The Book of Chocolate Saints

by Jeet Thayil

  Amrik Singh Dhillon, founder, Amrik Singh Dhillon Associates, interviewed by Dismas Bambai at the opening of 66, Gallery K. Hardesh, Chelsea, New York City, September 2003

  Newton called to say his friend had disappeared the night before and he’d gotten a call from Lenox Hill where the guy had been admitted with severe stomach pains. Could I meet him there? Doss was on a gurney near the emergency room, lying unattended in a corridor for twelve hours. He was relieved to see Newton, believe me. There was a woman with him, a Swiss woman who was taking care of him. She was the one who’d called. Doss had an inflamed gall bladder and he needed an operation, but he had no insurance. Newton motioned to me and we went to an ATM that was conveniently located in the lobby for just such an occasion, I’ll bet. He made a large withdrawal and we went to the cashier where he paid in advance and only then did they attend to Doss. He had not even been given a painkiller. American health care sucks, what else can you say about it?

  It was months afterwards that I saw a photo of Doss in an online review of the Hung Realist anthology. It turned out he was a well-known poet in Bombay and my premonition about him was correct, the premonition I had when I watched him drink vodka that morning. I heard he died on a railway station platform with an empty bottle near his feet.

  Doss’s story reminded me of another friend of Newton’s, a poet who had immigrated to Canada, Anglo-Indian guy by the name of Larry. According to Newton his career was similar in some ways to the French poet Arthur Rimbaud. Like the Frenchman he’d produced a body of work in extreme youth and then given up poetry and moved to a foreign land where he’d taken up a new career and died young. What a name for a poet. It always reminded me of a lawyer or Republican. Lawrence Bantleman.

  The year after all this happened there was an anniversary celebration for the Hung Realist anthology. I was working for Newton by then as agent and general consultant, I suppose you could call it. To tell you the truth business is the least of it. We hang out. The event was held at a bar in the East Village with a Russian name and a faded red velvet vibe. Mainly it was a conversation between four poets in the anthology, all of whom were currently living in the United States: obviously we couldn’t afford to fly anybody down. Afterwards Newton was signing copies and at the end of the line was a guy who had brought something for him, a manila envelope full of photos and photocopies of newspaper articles. He was a friend of Larry’s, though I got the feeling they were more than friends. Maybe lovers, maybe family, I don’t know. The guy was in tears. He’d come all the way to the East Village from god knows where to deliver the envelope. And the photos! Colour pictures of homeless guys, junkies, friendly down-and-outers in puffy jackets, craggy loners clustered around an apartment building in Vancouver in the winter. And there was a photo of a plaque on the building, the Bantleman Court Housing Society, “named in honour of Mr Lawrence Bantleman who devoted many years of his life to improve the quality of life of all who lived in our community”. According to the friend or lover, none of Larry’s colleagues knew that he had once been a poet.

  It struck me as an Indian story. A young poet publishes a few books before the age of twenty-five. The books disappear without a trace. There are no reviews and hardly any sales and the disappointed poet decides to change his vocation. He gives up writing and takes up drinking. He moves to another country where he works for the poor and dies too soon. Many years later a couple of poets publish an anthology that resurrects his memory. Sorry, my mistake, the last sentence should not be part of this story if it’s about an Indian poet. When those poets die there is no resurrection. They simply vanish, like Narayan Doss and Larry Bantleman. Having worked for Newton I guess I have a handle on those guys. Their poetic struggle was to survive the circumstances of the poetry.

  Rama Raoer, former professor of English Literature, Bombay University, interviewed by Dismas Bambai at Dolly Mansions, near Dadar Station, May 2005

  Didn’t you interview me more than twenty years ago about the same subject, Xavier and Doss? And didn’t you write a book about the poets of Bombay, a gossipy thriller type thing? Oh, I read it, of course I did. I couldn’t help myself. And now here you are again, planning an oral history of Xavier. I’m going to tell you something I should have told you the last time. I think you’re obsessed with Newton Francis Xavier, which makes you a footnote to a footnote and that is a sad thing. Do you understand? I think you suffer from a sick obsession. As for your questions, I will reply in the form of an anecdote. Last year I was travelling in the United States at the invitation of a publishing house that specialises in poetry in translation from around the world. It is now in its eighteenth year, so it isn’t doing too badly. I asked the publisher if he had heard of the Bombay poets, Nissim Ezekiel, say, or Dom Moraes, or Newton Xavier, or Narayan Doss, or Eunice de Souza, or Adil Jussawalla, or Dilip Chitre, or Namdeo Dhasal, or Arundhathi Subramaniam, or Ranjit Hoskote, or, well, I won’t bore you and myself with the entire list. Do you know what he told me? He said the only Indian poet he had heard of was Arun Kolatkar. I said something about how strange that was, considering the poets I mentioned wrote in English and had each produced a substantial body of work. He said it was possible that he had not heard of them precisely because they wrote in English, after all his area of expertise was poetry translated into English. But did he not specialise in poetry from all over the world, I asked, and was he saying that if someone were to translate the work of these poets into Marathi or Bulgarian or Roma and then translate it back into English there would be more of a chance that he would be interested? He said I had made an interesting proposition but only in a theoretical sense, as it did not carry much traction – this was the word he used, as if he was a marketing professional or orthopaedic doctor – it had no traction, he said, in the practical world. He said he did not wish to be combative but wasn’t it true that if these poets were as significant as I thought they were he would have heard of them? This was New York, he said, the centre of the wide world of publishing. Do you know what I did? I thanked the man who had dismissed my history and my milieu with a single sentence. I did not say what was on my mind, that he and his colleagues were fighting cancer with a Band-Aid, that they were arranging deck chairs on the Titanic and they were not even aware that the ship was sinking. I simply thanked him and shook his hand. And now I’ll thank you and if you don’t mind I’ll skip the handshake and ask you not to contact me again.

  Zusi Krass, writer and translator, interviewed by Dismas Bambai at Shamiana Coffee Shop, Taj Mahal Hotel, Bombay, March 2005

  I decided I would never go back to Bombay because I didn’t want to return to the scene of my early turmoil and by that I mean Narayan Doss, who I think of always as my black angel. Even today if sometimes I pray, I pray to him. I say, my black angel of Kamathipura, spread your sharp wings over me. Also, there were one or two small episodes of mental flux that struck me in the city that never weeps, the heartless city of Bombay, some voices I heard, a woman’s voice and the terrible thing she said, unpleasant experiences, bitter memories, and so I thought Bombay was over for me. My black angel had gone and my Indian journey was over and after all there are other places in the world, St Petersburg and Mexico City and Saigon. Why Bombay? I decided I would never go there again. And then a guiding voice boomed in my ear. Zusi, never say never! And of course I returned a year and a half ago because my book of translations appeared at last.

  The publisher sent review copies to Indian journals and newspapers but no distributor accepted it because of the price, a prohibitive price for poetry readers, most of whom have no spare change, as you know. There was some interest in the book and some favourable reviews, though one young fool said the poetry in Narayan’s work had been found in translation. I wrote to Nissim Ezekiel and asked if he would host a reading at the PEN Centre. He agreed even if I got the feeling that he didn’t remember me. Why would he? It had been a long time since my last visit to India. I convinced my publisher to give me some copies on author’s discount and I too
k them with me. When I met Nissim I knew immediately that he was a shadow of his old self, not even a shadow, a shadow of a shadow, a white shade that passed at times over the wire-rimmed glasses and the shamed accusing eyes. I knew it was the wing of madness. It resembled the confusion some call Alzheimer’s but I knew it was the same wing and the same shadow I have suffered under.

  Naturally I had no great expectations for the event. A handful of people at the most, I thought, considering Nissim’s advanced state of disinterest and my lack of experience in organising a literary event. And then, a surprise! Forty or forty-five people came, many carrying copies of the Hung Realist anthology. The hall filled up and some had to stand at the back near the glass cabinets where the rare books were displayed. Nissim made a small and unexpectedly lucid speech. The Marathi script, he said, was denser than the English because the overhangs and underhangs took up more space. Then, without explanation, he said, “Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming Miss Susie Strauss.” I didn’t bother correcting him and I didn’t really mind the mistake. What difference did it make, Zusi or Susie, Krass or Strauss? And I remembered a story Narayan told me. When William Golding came to Bombay to deliver a lecture Nissim had introduced him as William Goldman. If it didn’t bother Golding why should it bother Krass? I read some poems and a protégé of Nissim’s read the originals in Marathi. Then I said a few words about Narayan Doss. I said that he had had two simultaneous and overlapping careers, one in English and one in Marathi, and that he had never combined the two even though he had been quite capable of translating his own poems from one language to the other. I said my book was an opening salvo in that project and I hoped there would be more. There were questions from the audience and really they weren’t questions but expositions in the French sense. The first person to speak said Dalit poetry was superior to Dalit fiction and the assertion dropped into the room and sank without so much as a ripple. A man in a frayed kurta with the wild look of a homeless person or homeless poet explained (in English) why modernism came to Marathi before it came to the other languages of India, particularly English. Someone stood up and disputed this notion. It turned out the man with the wild look in his eyes was a reputed publisher and his interlocutor was a young poet and the dispute was long-standing. Afterwards a line of people appeared in front of me. They wanted me to sign copies of the anthology, which of course I said I would not do. How could I sign a book I had not translated or written? No, no. A student asked where she could find a copy of the Narayan Doss translations. Could she send away for it? I told her the price in dollars and she asked if she could borrow my copy for a day. She said she wanted to photocopy it. I remembered something Narayan had told me, that in the early days the Bombay poets used to cyclostyle copies of their books to distribute to friends. It was the only way they were able to read each other’s work. Of course I lent the girl a copy, and after thinking about it for a minute, or a second, I told her she could keep it.

  Afterwards I gathered my book bag and prepared to walk back to the YWCA where I’d managed to reserve my old room. I noticed that Nissim was still sitting in his chair on the podium. He hadn’t left the seat all evening, nodding to himself as if he was in the midst of a great debate. By then the audience had left and we were alone in the dusty room full of old books and smeared photographs of dead writers. He looked at me as if his thoughts were far away, on a frozen field in the north of Germany or in the farthest icy reaches of hell. I asked if he would like to have a cup of coffee and I expected him to make excuses. He agreed immediately and when he got up he was his old self, confident and thoughtful, his pale intellectual face alert to everything. We went to a South Indian place across the street from PEN, a place Nissim had been to a thousand times. I signalled for coffee and asked if he would like something to eat. He ordered a dosa and so did I. While we waited for the food I noticed that the cuffs of his shirt were caked with black dirt and his collar too was dirty, more than dirty, filthy, and his trousers were frayed and shiny, as if he owned no other clothes. He looked like someone who slept on the streets of the city, this man who was admired as the father of English poetry in India, who for many years had been its face, and a handsome face at that! Where was his family, his long-suffering wife? It was all too heartbreaking to consider. We talked about the new politics in the country, about how much the city had changed and how the Anglophone Bombay of the seventies had turned into its evil twin. We discussed the meaning of his name. He said the Lord called Ezekiel as a watchman and prophet to the rebellious House of Israel, and Ezekiel predicted for Israel a future of war, and the Lord gave him a scroll and commanded him to be not rebellious and to eat and fill his belly, and when he ate it was in his mouth as of honey for sweetness. We talked about poetry. He had just finished proofreading a new edition of his collected poems and there was a new edition of Dom Moraes expected and two books by Arun Kolatkar – all this in the same year. Then he started to talk about Bombay and water, the catastrophic effect of the ocean on peoples and coastlines, and the future of cities by the sea. He had never feared the sea around Bombay, he said. Salt water was a part of the landscape. It gave the city meaning and it destroyed the city too. You could see its effects all around you. No sooner was a building painted than the sea would begin its corrosion. We had more coffee. I asked for the bill and paid and it struck me then that he had no money. It was plain to see in the skeletal cast of his face and in the expressions of the waiters. As we left the restaurant, I to the YWCA and Nissim to where I don’t know, I asked if he was in need of money. He shook his head. He had more than enough for his needs, he told me. I insisted. I gave him whatever notes I had on my person. Then I said goodbye and left him on a sidestreet near Churchgate Station. At the end of the street as I turned left toward the telegraph office, I looked around. He was on the corner where I left him, surrounded by beggar children who grabbed at the currency notes he was handing out, the very notes I had just given him. What struck me was the smile on his face. He looked so happy.

  BOOK SIX

  Alien of Extraordinary Ability

  Saint Goody

  or Gudiya, or the Goods, or Ms Lol,

  whose forgiveness I do not deserve;

  first passion, and then its passing, all

  was decreed by the Summoner of love,

  all that we are, all whom we fail,

  all that we in the end must leave.

  from The Book of Chocolate Saints: Poems (Unpublished)

  1.

  They took a train from Bangalore to Delhi because (Goody complained) he’d rather spend days traversing the dust plains of Central India than sit in an air-controlled aeroplane for two and one half hours. He was sixty-six, he replied, a senior citizen entitled to his sweet maladies. Goody made a production of stocking up on drawing paper and magazines and postcards she’d been meaning to write. She charged her camera and cell phone. She packed moisturiser and hand sanitiser into Ziploc bags. The trip to Delhi was forty hours if the train was on time. If delayed they were up for a two-day stretch. But Xavier was happy not to fly. He said boredom was akin to happiness because it described the absence of crisis. After the calamitous events of the recent past – the booze; the hospital and his escape from it; his return to the Infantry Road apartment to find Goody with her suitcases packed, waiting by the front door for a taxi, which sight had heralded his unravelling because he could not imagine being without her; the wild promises he made, he would relearn the sober life, he would take his medication and take better care of her and they would move to Delhi; his promises, her tearful declaration that she had said she would leave and she had to keep to her word, his shaky avowals, their raised voices, a drama that had played until dawn – after all that here they were, with nothing expected of them but to stay on the train like packages waiting to be delivered.