The Book of Chocolate Saints

by Jeet Thayil

  Dismas closed the book and looked across the canal to the shrine. There was a white cross on which someone had placed a garland of marigolds. The sun was bright and the air had turned cooler.

  Saint Xavier, it seemed to him, was the patron saint of migrants, of drifters and wanderers and those who were misplaced on the planet, those who were missing limbs and homes, those addicts whose addiction was movement without meaning.

  No wonder X had taken his name.

  There in the mild sunshine he felt as if he were in a world of cotton wool. It is no exaggeration to say that he entered a state of unthinking bliss. Of the many things that had happened to him he retained no formal recollection. He could not remember his childhood, his parents, the humiliation he had suffered as a schoolboy. All he felt was gratitude that he was alive and in possession of an imperfect but working body, for his feet that traversed the tiles of the road, for his lungs and eyes and ticking heart.

  Xavier had taken his travel funds on a whim. For X the amount was little more than small change, but for Dismas it was a catastrophe. He would have to find work. Or cut short his stay in Goa and his travels around the country interviewing those who had known Xavier in his youth and middle age. Or he would have to sell the Two Marys, which were in storage. But what would be the point? Without authentication they were worth nothing. At least he had managed to keep his appointments in Forgottem and Mapusa; at least he had done that.

  Now, at the Basilica, he bought a ticket for the audio-visual programme and joined a group of melancholy Malayali nuns. They entered a hive of connected rooms where viewers were shown an enactment of the life of Christ, an extravaganza of life-size moving figures and weeping violins and the kind of melodramatic score that accompanied early Hindi movies. They were ushered onto a sheet of blue-tinted plastic flooring and the music changed: there was a sudden burst of bhangra. Disco lights strobed under their feet; the floor started to move. How strange it all was. Then, in the next room, because he was a few minutes late the lights were turned off soon after he entered. In the sudden darkness he saw a figure triangulated in the yogic lotus, whose black eyes stared into his eyes, so close he could feel the static from the hair. It was a flesh-coloured likeness of Jesus as sadhu meditating in a Himalayan cave. The Christ wore a beard to his navel and a piece of sackcloth fastened over his shoulder, his feet hooked to his upper thighs.

  It reminded him of something he’d read once about Xavier’s first show in London, in which he had depicted Jesus as a Hindu holy man. Among the paintings that provoked Roman Catholics was a large oil of Jesus as a blue-skinned sadhu meditating in a cave, his doe eyes rimmed with kajal. The show was called Haré Krishna, Haré Christ and Dismas had seen a review in which the writer had used such words as ‘genius’ and ‘iconoclast’ but had tried to underplay his admiration.

  And now, decades after the review had appeared, he was standing in front of what may have been the original inspiration for that picture, a piece of Goan kitsch that Xavier had transformed into art. And Dismas remembered something X had said, though he could not remember where or to whom. The point of art was not to imitate nature but to surpass it. Art supersedes nature, he had said, it reveals to nature how small are her horizons when placed alongside the imaginings of a superior mind.

  After the state’s elaborate preparations for the Exposition and a film festival that had opened at the same time – protests at the festival venue, residents complaining about the strain on the infrastructure – the actual Exposition was unexpectedly subdued. The tents were half empty and Dismas felt again that he was at the wrong place at the wrong time. A red-carpeted tented walkway led across the dusty grounds to where the saint’s remains were displayed. There were signs advising pilgrims to rest frequently and to wait if they found too heavy a crowd. Millions had been expected but they had neglected to arrive. It was deserted but for Dismas.

  And then he was under a worn chandelier in sight of the glass casket where Saint Xavier lay. Here the crowd was thicker, herded into an enclosure by policemen in plain clothes. Ahead of Dismas was an industrialist with a retinue of police officers and women in sunglasses, the industrialist in white shorts and a T-shirt, his face flushed red, his shorts too short. The man was a famous or infamous name in the nation’s newspapers, a scion of liquor and air travel. But he too was asked to move quickly. A policewoman had been stationed at the casket, her only job to wipe the stains of spit and sweat left by the pilgrims who kissed the glass above the feet of the saint, who left small envelopes with printed prayers, currency notes, lockets, and bits of thread and fabric.

  His sight of Francis Xavier was brief and unsettling. He saw a slender figure in a gown of gold and red brocade. The gown covered empty burgled space, he knew this, because there wasn’t much left of the man, the skull, a hand, three toes. The bald head was textured like hide or parchment and there was flesh missing from around the mouth and he could see the incisors, which were stained a deep yellow. How far was the reality of the saint’s remains from the romantic images of a tall white man with glossy brown hair and trimmed beard, eyes blue and soulful, a youth of strapping build and physical beauty. Here were the remains of the true saint, a small exhausted dark-skinned man.

  *

  He regarded the stunted trees laden with dust and the humid ocean-loaded heat that trembled on the flat brown land. Everywhere was salt and erosion. How easy it would be to melt into the air. He would not let it happen. He could not. He saw the finished book in his mind, the title and heft of it, two hundred and fifty pages of heft, and he saw the kind of blurbs that would populate the back cover. To feel better he bought things he did not need with funds he could not afford to deplete, white khadi kurta-pyjamas, a pair of knock-off Ray-Ban Aviators, and a glass pipe in the shape of a giant multicoloured mushroom.

  And then, what did he do then?

  He stayed true to his name, Dismas, the not-so-good thief. He returned to Bangalore and from the station he took an auto to the first guesthouse he found, a ‘pure veg’ hovel named Mr Majestic. The rooms were like boxes. There was a single cot and steel cupboard lit by the hospital glare of white tube-lights. There was no room service. He put his bag down and took a long shower and found a respectable collared shirt that made him look like a bank manager or journalist or young executive on his way up in the world. Then he went to Infantry Road, where it took less than twenty minutes to find Noon Wines. At the counter he asked for Dharini and when she appeared he asked if she remembered him. Yes, she said, greeting him without surprise. She let him buy her a cup of coffee: there was so much to talk about.

  6.

  She stared at the television at the foot of the bed. It was some kind of documentary, a group of men and women walking in single file on a beach. As they came into focus she saw white crosses painted on their foreheads and she noticed that their hands were bound. A tall photogenic minder accompanied each man and woman and a curious tenderness tied the minder to his charge. They walked toward a bluff where seven crosses faced the ocean. The camera panned from left to right across the crosses and then cut to the men and women walking one behind the other. There was a swell of classical music, some kind of opera, and there was a shot of the ocean and a bird far out to sea. There was a sense of something building. She opened a small refrigerator by the bed and poured herself a glass of water, her eyes on the screen. There was a close-up of a woman with fair hair and the cross on her forehead and another shot of the ocean. The sequence had been carefully composed and choreographed with three cameras if not more, the scenes cut with grainy footage of a surgical procedure involving the brain and another of a sexual act between bonobo monkeys, though the nature of the act was unclear. She picked up a nail file from the bedside table and worked on her nails as she looked at the screen. The animal documentary reminded her of the porn she used to watch in her teens when she had six or seven tabs open on her screen at one time. She remembered the first time she saw a dildo, purple and shaped like a sword. None of it w
as arousing but she found it impossible to look away; and for days afterwards the look on a young woman’s face would stay with her, some inadvertent flinch or smile. The video went back to the original sequence, now nearing its end. The men and women who had walked as if strolling on the sand, who had uncomplainingly been lifted and tied to the crosses, began to struggle as their minders drilled nails into their bound hands and feet. In the last shot the camera switched to the point of view of the crucified men and women as the sun began to set into the sea and they understood that this was the last sunset they would see on earth. Instead of credits there was a slow dissolve. She watched it through to the end, without emotion and with no sensation other than tiredness. When Xavier came into the room to change into street clothes she was watching a Hindi music video, and here too as she watched a dozen white women in ghagras dancing on a lavish sound stage the only sensation she was aware of was tiredness. He said he was going out for cigarettes and would be back in some time.

  “There are five packs of Wills on the table, but,” she said.

  “I like to prepare for every calamitous eventuality, as you know, and five packs of Wills is a mere fifty smokes, no protection at all,” he replied. “More nicotine is the answer to most problems, at least in my experience.”

  “Don’t leave out booze and sex.”

  “Yes, Dharini, worry not.”

  “Don’t call me Dharini. I told you I hate it. My name is Ari.”

  “Ari, I’ll be back in twenty, don’t worry.”

  She had looked him up on the Internet’s infinite stew of gossip, news, and innuendo; she knew some things about him; everybody did.

  “Not worried, yaar, sceptical. Isn’t that how you left your first wife? Going out for cigarettes.”

  “Not true at all, exurban myth with no basis in fact.”

  He laughed but the laugh trailed abruptly off into silence.

  “Newton,” she said.

  “Listen, I must step out for a bit. Newton Xavier the saint manqué must head out into the night for a bit of solitude and leave this lovely room and lovely girl and whatever lovely thing he and the girl have been doing. He will take a small raincheck on the continuing saga of fornication amid catastrophe because he must, must, must catch up with his other life. He does have another, you know. Aren’t you hungry? It’s almost nine.”

  “Fuck off,” she said, once and then again, anger resonating softly in her voice. “I’ll cope up with my own mechanisms.”

  “You’re a new kind of Indian,” he said. “Your English skills are rather patchy but you are highly articulate nevertheless and there is even the flash of occasional verbal brilliance. Anyway. Goodbye, now.”

  She didn’t get out of bed; she fell asleep watching American news. There was a story about three interplanetary events that had occurred earlier that year. Some scientists had identified the largest dwarf planet in the solar system and named it Eris. She knew there was nothing dwarfish about a dwarf planet, and Eris was a large dwarf, which made it a giant. There were many undiscovered dwarf planets, so many that eventually when they were all mapped perhaps astronomers would change the term from dwarf planet to half-planet. A week after the discovery of Eris, the space probe Deep Impact was launched with the intention of colliding with a comet, or sending an impacter to collide with the comet. And two days after Deep Impact impacted the comet another probe landed on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. It had been a busy month for space exploration, which made her think of her father, an amateur astronomer and former schoolteacher who had reinvented himself as a liquor retailer. She fell asleep and dreamt of two great planets that had somehow come loose from their orbits. When she saw the white hole of space dust that resulted from the planets’ collision she whimpered so loudly that she woke herself up.

  She came out of the shower and patted herself dry. She took a chocolate from a box on the couch and took a small bite and wound a towel around her waist and picked up the phone, but she could not remember why. It was late; she knew he was not coming back. The thing she would not forget about the whole Xavier episode, recognising him at the shop, getting to know him, looking after him, was that he had not even bothered to come up with a new excuse. “Going out for cigarettes.” She put the phone down and heard a woman’s voice say something about a stampede at a temple in which more than three hundred people had died. She looked at the screen for a minute but she could make no sense of the images. A crowd surging against itself. The pictures she had seen, the crucifixions, the surgical procedure, the sunset, the monkey sex, the stampede, the deep space probes, they were all of a piece; and, as always, televised evidence of the world’s obsessions left her feeling grimy but untouched. It was all information and it was all the same.

  She found her clothes and put on a black T-shirt, which she tucked into belted chinos. She found her shoes under a comforter on the floor. She put the sari and the box of chocolates in her laptop case and left the hospital. They stopped her at the exit and made her sit in the lobby while they checked Xavier’s hospital bill. She was allowed to leave only after a senior administrator confirmed that they had his address and the hospital would contact a collection agency if necessary.

  At home she let herself in quietly because her father would be asleep. There was a note on the dining table. Her father’s handwriting was mostly unreadable, as if someone had pointed a gun to his head and told him to hurry; she had to guess at the meaning of the words. She understood that he had made patatas bravas and left a bowl for her. In the kitchen she took things out of the cabinet and the fridge one item at a time, feeling some pleasure as she handled spoon, plate, bowl, and jug, as if she had been away for weeks, though it had only been a day. She put the bowl into the oven and when it heated she put it on a tray and added a thick slice of bread from a box on the counter and a glass of cold lemonade and took it all to her room.

  While she waited for the dial-up connection on her computer she took off her eye make-up and changed into shorts. She ate watching her new favourite webcam star, a Japanese girl who ate enormous meals alone. Solitary eaters around the world tuned in to allyouwhoeatalone. com to watch the girl eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Today she was wearing bunny ears and a plain black dress with primly rounded white collars. She used a soup spoon and a pair of chopsticks to prepare a mouthful.

  When she was ready the girl held the spoon up to the camera and said, “Hey, would you like a bite of this delicious dumpling noodle soup? The ankake sauce gives it very nice flavour.”

  She slurped slightly and chewed a dumpling.

  “Yes,” Dharini said, taking a bite of her patatas bravas. “I would love to have some of your delicious dumpling noodle soup.”

  “Next we have this fried rice with meat sauce topping. When they call this a kaki sauce they mean I think sometimes oyster sauce.”

  She held up a spoon full of the meat sauce.

  “The sauce is packed full of so good stuff. It got bamboo and wood ear mushroom.”

  The subtitles were mixed up but Dharini read them carefully. As always the Japanese girl sat in front of a table full of dishes and floating captions informed the viewer about how many calories she would consume. Eighteen thousand. She took her time but she finished every bite and she did it with a smile on her pretty face, and though the meals she ate were enormous they never seemed to show on her person, she was slender and willowy, which made Dharini wonder if she threw up after each meal and if the vomiting was as much of a ritual as the eating. It did not matter. Nothing mattered except the hypnotised feeling that came over her when she watched the girl eat and the comfort she felt when they ate together. The Japanese girl’s meal would continue for at least two hours. Long after she had finished her own dinner she continued to watch and each time the girl took a bite of some raw fish or seaweed or pork, Dharini could taste the food in her mouth. After some time she began to feel uncomfortably full and she clicked off the channel and went to womenwhoweep.com. On the live cam two women held hands and
cried endless tears. Whenever one of them stopped crying she would look at her companion and the tears would start again. One of the women said, you who have lost loved ones, you who are alone in your grief, it is for you that we weep. Now, said the other woman, we will take a request. This is for Miss T who has lost her beloved dog. And the women started to cry again. I miss you, Coco, they said between sobs, oh, how I miss you. Dharini watched the two women until the last tear had dried. Then she stopped in at a Bollywood chat room where a personal message was waiting for her from a regular who called himself M-Thug. (His real name was Muzamil.) They made small talk about cricket and a newly released Bollywood comedy that starred Salman and Bipasha. The movie was full of innuendo and double entendres. M-Thug said even the name of the movie was a reference to doggy style or missionary. Of course it was, she said, so what? That didn’t make it a good name for a movie. They talked some more and then she shut the computer down and brushed her teeth and went to bed. She dreamt of her dead mother, Prasanna, and woke up giggling. She had a clear memory of her mother laughing in her dream, though she could not remember what she had been laughing about.

  When she came out dressed and ready to leave her father was reading the Hindoo and drinking a cup of coffee. It was a memory from the mornings of her childhood, summer heat swarming in the window, the neighbour’s dog barking, a big dog’s perplexed day-long bark, and she would come into the kitchen to the smell of South Indian coffee decoction, idlis, sambar and chutney on the table, and her parents sharing the newspaper before they went to their respective teaching jobs. She made toast and a boiled egg and noticed that Bhuvapathi, her father, seemed to be ageing in front of her eyes. Just yesterday his hair had been black and full. Now most of it was grey and he seemed smaller, as if he was shrinking from the inside.