The Book of Chocolate Saints

by Jeet Thayil

  Early on the morning of the second day the train passed a field of sunflowers and yellow mustard plants tall in the sun. He felt the colours seep into his brain like ink. Purnima saw his eyes fixed on the flowers and offered a penny for his thoughts. They were the only ones awake.

  “A penny,” he said. “No more, no less?”

  “A pound, a pound for your thoughts.”

  “Rothko,” he said. “Saint Markus. I wonder how he would have responded to the immovable object that is India if by some chance he’d visited here in the last years of his life. It might have been a good thing or it might have been the death of him. And why am I saying this as if I have some definite prior knowledge? Because I do, I do have prior knowledge. I stopped over to see him before he died. He was under house arrest by his doctors but he took care not to mention it. He seemed happy to see me and this struck me as strange because he was not a happy man. He had no aptitude for happiness, which is a gift like any other, a skill that can be developed or neglected according to one’s temperament. Mr Rothko set no stock by happiness. It was not a quality to which he accorded any kind of value, negative or positive. He saw no artistic potential in it, I suppose. Moreover, he was the lifelong exile, the permanent immigrant. In his head he was still the ten-year-old Russian boy newly arrived in a hostile land. So when I saw him smiling I should have known something was wrong. I’d never before seen him smile or heard him laugh, not once in all those years. But here he was in his slippers, shuffling like an old man or a much older man than he was at the time. He kept trying to light a cigarette but his hands wouldn’t work. Finally he said, could you do me a little favour, please, Newton? I haven’t been to the bank, not feeling up to going out at the moment, nothing serious, just old man’s woes. Could you nip down to Garnet’s and pick up a bottle of vodka for me, and some cigarettes? Actually make it two bottles and save me a trip. This is Mark Rothko, my old friend and mentor. The man who introduced me to the art world of Manhattan, whose homes were a haven to me when I had no home, who taught me that it was possible to drink and be disciplined at one and the same time. What was I going to say? No? I didn’t know that his doctor had said that a binge at this point in his life was just the same as stepping in front of a train or jumping off a building – a little like my own condition at the moment, if you see what I mean. After he died there was a joke going around town, a New York art world joke, which is to say the kind of joke resorted to by soldiers, doctors, undertakers, and thieves. They nicknamed me The Man Who Killed Rothko. They said it was the vodka I gave him that did him in. Not true. What did him in was old age, according to his own insightful analysis, what did him in was the suspicion that his best was behind him and all that was left was a kind of creeping obsolescence that gets worse by the hour.”

  Purnima said, “I knew something like this is what you would say.”

  They stopped at a station named Daund. It was still early and the platform was deserted but for a pair of sadhus. The older man had a cottonwool beard that corkscrewed to his collarbone. He was winding a turban around his head. One foot was drawn up under him on the bench and slowly he shaped the white cloth to his skull. His companion’s kurta and mirrored vest and lungi were shades of saffron that varied subtly in texture and hue. Producing a hand mirror from a saffron shoulder bag he combed his beard with his free hand and used the mirror to check the underside of his beard, the back of his turban, and the malas looped around his neck. Critically and thoroughly he examined himself. As a last touch he pulled loose a lock of black hair from under the turban and adjusted it over his ear. Now he was ready. He put the mirror into a quilted cloth case and returned it to the bag. When he smiled to himself Xavier experienced a moment of transference. To step out of his life and into the sadhu’s, to sit on a bench in the sun and groom oneself like a cat, consciousness without self-consciousness, wholly free of everything but the body and the pleasure of the moment. How much better than his own tight life!

  Agra Cant went past. The train slowed but didn’t stop and Xavier said, why can’t Agra? If Delhi can, surely Agra can too? Purnima covered her mouth with her hand when she laughed. He imagined setting up house with her in a middle-class dwelling of one or two rooms. She would wake at four to bathe. She would put on a fresh sari and go into the kitchen where she’d contentedly stay for hours making idlis, coconut chutney, filter coffee, and Saraswat sambar. He would not be expected to make an appearance until brunch. He would never enter the kitchen. It would be understood that he was incapable of making a cup of tea. Lunch would be early, rice and curd a staple, after lunch, a nap. Their sex would be furtive and silent, the quick coupling of married Indians accomplished with a minimum of fuss. She would not expect foreplay, much less an orgasm. On festival days he would buy her a sari or a gold bangle and she would shed tears of joy. The happiness would keep her going for weeks. When would he work? All day and all night, the household would revolve around his work and he would be energised by the newness of it all. What would it not do to his output? He was visioning a pile of manuscript pages and vast arrays of fresh canvases when Purnima’s daughter descended from her bunk and went to the toilet without a glance in his direction. He waited five slow minutes before he excused himself. The girl was waiting in the corridor. She put a piece of folded notepaper in his hand and squeezed his crotch so knowingly it made his heart race. Then she hurried off. She’d written her phone number, no name, just the number and the words ‘call me’. He put the note away; his hands were shaking.

  They had stopped at a small station called Bhooteshwar – Place of Ghosts, Xavier said automatically to himself – and there were no people, no dogs, no sign of life until the train started to move and he caught sight of a man painting a railroad buggy. The wheels were chilli red and the buggy bright blue, violent bits of colour against the blank grey day. The train passed shanties built on the side of the tracks, toxic slum clusters and caved-in dwellings constructed from detritus. Children played kith kith in the dust. Even the fields were covered with plastic rubbish and sewage. A woman sat with her sari around her hips and her back to the train for modesty. A tin of water stood beside her and she chatted to another woman who sifted through the rubble. What was the second woman looking for? Blasted brown fields stretched on every side. Small bodies of water thick with green slime or black, liquid matter turned solid.

  Poverty, filth, distress: they were in the north, arrived at last in the Republic of Rape. Purnima, Anand, and the daughter had lapsed into silence. Goody was still asleep. He felt strangely protective of this impromptu family.

  They were nearing Delhi, he knew, because the train had slowed and the debris and disarray had increased. They passed shrines to nothing in the middle of nothing, Muslim shrines with no indication they were living places of worship. A single stunted tree was the only thing upright on a long stretch of rocky scrub. Two men were seated against the trunk. They had positioned themselves carefully to make use of the slender shade. Others, without the strength to look for shade, lay splayed as if felled by sniper fire. Soon the flat-roofed one-room structures gave way to corrugated tin shacks and tarpaulin weighed down with broken bricks; mounds of garbage spread evenly over vast open areas; excrement and children and starved maimed dogs.

  The train pulled in to New Delhi railway station and on the platform they said goodbye to the Saraswats. Goody gave Purnima an invitation to Xavier’s party, a card with a time, an address, and 66 in embossed numerals. Outside they settled their suitcases into the back of a taxi. In a pocket Xavier found the notepaper given to him by Purnima’s daughter and he let it fall to the floor of the car. It was late in the afternoon and the air was dry with a hint of smoke; anything seemed possible in the mild sunshine, even hope.

  *

  The taxi took them to the house of a journalist Goody knew from her time in the city. Paro took immediate charge. They were to rest from their travels and familiarise themselves with the city while she found them an apartment to rent. For now they had
a guest room facing a stand of frangipani trees and Paro threw a small party that she called a get-together.

  It was the time of tsunamis and bombs.

  The day before three explosions had occurred in the city’s most populous shopping district and in the news photos Goody noted, as always, the women’s shoes and slippers strewn over the bombsite.

  “So there are monuments in Delhi, so what?” a transplanted Bombayite told Goody.

  The woman had moved to Delhi when she married. She’d been a professional party-thrower in Bombay, a job she called event management. She was still throwing parties but for a classier crowd.

  “If every second fool made a monument to himself in Bombay we’d also have thousands of them. I moved here because, what, capital city, has to be more secure, right? Wrong! You’re out buying jeans, which, just remember, you’re buying cheap jeans, and dishoom you wake up legless in a hospital.”

  “How long have you been here?”

  “Let’s see, eight, no, nine years. My god, has it already been that long? I think I need another gin-tonic.”

  “Nine years and you still sound like a Bombayite.”

  “Darling, I hope I never sound like a Dilliwalli.”

  Goody heard this a lot, how awful the city was, how inhospitable, how unsafe for women. But Delhi was her town. It was where she had grown up and where she returned after she left London and she wanted to show it off to Xavier.

  People filled their plates with samosas, kebabs, and paneer on skewers. They sipped punch from shot glasses and gossiped about the Gandhis.

  It was the time of tsunamis and bombs.

  “Paharganj, Govindpuri, Sarojini Nagar,” said Sonia Grover, a lawyer who knew more secrets about politicians and industrialists than most journalists. She was a friend of Goody’s mother. “See what places they target. Markets where the middle class and the working class do their Diwali shopping. Why not pick on the rich?”

  “I’m sure they will,” said Goody.

  “Not that I’m complaining but pick on someone your own size, you get me?”

  “I get you, but it’s penis size that’s the real problem. The bombs, the rage, the religious screeching, all that is compensation.”

  “You’re a woman now. I remember you as a schoolgirl. How temperamental you were, endearingly anti-social. Your mother didn’t know what to do with you.”

  “That may be the perfect epitaph for me. Her mother didn’t know what to do with her and neither did she. And you know what, I think I might be a little anti-social still.”

  “You artistic types,” said Sonia. “What can I say?”

  She patted her hair and downed a shot of punch. Immediately Paro brought around a tray of glasses filled to the brim and Sonia took another. She shook Goody’s hand in a businesslike way and went to a group of men smoking on the balcony.

  Goody found Xavier in the bedroom, alone, staring at the only decoration on the walls, a poster of Gauguin’s Jacob wrestling with a yellow-winged angel on a flat ground of vivid red. It wasn’t the wrestlers he was looking at, but the peasant women in the foreground. He seemed entranced.

  “No,” he said, his eyes on the poster. “I think, I don’t think I can go out there. I have nothing to say. I’m dry as a bone. I want a shared spiritual experience not a wrestling match.”

  She made excuses to the guests. He was train-weary and crotchety, she said. Coming down with something, Delhi belly, maybe, or chikungunya or dengue. Who knows? He’ll be out at some point, I’m sure. Best to just let him be.

  But he did not come out. He stayed in the room until long after the last of them had left. He was doing nothing, as far as she could see, other than staring at the Gauguin, the peasant women in their white bonnets sharing some kind of religious experience, yes, their eyes shut and hands folded in prayer, their great pale heads lovingly detailed in comparison to the indistinct figures of Jacob and the angel.

  Their arrival in the city coincided with a downturn or upturn in Xavier’s condition. With the medication taking hold he was no longer excitable. Sometimes she missed his manic phase. Was it better for him to be energised and falling for a procession of young women, or depressed and not producing? Undoubtedly the former but it made him unmanageable.

  To get him out of the house she rented a car and they went to the Q’utb Minar. They kept the driver waiting and walked toward the structure, which was roofed and pillared but open on all sides. At the centre was a narrow tomb of faded marble. The Q’utb’s lack of doors and oversight had extracted a price. Names had been scratched into the tomb. There was graffiti on the walls and grillework. There were lists of all kinds.

  Ronita I love you.

  Kuldeep I love you.

  Neha loves herself.

  I love you Kavita but you don’t love me Bhola.

  Deepak, Neetu, Dhiraj I love you.

  Dial 36219837 and enjoy.

  And at the end of these oddly promissory slogans was one in the past tense. Mansoor loved Afsana.

  “Love,” Goody said.

  “This was once the tallest tower in ancient India,” said Xavier, who had perked up in the presence of ancient buildings. “The strict lines and clean shape? It’s the Muslim architectural line, human separated from divine and only the divine worthy of consecration.”

  “Do you think we’ll learn to love each other again?”

  Without waiting for a reply, she walked ahead to a television monitor. For twenty rupees it gave you the view from a video camera attached to the top of the Q’utb. They were close enough to the tower to see the fine work on its upper storeys, the marble and red sandstone, but the monitor showed live action footage of the unexceptional buildings nearby. Goody saw a sign: Remote Presence Facilitation System. Such a grand name for a camera pointed the wrong way. When they reached the Quwwatul adjacent to the Q’utb she felt a little faint, like a woman in a nineteenth-century novel. The words ‘smelling salts’ came into her head, though it was water she wanted. The question she had asked came back to her like a cave echo.

  “The oldest extant mosque in India,” Xavier said in his special voice, “and one of the oldest indications of Hindu–Muslim collaboration and competition, which is what makes for the charged architecture.”

  He seemed to have revived, or he was making an effort. He had revived and she had wilted. They edged around massive stone screens inscribed with geometric designs. She caught sight of the inner masjid, the perimeter supported by dozens of stone pillars, like no Muslim building she had seen. There was a proliferation of deities and the abundant female figures found on temple walls.

  “But it looks so Hindu,” she said.

  A plaque said the mosque’s cloisters had been built using pillars, carved columns ‘and other architectural members’ of twenty-seven Hindu and Jain temples taken in their entirety to the site of the Q’utb.

  “In other words, the temples were destroyed to make this. Do you see?” Xavier said, running a hand along a pillar. “More to it than the linear Islamic ache that sublimates desire into calligraphy.”

  “That’s what I like about you, New, you’re better than a guidebook. Right now? I think I like you more than I have for a long time.”

  “Touch it and feel how the pillar curves. Now look up there, see those supports? What’s surprising about them? You’re not looking. Yes, exactly, four men, facing in four directions. The human figure in a mosque, how did they get away with it?”

  The figures were male, Aryan, kingly. They lay against the ceiling, knees bent and dangling upward, looking down at the viewer, the entire figure a refutation of gravity. Each had been given some individualised characterisation, the Brahmin thread or armlets or royal headgear, and there wasn’t a flat belly among them. Goody thought: Indian stomachs.

  “Take a look at the faces. See how they’ve been hacked with such force that some part of the chest is missing as well?”

  “Look,” she said, excited. “There are female figures too.”

&nb
sp; “But fewer, as if they were slipped in when no one was looking.”