The Book of Chocolate Saints

by Jeet Thayil

  “And Edna, the mother of Gillian, your only child. How is the lovely Edna? I liked her. She didn’t let love go to her head. She knew you’d disappear sooner rather than later, she expected it and she didn’t take it personal. She was English.”

  “Dead of cancer. Gill blames me and doesn’t pick up when I call. Is this a recap of my failures? If so we’ll be here all night and possibly half the next day.”

  He took the ice bag off his face and gently moved his head. A black drop pooled in his nostril. Goody returned to push his head back and replace the bag.

  “Don’t mind me,” she said. “Ask about Lula. I know you’re dying to.”

  Time said, “Newton, she’s right. I’m holding my breath. What happened to Lula, who used to scream loud and long in the same high pitch as your mother? I remember how sensitive you were about a high mad woman’s voice.”

  Xavier said nothing.

  “Still is,” said Goody. “That won’t change.”

  “Lula of the proper place settings, never drank in front of the guests for some reason, always tottered off to the kitchen to take her medicine, in quotes. End of the evening, she was drunker than anyone and that’s saying a lot. Four a.m. and we’d be around the dinner table, still drinking, food untouched, ashtrays full. Passionate gossip about Rothko and Bacon, or was it Spender and Auden? You were trying to write again and you were fully invested in the midnight oil. Once I saw fifty drafts of a single poem. When you were inside a poem you kept at it no matter what was happening around you. Couldn’t have been easy, the place was a madhouse. Any kind of stranger was welcome. I remember a wheatgrass evangelist and young poets by the score and a couple who had to leave their house in a hurry and arrived with pots and pans and a miniature herb garden. You were no recluse then. Lula wore a housecoat and played the piano. One night she turned off the lights and crashed one demented chord into another to chase away a bat that had flown in the window. You don’t remember? How? I remember all of it. I used to worry about her.”

  “I know the answer to this one,” Goody said. “May I, Newton?”

  Xavier moved his head in what might have been assent.

  “He left a notebook full of sketches in a bill drawer he knew she’d open,” said Goody. “Then he left on a business trip and never returned. A hundred sketches of a woman who clearly was not Lula, who clearly was me.”

  “Such cruelty,” said Benny Time. “I suppose it’s a talent like any other. Do you meet her at all?”

  “She doesn’t meet people,” said Goody. “She’s become a kind of Garbo figure. Tell me, what happened to the bat?”

  “The bat.”

  “The bat lost in the living room, did the piano dissonance work?”

  “Yes, she managed to chase it out,” said Time. “I think I miss her.”

  “Everybody does,” said Xavier. “Even Goody, even though they’ve never met.”

  He noticed that Time’s hair was still thick. Like his stubble it was more salt than pepper. He looked designed. The spotless white suit. The buttonhole. The orange tan and air of wellbeing. The healthfulness that reminded you he was in the God business and business was good.

  “I wanted to get in touch with you and I didn’t know how. I wrote to Dismas when I saw the interview in the Indian tabloid,” said Time, “I couldn’t tell him anything except that it was a matter of some importance.”

  “Well, here I am,” said Xavier. “A captive audience. Captive and bleeding.”

  “I even considered getting someone to stake out Koshy’s. I knew you’d drop in sooner or later.”

  “Koshy’s, is that the important matter you wished to talk about?”

  “I knew you’d go and say hello to young Koshy and if I managed to get through to you then you’d hear what I had to say. Listen, it’s been more than thirty years since you’ve published a poem. I think I know why.”

  “Do tell, the damn nation wants to know.”

  “You said art makes nothing happen and if it cannot pick up a gun it has no place in the twenty-first century.”

  “‘Poetry makes nothing happen,’” said Xavier. “Auden to Yeats, in memoriam. It wasn’t me.”

  “‘What use is a poem that cannot pick up a gun?’ That was you and this is what I want to talk about. The party wants to ban the Church of Time in India. We’ve been getting emails, mildly unfriendly, and some outright threats. We had to increase the security cover. Johnny has reason to be paranoid. We all do.”

  “If this is some kind of elaborate apology, I’m not going to sue.”

  “No, ha ha, I mean, I apologise but that isn’t it.”

  “How do you know the emails aren’t from a Muslim group?”

  “I don’t. It’s a distinct possibility.”

  “Or loony Christians hoping to whip up sympathy and solidarity?”

  “Like I say, it’s possible. We haven’t ruled out anything. I’m thinking of inviting the party to a sit-down in Delhi. We have a press conference about pluralism. We say it’s possible for different faiths to coexist. I make it clear I am not interested in converting anyone.”

  “Sounds somewhat doomed to me.”

  “I’ve been saying the exact same thing,” said Johnny Starr.

  “I know you have. Still.”

  “Sometimes preaching only works with the converted,” said Xavier.

  “Right, but let’s say I appear to lose the debate. I agree conversion is wrong. I even say the Lord Jesus Christ would not want such a thing. We strike a blow for peaceful coexistence.”

  “A blow,” Goody said. “For peace.”

  “Imagine if they’re successful in banning the church. You saw how many came tonight. What happens to them?”

  “Where, no, why do I come in?”

  “You’re a famous Christian. You have the name of a saint and the temperament of one, you know, a taste for isolation and long periods of denial in pursuit of your art.”

  “Let’s not bring art into this.”

  “If you were present the thing would carry some particular weight. You could mention that you’ve known me for years, which is no lie. We could make a joint statement and say religions can work together.”

  “Get a Muslim. You don’t want the Muslims to feel sidelined. Or a Hindu, obviously, get a Hindu.”

  “Newton, look, I want you because you don’t get out much. You don’t do press conferences. That interview with Indian Angle was the first time you said anything in public in years. You out there talking coexistence will reverberate. It will travel out into the saffron void and the void will send it back enhanced with echoes. It’s a way to put a gun in the hands of a poem.”

  There was a silence and Goody went to the buffet to pick at the cold cuts and fruit and bread sticks. The plates were white china with a close-up of Benny Time in the centre. She placed sliced strawberries on his eyes.

  She said, “Your face on a plate? I know it helps to love yourself in this line of work, but really?”

  “Johnny’s idea, not mine.”

  Johnny nodded. “Helps to pump up the adrenaline before you go out in front of a million people.”

  “Let me put your mind at rest,” said Time. “I don’t expect a Church of Time endorsement or any kind of cheesy advertising. I will not tell you what to say. Tell them I’m a phony, I don’t mind, as long as we do the important thing, you and me in a room speaking reasonably to a camera. Then we leave it to them.”

  Xavier put the ice bag down and wondered what would happen if you contracted a nosebleed that never stopped. How long before the blood loss made you pass out?

  Benny was his friend and he was in need. Of course he would say yes.

  He looked at Goody who was making her way to his side of the room. She put the plate on the coffee table and removed her shoes and put her feet up on the couch.

  “And what are your thoughts on this pressing matter?”

  Goody said, “God.”

  *

  And what of God?
/>   Confession: he is not the only digressionist in this tale.

  Nor is Goody.

  After all, what is digression but the story entire? Every story is a digression from some other, it is in the digression that meaning resides.

  There’s been some discussion as to why God created the world. Let me clear it up.

  He made the world because that’s what he does. He makes things.

  A more pertinent question, though pertinence is hardly the point at this point: why did he make humans?

  Now there’s a question.

  He made us as a bulwark against loneliness and boredom. Too late he discovered we were in fact the opposite. We augment boredom; we deepen loneliness.

  In time we make boredom and loneliness preferable.

  As I speak, the moon bides its time.

  Because of orbital distance the moon appears to be exactly the same size as the sun. The fact that it appears to be the same size as the sun is no coincidence, whatever scientists may say. It is design. It is a way of telling us that we are guilty of a conceptual error.

  The moon is male and female. It is the true husband, the first wife, the secret father and earth mother.

  It tinkles a stream of warm yellow on the mountains of a city; it bides its time.

  Soon, though, soon it will give up all restraint and urinate in abandon on a street many miles to the north, and a woman on the street, and a man in a car, and an uncertain feast.

  It will urinate on an old man dying in an alley in the city to the north. No, that won’t do. Be specific.

  A city one thousand and eighty-four miles to the north.

  The moon has questionable hygiene and indifferent health. His urine isn’t yellow but a deep hepatitic honey.

  The moon is a monomaniac, a piss artist, and peeper.

  He does not care about us.

  2.

  You die. You get old and die. Your anger curdles, your grief dries, your talent fades on the page. Your cells metastasise into an army dedicated to the overthrow of you. You become dependent on paid strangers for the maintenance of your blood and your brittle bones. You understand that thought is the enemy, the source of all lesions, tumours, and sarcomas; then thought becomes flesh becomes the emblem of your shame.

  In the mirror he examined the hitherto unsuspected reservoirs of gore between his badly bandaged nose and collaterally blackened eye. Every day there was a new colour or some unexpected new shading to an old colour. He had never considered how much the nose shaped the face and how much disrepute must accompany its disfigurement.

  Thoughts plagued him like a head cold as he walked around Sankey Park, or, to honour it with its true name, Wanker’s Park, a title it had earned after an incident involving Goody and an aged Indian patriarch. (More on said incident later.) Wanker’s opened at six in the morning and closed, inexplicably, four hours later; it stayed closed all day and reopened briefly in the evening. Located between Brahmin Malleswaram and unBrahmin Palace Orchards, it was landscaped but a shambles. New pagodas and benches were being installed; plants had been uprooted; there was mud and rubble everywhere.

  The city too was a shambles, accursed by the outsize nature of its greed, structures razed and reconstructed in front of your eyes, roads widened, flyovers erected, and none of it built to last. This was the new Bangalore, made with substandard materials sourced and maintained by a gang of men in white khadi.

  Goody said, “I spoke to the doctor. He wants to see you next week. You can’t keep putting it off, New, how long will you put it off?”

  The walkway that bordered the lake was being resurfaced. Xavier stopped to watch as park workers placed the paving stones, laborious work, like fitting together the pieces of a concrete puzzle. The stones were of an unwieldy shield-shaped design and some had to be broken to fit the walkway’s curving borders. The result was all gap and overlap.

  “He was interested in your symptoms, seemed excited, actually. I think he’s the right doctor for you if only you’d give him a chance.”

  The workers wore chilli red or turmeric yellow lungis over shorts. What language were they speaking? A high-pitched bird staccato of truncated vowels and hard consonants. They were always working, supervised by a fat man in a windcheater, who did nothing as far as Xavier could see except smoke and nurse his hangover. Meanwhile, the workers sat on their haunches, bird-like, and placed the stones in the intricate, self-defeating pattern.

  “He says you have mild hypomania. It disguises itself well enough that you seem completely normal.”

  What an ecstasy of invention they were, the paving stones, in their unevenness and the intricacy of their design. How much misdirected energy, how much labour had gone into their execution, how many days and hours of work by the diminutive men in lungis.

  “In any case at least you’re off the booze,” she said. “What a word. Booze. I mean, it has ooze in it.”

  He wanted to weep. One of these days I’ll start, he thought, and I won’t stop until I die.

  *

  At night Wanker’s Park was a commotion of fluorescent light, the lake hidden under a layer of green slime. A group of boys clambered out of the water with a plastic bag in which a dozen fish floated belly-up. They took the bag to a man on a bench who bought the lot for fifteen rupees. When the boys had gone, Xavier asked the dull-eyed purchaser of the fish if he had bought them to eat or to sell.

  “Selling no good, too small,” said the man. “I fry and eat.”

  Xavier nodded in the direction of a large half-dissolved Ganesh leaking blue and red paint into the water.

  “Thirty thousand idols were drowned here,” he said, grinning. “The paint from the idols killed the fish. I do hope you will reconsider your dinner plans.”

  The man nodded at the brownly stained bandage that protruded from Xavier’s unshaven face. He nodded but the gesture conveyed no agreement and after a while he lit a beedi and sauntered away.

  In the water Ganesh shed his necklaces, bracelets, and jewelled headgear. He shed his skin. He shed four arms. Now he was an obese child, head sawn off and a shrunken-to-scale elephant’s trunk sutured in place. Now he was a straw figure bound with string, grotesque and pleading, a repository for cruelty and pity.

  The festival rituals were all oddity and creeping nuance and it had always been thus. The men placing the paving stones were tribals and the fat man telling them how to go about it was a highborn or higherborn official. The conversation between them had occurred many centuries ago and would continue centuries hence.

  I am home at last among my people, thought Xavier. My men and women with their love of the lash and indifference to filth, whose cruelty and serenity is the source of my rich, my inexhaustible subject matter.

  You get old and you die. Your enemy is the disintegrating face in the mirror and the heart that will attack you one day. I is the enemy.

  Naked came I of my mad mother’s womb and naked shall I return.

  *

  In his dream his father was on a beach. If you don’t mind (he said), I won’t share. I discovered it only recently and I’m making up for lost time. Xavier waited while his father – who had never smoked a joint in his life, whose pleasures had been alcohol and cigarettes, who had been the editor of some of the most prominent newspapers in the country – smoked the joint down to the butt. The sea seemed unnaturally calm, like a sea in a dream, or like a painting of the sea made by a child, or like something that looked like the sea but was really something else. He saw a white cloud shaped like a mastodon and another like a sleeping woman, a woman whose profile and rose-pink complexion produced a constriction in his chest. Who is it? My mother? My wife? Someone who left me? The answer was about to reveal itself, was about to drop from his eyes in slivers of salt ice. But Frank yawned and said: my role in your dream is small but significant. I’m here to provide a bit of preliminary context and to tell you that dreams are tenseless. They have no past or future. They don’t predict, they are. They exist like stories
, or, to be more precise, like manuscripts with no title, author’s name, footnotes, or publication details. That doesn’t mean the story is incomprehensible or that some of its pleasure is lost. On the contrary the story derives its power from incompleteness and from its partial and fragmented nature. Those who ask after its meaning are mistaken or they are being intentionally rude. Then his father lifted his arms in a gesture that encompassed the sea and sand and blue sky. There are at least five ways to experience the ocean without demanding to know its meaning. For example, you can touch it. That is, you can cup it in your hands or immerse yourself in it or you can stand at its edge and dip your toe, said his father. Another way is to listen to its music. Did you know that the ocean rhymes with itself in each of its manifestations around the world? Because wherever in the world you find it the ocean’s sound is the same. It sounds like itself. A third way to experience the ocean is to look at the shape it takes and try to map its abundant architecture. Let its immensity seep into you. A fourth way is to taste it and take a sip of its salt. The fifth is inconvertible and extreme. It is a permanent solution to a temporary problem and there’s no need to go into it now. Do you see? Your mother was insane but you don’t have to be. Xavier nodded and said, may I ask you something? That’s what I’m here for, said his father. You can ask me anything you want. Xavier said, what is it like to be dead? His father nodded and looked up at the sky. What’s it like to be dead, he said, that’s your question? Yes, said Xavier. I’m glad you asked, said Frank. Every morning the body and the soul are reunited. At night they separate and free associate. Sleep will teach you how to die. Look around you and don’t be afraid. Then his father spread his arms and turned in a small circle. Xavier also spread his arms and turned in a circle. But when he came back around Frank was gone and the beach had disappeared. He was near a lake. In the sky was a sliver of moon. What kind of moon? A moon like a clipped fingernail, like a smudge of powdered sugar, like a yellow laddoo, like a shattered dinner plate, like the tusk of a wounded mammoth, like a scimitar buried in the enemy’s skull, like a horned demon drowned in blood, like a fallen warrior’s silver visor, like the prow of a ghostly mothership, like the smile of a giant black cat, like God’s half-closed night-time eye, a low murder moon, the kind of moon that will soon illuminate a woman not alone, in a city to the north. Not yet, but soon.