The Book of Chocolate Saints

by Jeet Thayil

  “What I’m saying, the male–female ratio up here is screwy, seven women to ten men. And it’s getting worse by the year in case you haven’t noticed.”

  “They kill girl children out of the womb, Paromita. It’s true all over the country.”

  “Yes but here it’s happening sooner rather than later.”

  “And this is karma going round and coming round? They get what they deserve?”

  “Imagine a city, a state, a nation without women, the unrelieved ugliness of it. They’ll be stuck with each other, men on men on men. It is exactly what they deserve.”

  “A society of men without women,” said Goody, imagining. “A definition of hell. And the punishment? That the men, the gross men will have to fuck each other and fantasise about women while they’re doing it.”

  “Serve them right,” said Dharini, cupping her hands to her mouth to laugh.

  Paro made up for them the L-shaped couch in the living room.

  It was late, the moon a dull red. The sounds of Nizamuddin washed into the house. The neighbourhood’s dogs howled in concert and went silent and there was the tap of the night watchman’s staff and the rare splash of traffic.

  They settled for the night in borrowed T-shirts and Dharini asked again how Goody and Xavier had met.

  “Tell like a bedtime story, but.”

  Goody shut her eyes and listened to the ceiling fan. The cotton sheet was cool against her skin. If she let her senses shrink to the immediate everything would be fine, but the immediate was a small island surrounded by the infinite.

  “In a minute,” she said. “Why do people always want to know how other people met? You’ll have to wait. I’m dead on my feet. It’s late.”

  “What he must be thinking? Two women leaving him at the same time, must be a first.”

  “Maybe not. He’s had a few lives, is what, been around a long time.”

  “Longer than you and me combined?”

  “He may not even have noticed we left.”

  “He noticed. I think so he noticed. Is it always too hot in this city?”

  “Sometimes too cold. How old are you?”

  “Why don’t people wear hats in Delhi? Aren’t they afraid of sunstroke? Twenty-three next month.”

  “Is that a marriageable age in this country? Do people pressure you about it?”

  “My mother used to pressurise but she is no more.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “She’s from Kerala and my father’s from north. They met in college. Once she made me meet a boy. You know what he said?”

  “How much dowry will you bring?”

  “He asked what I cook.”

  “And you said, I prefer eating out.”

  “I said, aloo, pyaaz, tamater, bhindi. He said, together or separate? I said, separate. I was lying. Then he said, rotis? I said, of course, rotis.”

  “Match made in heaven.”

  “He said, round rotis or like the map of America? He laughed and I laughed. Then I said, I cannot marry you because I have a boyfriend.”

  “More lies?”

  “Lies, only. I’ll not let some boy rule my life. That’s why I’m pestering about you and Newton. Tell.”

  “It’s been a hard day. First thing in the morning, okay?”

  But in the morning there were missed calls and messages on both their phones, messages that were pleading, angry, apologetic, and unapologetic. They compared call records, eleven to Dharini and twenty-eight to Goody. They compared texts. To Dharini he wrote: Don’t u wanna cum to my last party? And: Cum on! And: Ari! Listen! To Goody: M SORRY! And: Benny Time in Delhi. Wants 2 fix press conf. And: I need u. Nat Gallery party next month. And: U pick a fine time 2 leave me Lucille! Some messages to Goody consisted of one word collapsed into three letters: PLS!

  Paro’s driver took them to Defence Colony. They stopped at a traffic light and a child knocked on the glass. It was a girl of three or four who put out her hand and said, Didi. Dharini asked the driver to roll down the window and she gave the girl a note. Immediately more children appeared. Then a woman limped to the car, her clothes grained with dirt and grease and her mirrored skirt so caked with grime that it reflected nothing. She wore heavy anklets that rested on bandaged ankles and her face was creased like soft old leather and swollen with alcohol and heat. It was impossible to tell how old she was. Dharini gave her a hundred rupees and the puffy red features seemed to register a kind of emotion, distant gratitude or pleasure.

  “Give me your blessing,” she told the woman, whose lips had opened in a small toothless grin.

  The driver powered up the window and put the car in gear. The interiors had filled with dry, pleasant heat.

  Dharini said, “Tell. Now you can tell.”

  Goody said she would have to go back ten years and it was a long story and maybe they didn’t have enough time.

  Dharini laughed and settled into the upholstery.

  “Time is my bitch, no?” she said. “I own it, man.”

  *

  When Goody finished the car had come to a stop in front of the Defence Colony studio. They stayed inside in the airconditioning, reluctant to step out into the day.

  “And that’s the story in its entirety,” Goody told Dharini. “What do you think?”

  “Hottest thing I ever heard,” Dharini said.

  When they got to the studio the French windows were open and a fine layer of dust had gathered on the desktops and bookshelves. The bed had not been slept in. The shower stall was dry.

  There was no sign of Xavier.

  BOOK SEVEN

  The Book of Chocolate Saints

  Saint Maurice

  or Moritz, or Moorish, or Mauritius,

  upper Egyptian third-century legionary;

  canonised early, before the Holy See

  reserved the right to the Pope’s sole hands;

  turned white in early representation;

  a thousand years later, painted as he was,

  black soldier, black saint; patron of weavers,

  swordsmiths, dyers, & infantrymen.

  from The Book of Chocolate Saints: Poems (Unpublished)

  1.

  Up close the sunbird was enormous. Distance revealed her frailty: she was the size of his thumb. As long as he paced she stayed on the terrace; if he stopped moving she would flick her wings, ready to fly. She turned up at all hours, unmistakable, in colours only a master would mix – matt olive and jonquil yellow, a bluish sheen around her eyes. Her favourite spot was the terrace wall near the champakali. To begin he asked a simple question. If it is true that nothing will remain of us but the bits that live inside a machine, then is it true that we will never die? Because machines will live for ever, which means we too will always be available to friends and strangers as information on a screen. The bird tickled her breast with her lovely, slender, decurved bill. He heard her call, why-be, why-be? Haw, he said, you’re right. The Internet won’t always be confined to a screen. It will be everywhere, in the air, in water, grafted into our skins, which means after I die bits of me will be everywhere too, for ever everywhere. The sunbird in her excitement lifted off the wall into a hummingbird variation. Her wings moved at microscopic speed as she vibrated in place and sang a long bell-like note; then she flicked her wings once and dropped into the trees.

  The encounter lifted his spirits enough to make him want to go back into the house and see what the women were up to, though even in his craziness he wasn’t going to mention that he had been talking business with a sunbird, which, after all, was one of the most common species of bird on the Indian subcontinent. If you’re going to hallucinate a bird make it a peacock, a flamingo, a sarus crane, anything but a sunbird in the moonlight.

  But when he stepped in from the terrace he sensed that the apartment was empty. They were gone, both of them. Where? Had they left together without telling him? Had they left him together?

  The phone in his pocket buzzed.

  “X,” said Benny Time,
bass-heavy music in the background. “What’s the haps?”

  “I’ll be with you in just a minute,” he said and searched the bedrooms, both bathrooms, and the back balcony. “Yes.”

  “What’s the haps, my man?”

  “Benny, Benny, if the sixties are back I’ll have to get my groovy threads out of mothballs. Man.”

  “A figure of speech. I’m here in your town mixing it up with Bunty and Babloo.”

  “A most alarming scenario, Benny. Do I know them?”

  “No.”

  “Lion tamers, perhaps, with a side in firearms?”

  “Liquor barons, X, promoters of last night’s Benny Time event in Delhi. The Lord works in mysterious ways. Listen, why don’t you join us? We’re at the, one second, where are we?”

  Indistinct voices went in and out of hearing.

  “Escalate, is the name of the club. In Gurgaon. I hope you’re all set for tomorrow? We’re planning on meeting early.”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “The press conference. Two p.m. sharp. Everybody will be there. I’ve got a suit for you, grey pinstripe double-breasted for that unassailable authority silhouette.”

  “I should have thought white linen.”

  “I’m white linen and most of the talking, you’re pinstripe and all of the gravitas. You sit there with a wise look on your face, say a few words about freedom to worship as one sees fit. You’re good with the press, right?”

  “Even the crow is a blackbird among pigeons.”

  “See, that’s why you make the big bucks. You’re good, X, real good.”

  “The bucks are never big enough, if you really want to know.”

  “This is a truth universally acknowledged. When tomorrow do we pick you up?”

  “When tomorrow,” Xavier sang, stepping out into the terrace again. The sunbird was nowhere to be seen.

  “Yes?”

  “Well, someone told me once that there’s no ease in death but I wonder if that’s necessarily the point. The unexamined death is not, you know, worth dying and the question is, will you and I and everyone else continue to exist after life as we know it comes to an end? If it is true that the mind lives for seven seconds after the body dies when does death occur? When the body dies or when the mind dies? If my brain is kept alive am I dead? If I am only body and I arrange to have it frozen indefinitely can I be said to be dead? We the living have this in common and only this, we are born to die. Everything else is speculation but speculate we must. These are some of the questions I am examining tonight, all alone, I might add.”

  “Now look, stop with the death and dying for one evening. Hop into a cab and come down to Escalate, I mean, up to Escalate, this party will go on some.”

  He ended the call and went to the kitchen on the slim chance that Goody or Dharini, or Goody and Dharini were whipping up a late night snack or making cocoa or cleaning the oven or executing some other cheerful chore; but the kitchen was empty. There was no sign of recent habitation other than cups and unwashed dishes in the sink and a cigarette butt on the windowsill.

  He resisted the urge to pick up the phone and call her, call Goody, not the other one whose name had slipped his mind for the moment. Had he really said he loved her? His brain was on fire and his body drowned in ecumenical piss. Caught between the two was he, prodigal son of Forgottem. But he would not call; he would not text; he would not be a needy old man. He’d depend on the dictum of the disco philosopher: he would survive. He thought of Benny Time and his doomed mission, to make a suspect church palatable to pagans and enemies. He deserved Time and Time deserved him. He would help save that which could not be saved and then he would secure his own work. He had a party and a birthday show coming up, a show to end all shows, the work of a lifetime assembled under one roof. He would focus and buckle down. But just as quickly as it came the fantasy passed, exited the stage pursued by a heavy bear. On impulse he went into the bedroom and put on his lucky boots. He wasn’t flying but he was going to Gurgaon; he needed all the luck he could get.

  He would hop into a cab and escalate.

  The walk to the market was disorienting because all the way on the main road women beckoned to motorists, lone women motionless under the trees or strolling into side lanes. After sunset Defence Colony changed character, or revealed its true character, and the respectable neighbourhood became a seething cauldron of iniquity. He found a taxi stand at the market and a turbanned cabbie on a charpoy who agreed to take him to the Gurgaon mall where Escalate was located. For most of the way the cabbie drove in silence. As they neared the mall he asked if he should wait in case Xavier wished to return to Delhi. Xavier told him he wasn’t sure when he would return and it was better that they parted ways. The driver said Gurgaon wasn’t safe to wander around in after dark and possibly not in the daytime either. He suggested that Xavier take his phone number just in case. They passed metro construction and complex diversions around dug-up sections of road and the car slowed to a crawl. They passed stalled or overturned trucks and entered a long stretch of scrub punctuated only by the burnt-out neon of liquor shops. Then came sudden islands of electric light, malls like giant spaceships, the fortified walls of tower blocks, construction sites the size of football fields, all of it surrounded by the heaving dark of rural Haryana. It felt like the Indian future had arrived, dropped from the sky in prefab chunks, but there was an end-of-times feel to it all. The taxi dropped him at the entrance to the mall and he made a note of the driver’s name and number.

  He passed through a metal detector and took a lift to the top floor. The lift was mirrored and everywhere he looked he saw his used-up face, the lines crooked or smeared, each new angle recalling the unseemliness of the whole. At the club a slight woman in a black suit stamped his wrist with the likeness of a tawaif in regalia. She led him up three floors to a VIP booth above the bandstand where a small group ate dinner. Benny waved him to a seat and a waiter served him oysters on crushed ice.

  “This is Bunty,” said Benny, introducing him to a cigar-smoker in a Grateful Dead T-shirt and sequinned dinner jacket. “On your left is the beauteous Meeyami and you know John.”

  “I know John and my nose knows John.”

  “Mr Xavier, great to see you again. Glad to see your nose has healed, and again, my apologies. What are you drinking?”

  Meeyami picked up a dripping bottle of champagne and filled his glass. He lifted it to the dim yellow light cast by the chandeliers and examined the flute’s extended stem, the endless happy bubbles lifting to the brim. He took a small sip and his throat constricted with an involuntary spasm, future body knowledge, distress telegraphed from brain to gullet. He took a breath and tried again.

  “It’s spelt M-I-A-M-I but pronounced Mia Me,” the girl said. “Do you like to drink?”

  “I do like to drink,” he replied. “I must confess I do rather like to drink.”

  She nodded seriously and touched his glass with hers.

  “Meet Casa Dungdung,” she said, indicating a woman of the same age as she, somewhere in the lissome mid-twenties, with similar hair, straightened and dyed, wearing a similar strappy dress, so short the hem needed constant adjustment.

  Bunty clapped him on the back and said the band would be on in a minute and he’d love them, three guys from Oakland, California. The highlight was the singer back-flipping into the audience.

  “The singer is a big white guy, yeah?” said Bunty, talking around his cigar. “Is a sight to see, bru.”

  A waiter came around with a tray of shots, vodka possibly, presented in a swirl of dry ice. Xavier took two, one for each hand. Benny and Johnny Starr were deep in conversation, their heads together across the table. Benny told him they were planning the press meet for the following day and the three of them needed to have a sit-down at some point.

  “Not right now,” said Bunty. “Here come the boys from Oakland.”

  They gathered at the balcony as the lights dimmed. Xavier got up and filled his glass with champagne a
nd found a face he knew, a gallerist from the old days, friend and colleague to Warhol, Basquiat, and Rene Ricard, based now in New Delhi.

  “Newton,” said Tungsten, “tell these whippersnappers. Haven’t I always been a dinge queen? Why else would I live in this hellhole? What do I always say? Give me an Iranian oil wrestler or a Tamilian stud muffin any day of any week!”

  “He is and always has been,” Xavier told the two young men with Tungsten, “a dinge queen.”

  “I’d rather have sex with pupae and larvae than fuck a Caucasian.”

  The band was well into a fast rap over rock power chords. It was their hit anthem. Rise up, get over, throw off the chains of the oppressor, not today or tomorrow but someday. In the Spanish gut-string guitar break the singer made his move and somersaulted into the audience. Instantly the crowd parted; there was nobody to break his fall. Even three floors up Xavier heard the impact.

  “Oh fuck,” said Bunty.

  “Fuck, fuck,” someone else said, perhaps it was Babloo, and both men left the room.

  Roadies carried the shaken frontman from the floor. The band called an end to the show and hurried from the stage.

  “I’m a poet,” Casa Dungdung was saying. “I’ve always been a poet. When other people are talking about this and that, in my head a poem is birthing. Right now for example. They’re talking hip-hop and I’m thinking, ‘nuclear kiss’, or I’m thinking, ‘sample this’. I’m doing my make-up and I’m thinking, ‘apricot death’. I’m thinking, ‘foundation is fugue’. Poetry works in mysterious ways but it begins with verbal anarchy. We cannot legislate the unacknowledged legislators. What do I do? I’m an anaesthetist. Six days a week I’m in the operating theatre doing needlework and in my head my lines are writing themselves. Late at night I’ll be home having a drink and staring out the window and I’ll note the poetic nature of staring out the window with a drink in my hand and I’ll think, I’m a poet, inside and outside I’m a poet. What do you do?”