting in a chair, doing nothing. He might have been asleep with his eyes open, but he was too anxious to sleep and he refused medication, saying, I’ve been crazy off and on for years, why fix it now? There were other symptoms; Goody made a list. He was moved to tears by tales of lost siblings and parent–child estrangement, exactly the kind of improbable Hindi cinema that he’d denounced to the press at memorable length; was claustrophobic, particularly in lifts, on aeroplanes, and in basements; was susceptible to irrational urges in the presence of high windows; was in need of anxiety medication when it came time to visit a dentist; was, if not a hypochondriac, certainly over-attentive to various workaday ailments including mild digestive disorders, small aches and pains, and a blood-sugar complaint; was susceptible to cross-referenced superstitions, the number 13 but only when written in blue ink, or a cat of any colour near a ladder taller than a man’s head, or a hat placed brim-down on a double bed; was averse to the numerals 00 and refused therefore to date paintings he had made in the year 2000.

  He said he was casting about for something to take his mind off the daily grind of not drinking, not working, no longer being a Hung Realist or Progressive Autist. Because he was not working he was vulnerable to superstition and doubt. He worried that his well had dried, had never been much more than a trickle, a cruel joke perpetrated by the hucksters who had lionised him to buy his paintings cheap and profit from the investment. The man’s a genius, buy his paintings. From me. His true contempt was reserved for those who valued the visual art over the poetry. Did
they not know that he’d been poetry-stopped for twenty years and that was why he painted, because he could not write? Here he would mention the Two Marys and Goody’s unwise dalliance with Dismas Bambai. A week later when he was on the upward curve of his cycle she’d hear him proclaim it as Truth: he was a genius, certifiable, the greatest living artist. You could see it even in his worst pictures, hell, you saw it especially in the bad pictures; as for the poems, there was not a bad one in the lot. Once he was dead they’d all be saying so and he would be worth millions. What was the point? He wanted it now.

  Then he would say, “Why don’t I admit it? Time’s up and I’m tired. I’m useless and it’s time.”

  Or his talk became fantastical. One night at dinner he spoke excitedly about the Aztecs, spoke for half an hour about blood and mythology, an extempore comparative study of Tamil versus Aztec bloodletting rituals.

  “The Tamils are as bloodthirsty as the Aztecs but Tamils are masters of presentation and they know how to hide their essential natures under layers of mumbo, not to mention jumbo. The Aztecs did not wish to conceal but reveal. The long hair matted with blood. The blood worn like ribbons of honour. The faces dyed black. They were addicted, if you see what I mean, vampires to the brightness arterial.”

  He spoke admiringly of the way they cut earlobe or tongue for the thin red sashes with which they draped themselves, comparing them to the Tamil ritualists who embedded hooks in their backs or killed a goat and licked its blood and walked the streets with their chests gleaming red.

  “It is useful to compare because in the worship of blood they are certainly comparable. But, and this is the point, if there was a blood championship the Aztecs would win. Their goal was to appease god not worship him. The blood is key, the sacred colour of the sacre coeur, a petition of mercy to the supreme authority.”