by Jeet Thayil
“As if I could stop you.”
“Right. Why are you lot so preoccupied with masturbation? Somewhat childish, don’t you think? Excuse me. Bartender, two more Purple Mandragoras.”
“What do the stories have in common?”
“Cruelty, the twin of boredom.”
“I think you answered the question as to whether you’re having fun. What else?”
*
He said: the mindful killings, that which was then, this which is now, the self-murderers, the dogs of instruction, the teachers, the torturers, the ennui sold as spirit food, the cyclic insurrection of the will, the red leaf sap of tomorrow, the old toads of fervour and patriotism, the renegade eels, the death’s head moths, the spastic drool of words, the succubus in the shape of a child bride, the infant’s wild goat cries, the mother’s curse, the broken sea shanties, the one-celled spasm, the premonitions of the crow, the immortal armoured cockroach, the unrenewable planet Teegeeack, the northern haar’s thin tempests, the blood nozzle, the sleep abortions worse than waking, the artery spout sold as art, the multiple hunter’s moons, the tree virgins’ song of succour, the angular nymphs of paradise, the rapist in the family, the illegal migrant youth, the tubercular smell of poverty, the hymen smears on hemp, the midnight screes, the unilluminati, the ti guinin, the gris gris, the coco konkon, the serried enemy encampments, the precipitous inducements, the staged ferocities, the prayerful lords of mayhem, the fleet angels of misrule, the black arts or kala kalaa, Theos the rainmaker, the sick ships trailed by phosphorescence, the white plague rats, the frozen, the furious, the plundered, the numb, the suicide’s retched tongue, the shamed archer’s lost thumbs, the sea’s sucked bile, the slop buckets of fortune, the reptile skull, the feast liver, the starhead nails embedded in his breastbone, the entrail filth of mortal birth, the malaria kiss upon waking, the spouse who waits, the wine dark, the decking fitted to ribs, the long gunwales of longing, the interlocked joints, the black ship’s blue prow, the white sails, the halyards, the braces, the sheets, the white-armed woman, the leather sacks of barley, the mill-crushed grain, the water skins, the mixing bowls of true wine, the Wain Harrow, the Bear always to his left, the eye holes shaped like ears, the craven foetus underfoot, the bliss sale, the adulterated habit-forming poisons, the absent cave fathers, the prideful lobotomists, the no gnomes, the trickster, the raven, the white-faced bear, the rattlesnake husband, the coyote dances, the first woman’s twinned twins, the hummingbird’s fearful trembling, the hero disguised as demon, the demon disguised as angel, the angel disguised as human, the dumb instruments of no change, the catastrophes, the misfortunes, the false feasts, the friends felled in battle, the unending books of the dead, the libations to the dead, the mist-wrapped rivers of ocean, the sixth of seven oceans, the sea of milk, the second son tied to a stake, the sons exchanged for cows, the three-headed son whose middle head sips liquor, the temptation disguised as birdsong, the creator for whom no temple is built, the god disguised as nymph boar manlion dwarf, the thousand years of prayer and penance, the air for food, the standing on one leg, the cunning supplicant, the vengeful sage, the outcaste curse, the horse sacrifice, the horse stratagem, the fever born of the great god’s anger, the vow, the silence, the boon, the desert loo, the ticking heart of empires, the stumble fugues, the eaters of paper, the insect brain in wait, the nocturnal machinery of dismay, the committed whoredoms, the whoring after the heathen, the bruised breasts of virginity, the multiplied fornications, the broken wedlock, the shed blood in fury of jealousy, the prophets of vanity who see nothing, the lying divinations, the filled cup of astonishment and desolation, the old hatreds, the furious rebukes, the warm rivers of blood, the frogs, the pestilence, the lice, the flies, the festering skin eruptions, the rain of hail, the locusts, the darkness that can be touched, the deaths of the firstborn, the blood cities, the untempered mortar daub, the abominations of the fathers, the high tree brought down, the low tree exalted, the green tree dried up, the dry tree made to flourish, the abundance as long as the moon endures, the darling delivered from the power of the dog, the old men full of days, the remembrance of things to come, the aleph, the beth, the gimel, the divided tongue that walks in the world, the fool clothed with skin and flesh, the fool fenced with bone and sinew, the scent of water, the genealogy that is not to be reckoned, the sacrificial bull, the ram, the heifer, the calf, the thigh bones wrapped in fat, the forty days and forty nights, the flood, the ark of the horned fish, the dismantling of venerable archetypes, the bulbous protuberance, the carven substitute, the atrocities disguised as reason, the lost hallucinate prophecies of a race, all that is ruthless, solitary, and inseparable from insanity.
I’ve forgotten some of it but you get the idea. You get the endless murderous drift of the conversation. Then the writer said, and now I must be off, I have a chapter to finish. I’ll see you again I’m sure. Then he picked up his cane and walked away. I noticed he was steady on his feet, absolutely steady. How could he be so unmoved when my own world had ended?
But I heard the message and I took it to heart. My son was in danger. In his anger and wisdom the writer known as God had told me what to do. I must take matters into my own capable doctor’s hands as I had always done. That is why I had picked up the knife all those years ago. I wanted to save my son. I wanted to keep him safe from harm. And so I knew I had to return to the asylum and the company of my lunatics. And here I shall stay. Tell him that.
T. J. S. George, author and editor, interviewed by Dismas Bambai in Palace Orchards, Bangalore, September 2006
When I think about it now what strikes me about the whole unlikely story is how much of a role chance played in the way it unfolded. It strikes me too that Newton was a magnet for chaos and magic and he seemed to invite these kinds of unlikely occurrences. I was editing a newspaper in those days, the summer of 2003, and one morning I received a phone call on my personal line. Somehow the caller had managed to get past the switchboard. He said he had been trying to contact Newton Xavier and somebody said I might be able to help. I wrote a Sunday editor’s column, ‘Memory’s Parade’, in which I’d described meeting Newton and his father. Frank and I had known each other in Bombay in the fifties when we were both active in different ways in journalism, and I’d known Newton from the days when he was writing cricket commentary. It was elegant commentary for a teenager, or a writer of any age. Years later we were employed by the United Nations at the same time and we renewed our friendship. I mentioned all this in my column, which the caller or a friend of his had seen. He wanted to know if I was still in touch with Newton and his father. He didn’t know that Frank had died soon after the Emergency of a heart attack, exactly the thing that took Newton some thirty years later at around the same age. Strange, is it not, how our longevity or lack thereof seems to be wired into our genes? I told the caller that I might be able to find a contact number for Newton and then I asked the man his name. He said he was the superintendent of the Institute of Mental Health in Bangalore and that Beryl Xavier, Newton’s mother, had died there the day before. I was distressed to hear this because I had had no idea that she was living in Bangalore, not so far from my own home. If I had known, my wife and I would have visited her. What, I asked, was the cause of death? In an apologetic voice the superintendent explained that she had stopped eating and this had led to heart failure. He said Beryl owed the institute a certain sum of money and they were unable to release the body until the dues had been paid. It was a question of procedure. Further complicating matters was the fact that there had been a power failure at the institute and it was the height of Bangalore’s summer. You see, the morgue at the institute was somewhat basic and the refrigeration wasn’t working. There was the question of a health risk. Could I contact Mr Xavier and ask him to claim his mother’s body at the earliest? I agreed without hesitation. I put a reporter on it and she found a telephone number for Newton, who, it so happened, was in Delhi on one of his annual Indian visits. It was around noon when I called. I
have bad news, Newton, I said. He took it well or I think he took it well. He is not one whose emotions are immediately apparent. He thanked me and said he would make arrangements. I think he spent the afternoon trying to book a flight. When he got to the institute it was very late and then he had to wait until dawn to take the body to a crematorium. I learned all this from my reporter, not Newton, who returned to Delhi without getting in touch. I think he was embarrassed by the whole episode and I don’t see why. Years later I saw poems by him in a magazine, his first poems in twenty years. There was a sonnet about his mother, about how much the body stank, forgive me, mummy, staring down from your heavenly asylum, and so on. Disturbing work, not for the faint of heart or stomach. And sad too, I mean, why was the son asking forgiveness? Considering her history of violence should not forgiveness have travelled from child to parent? In about a dozen lines he encapsulated mothers and sons, and madness, and the loss of a parent, and the corruption that is death. More than a sense of loss it was repulsion that the poem conveyed. But I’m a journalist, I’m no interpreter of poetry, thank god. Please don’t take me at my word. Read for yourself.
Manoj Patel, artist, member of Progressive Autists Group, interviewed by Dismas Bambai at Pocket 17, Artists’ Colony, New Delhi, October 2005
I went through that phase. I tried to give it up for the usual reasons, fear being foremost. That morning I was sketching around the idea for a painting. (I do this thing when I’m stuck, automatic hand exercises where I let my fingers move with no interference from the mind.) I drew a paper cup and then I started to fill it with ash. I thought if I completed the sketch I wouldn’t want to smoke. But I did, I still wanted to smoke and I thought it would help to get out of the house. Newton was in town, staying in Chattarpur, of all places, at the house of a mutual friend. I asked my assistant to drive me there. You go past the metro station and take a left after a building called the World Centre for Energy and Consciousness – where do they get these names? – which looks like a cross between a cowshed and a spa. When we left the main road it felt like we had entered a forest. The house was behind a high wall. We parked and Newton came out to meet us and I told him I was trying to stop smoking. I told him about the drawing of ash in a paper cup. He laughed and offered me a cigarette and of course I accepted and of course it disgusted me. I felt like taking a shower but I smoked the cigarette to the end. My assistant was not happy. She likes to mother me. You know how conservative the young can be. Watching me smoke had made her go long in the face and to lighten the mood I told Newton, this is my assistant, Sonakshi. Isn’t she beautiful? He said, I only know beautiful when I paint it nude. Sonakshi recovered quickly. She said, in that case you will never know if I am beautiful. I said, this is why I like this girl. Newton said he liked her too. He laughed and I laughed and after some time Sonakshi also laughed. We laughed and smoked and just then there was a call on the landline from Bangalore. Newton’s mother had died. And I thought, yes, this is how it was with Newton. Laughter followed by tears. We spent the rest of the day getting him a seat on the night flight to Bangalore and then we dropped him to the airport. Sonakshi packed his case because he doesn’t know how to pack. He does not know how to pack and he does not know how to fly. We stopped at a pharmacy I know, where I picked up a strip of Anxit and a strip of Valium-10. He said he would take one Anxit and one Valium for each hour of the flight, meaning he would take seven pills in all. As I watched him walk to the departure gate I noticed he had the shuffle of an old man, and I worried for him, and for myself, and for all those who offer themselves to the most insatiable of the gods. I mean goddess, the insatiable goddess of art and sacrifice, Saraswati become Kali. Sonakshi too watched Xavier as he shuffled into the terminal and searched his pockets for cigarettes or identification documents or anxiety medication. Poor old man, she said. Poor, poor man. Save your pity, I told her. Pity is wasted on the pitiless. Then I parked at the first shop on the Ring Road and picked up a packet of Gold Flakes and a Clipper lighter. This time I didn’t want a shower, I enjoyed it.
Zusi Krass, writer and translator, interviewed by Dismas Bambai at the Shamiana Coffee Shop, Taj Mahal Hotel, Bombay, March 2005
I went to California on family business but I was nervous, so nervous. They have the death penalty there, you know. The Swiss abolished capital punishment in the forties. We evolved before the rest of the world. Do you know Switzerland has separated and recycled trash since the mid-seventies? Long before you people knew, we knew. The future depends on garbage. Imagine a Swiss woman in California where the death penalty is still in effect. Imagine her state of mind and the crisis she must negotiate. To put it plainly, it made me crazy and I walked around a lot. This is how I deal with anxiety, I am centred by the rote physicality of one step following the other, the meditative quality of it, you know? I walk around aimlessly but purposefully, as if I’m going somewhere. I don’t want it to look like I’m drifting or they’ll be on me in a second.
And so I was out one evening walking around. It had been a couple of hours and I didn’t know where I was, some quiet part of town, and I don’t know how it happened but I tripped over my own feet. I looked down at my toes encased in sensible Swiss sandals and I was thinking to myself that I liked the look of my sandalled feet navigating the sidewalks of America – and I fell over and hurt my elbow. I was bleeding but I got up right away. I didn’t want to take a risk. What if someone saw? They’d be on me. It was a long American street, endless in both directions, an endless stream of cars and I was the only pedestrian. All the people driving saw me fall. They were so surprised to see me get up bleeding but nobody stopped to help. I’m the only pedestrian, bleeding on a road in California, and nobody stopped because of the death penalty.
The linearity of it was clear to me. It was something I thought about a lot when I was there, that they put a person to death as if it is a normal facet of civilised life when actually it is the exact opposite, it is a remnant of the barbaric life. The government brings the entire force of its administrative, bureaucratic, and legalistic might to kill a man, which, as we know, is not an easy thing to do, the spark is not easy to extinguish.
I thought about it as I was walking or limping along and I thought how badly I needed a coffee, but the pedestrian walkway was narrow and then it disappeared into the freeway or highway or whatever they call it. Finally I scrambled down a small hillside to an even quieter street where I tried to hail a taxi. There were no taxis. I could not believe it! I was in a city, and not just any city, I was in Hollywood, and there were no taxis, no pedestrians, no shops, nothing, just cars zipping by all day and all night. Is that any way to live?
I walked and walked. It felt like I’d been walking for miles and by then it was dark and I could hear the animals in the brush. I heard a wolfhound or vampire, a long howl on a moonless night, and that scramble of paws, enough to set anybody’s heart a-thumping. By now I really needed a coffee. I was bleeding and shook up and I needed to calm down. Plus, I was so thirsty I could have cried. Just as I was reaching the end of my patience, my superhuman patience, I saw a pop-up-storefront-on-the-street type of gin joint, just without the gin. I tried to compose myself. I tidied my hair as best I could, after those hours in the carbon monoxide I must have looked a fright. I patted down my hair and smoothed my dress and went to the counter and asked the man for an espresso. I thought I’d have an espresso to start, followed by a flat white and then I’d feel human again. The guy behind the counter gave me coffee ice cream because he thought that was what I had ordered. Turned out, they served only ice cream. The only place open on that entire stretch of California freeway or highway or sidestreet, the only sign of life for miles, and all they served was ice cream. You know what I did? I ate it. You know why I ate it? Because they have the death penalty in California. What else was I going to do? I ate the whole bowl of American ice cream and with every bite I wished I was sipping hot coffee and it occurred to me that I had not had a decent espresso since I had landed in the damn
ed sunshine state.
All of a sudden I realised I truly disliked everything about California. I couldn’t stand it. The pruned palm trees, the million cars, the lack of pedestrians, the permanent sunshine, the shorts and slippers, the perky cheery upbeat fucking bonhomie. California. I knew in my heart it was a travesty of the true essence, the opposite of joy. Not only because of the cars and carbon and diner coffee and capital punishment. The thing I most could not stomach was their regressive policy regarding zoophiliacs. I want to ask them, is it not backward to legislate love? How primitive must a mind be to tell another mind what is allowed and what is not in the realm of the tender emotions? In California if your boyfriend is a dolphin or a seal you are breaking the law. They prosecute you if you love a non-human species. They prosecute zoophiliacs everywhere in America except Colorado, which may be a reason to live in that godforsaken place. But I was born in Zurich, first in order of precedence of the cantons of Switzerland. I cannot live in Colorado. I was thinking about these layers of complexity and I gave myself a fever. I’m eating the terrible coffee ice cream with a false fever from nerves and I’m thinking, I need to get out of here.