by Jeet Thayil
“I drink,” Xavier said, picking up a glass of red wine from a passing tray, though to give credit where it was due this was no glass. This was a goldfish bowl of wine.
“Ha ha,” said Casa, “you do. I was being naughty. I know who you are. You’re the painter and poet, founder of the Hung Realists. You founded the Bombay School of Experimental Autists with Ara and Husain. Some call it the School of eX. I loved the motto and adapted it into my own life.”
“Oh, did you now?”
“Anarchy and anonymity!”
The party moved downstairs to a table by the bandstand. Casa Dungdung and Mia Me danced the twist and mimed the words, “bully for you, chilly for me, got to get a raincheck on … pain”, with exaggerated hand gestures. More champagne arrived. Bunty returned to say that the Oakland band had cancelled their India tour because the singer had injured his back. The sponsors were not pleased. Bunty wanted whisky.
“What was white boy thinking?” he said. “This is Delhi, nobody gonna catch you when you fall.”
He joined the women on the dance floor.
“Madder music, stronger wine!” Xavier said, obscurely.
“We’ll have a police presence tomorrow,” Benny Time shouted in Xavier’s ear. “They’re taking the threats seriously.”
“Do they know who’s making them?”
“They don’t. Landline calls to newspapers and television channels. Cleverly effective, don’t you think?”
Xavier took a mouthful of wine and felt the bass in his prostate, a juddered vibration slightly slower than his pulse rate. For the first time in days he felt contained in his skin, solid and comfortable.
I have been faithful to thee, Goody, in my fashion.
“Listen, I wanted to say you don’t have to do this. I do appreciate it but things are different now that there’s a possibility of violence. I’m saying I’ll understand if you opt out,” said Benny.
Xavier felt for his phone and sent a text: M SORRY.
He said, “We’re in it together, Benn, old boy. I’m going to help you navigate the merry puddle and you’re going to help me throw the party to end all parties for the Delhi opening of 66.”
The DJ played a remix of ‘Choli ke Peeche’. Bunty and Mia Me performed a series of chesty Bollywood moves. Casa Dungdung was dancing with herself and Xavier picked up his refilled bowl of wine and joined her. He held the glass carefully but a spray of red appeared on his white shirtfront.
He woke on a bed, possibly a bed in a hotel room, fully dressed except for his boots, which were nowhere to be found, not under the bed, not in the closet, not in the bathroom, not in the hallway outside. He could not find his boots but in his trouser pockets he found a dangly silver earring and a butter cookie. He remembered some things from the night before, dancing, taking a lift with people he didn’t know, texting someone, Goody probably, and the clearest memory of all, he was dancing in darkness and when he looked up there was the night sky and all its stars. He was on a rooftop designed to resemble a dance floor and someone passed him a joint. He remembered all this but he could not remember getting to the hotel. He could not remember losing his boots. The room was low-end business, meaning it was bare of everything including the essentials. There was no water in the minibar, much less a cold beer or miniature vodka. There was no phone and of course there was no room service. He went into the bathroom and splashed water on his face and went back to bed. He dreamed of his old friend, Dom Moraes. They were sitting in the Casbah, a beloved Bandra dive. You don’t understand, his friend kept saying. I’m not dead at all. I’m like jazz, I smell funny but I’m still here. You’re dead, Xavier said, I was at your funeral. I’m here, said Dom, and I’m thirsty. There was a banging on the door. Don’t wake up, Dom said, we have a lot to talk about.
It was Benny Time with a pinstriped suit on a hanger, as he’d promised. He waited in the lobby while Xavier showered and dressed and came downstairs barefoot. They stopped at the hotel restaurant for breakfast, or it might have been lunch, and Xavier chased the ache from his eyes with a glass of beer. His head felt porous with light, his vision soft around the edges, cataract squiggles floating out of sight. He had stopped taking his medication, perhaps these were the side effects? If so, he was all for it. More porousness! The waiter brought the bill and he had an idea, a solution to his immediate problem. Let me buy your slippers, he said. The boy hesitated for a minute, then shyly took off his worn rubber slippers and presented them to Xavier. He refused to take money in return.
When they got to the hotel where the press conference was to be held there was an unexpectedly large police contingent and in a matter of minutes Time was surrounded. There was security everywhere and television crews roamed the lobby. It was only when a young man approached Xavier for a statement that he learned what had happened: Johnny Starr abducted by persons unknown. Benny Time returned, distraught, and took him to a corner. The press conference would be rescheduled to give them time to formulate a response, but what response?
“John was taken from the street,” said Time. “Full daylight, picked up by three men and shoved into an SUV. The hotel guard says he saw it happen but didn’t do anything because this is Gurgaon. Shoot-outs on main street are standard. Three men bundling someone into a car is just guys having fun. Jesus! The tour can’t go on without him. How did they know?”
The crowd in the conference room was immense. Xavier had to take off his suit coat and roll up his sleeves. The dancing girl stamp on his inner wrist had smeared in the humidity and the waiter’s rubber slippers felt like a blessing. A reporter asked if someone had taken responsibility for Starr’s abduction. Another asked whether it was right-wing Hindus or Muslims. A policeman sent to monitor the conference said nothing had been ruled out. Then a print reporter stood up and asked Xavier for a comment.
“I’m here as a friend to the Church of Time and I’ll keep my comments brief,” he said. The reporters leaned forward as one, the better to hear him. “Johnny Starr is an American citizen. As we know, the Americans do not forgive the taking of their citizens as hostages. I, on the other hand, I am free and unaffiliated except to God and Time. Whoever you are, Hindu Muslim Buddhist Christian, perhaps we should talk.”
“You’re offering yourself in exchange for Mr Starr?” someone asked.
“Not necessarily.”
His phone started to buzz as the conference ended: Goody, calling from the real world. Her voice would be grounded and reassuring, perhaps offering reconciliation. He dismissed the call and the phone rang again, an unknown number, and he fantasised briefly about dropping the device into the bin under the desk. Start with the umbilical cord of the cell phone, then sever other workaday ties to the world, eliminate all urgency and busyness, leave only unvexed thought and the promise of serenity.
But he was hurried into the street by Benny Time, who had acquired a companion, a policeman in a safari suit.
“I can’t let you do it,” Benny said. “You didn’t sign up for this. I appreciate it, I do, but we’re in outer space now. All bets are off. According to my friend here it’s either a Hindu or Islamic faction.”
“And they picked Johnny because he is the singing voice and he was easier to get than you.”
“He’s closer to me than anyone.”
“Welcome to the future, Benny, a world where it’s impossible to tell the conservatives from the radicals.”
“Anyway you’re off the hook. Thank you but I can’t expect you to put yourself at risk. If anyone should take responsibility for this it’s me.”
Xavier’s phone buzzed and he touched the accept button.
“Hello.”
“Sir, NDTV this side, I am calling to—”
He cut the call and considered the phone as it buzzed again. Goody. His throat and nose felt scratchy and his head was loose on the pivot of his neck, as if he was coming down with something. The timing could not be worse.
“I say, could you drive me to the hotel at all? I think I need a bit
of a lie-down.”
“X, the conference is done, you can go home now. I don’t know what comes next. You should go home.”
But he got off near the airport turn-off. It took him some time to locate the restaurant he had had breakfast in, which was the only way he knew to find the hotel. There was a theka next door and he picked up a nip bottle of gin and two beers, which he took to his room. He saw a pad and pencil on the night table and understood that the sensation he had been experiencing all day, as if he was coming down with something, was not a prelude to illness at all. He was on the verge of a poem and he had forgotten the feeling – the fullness in the chest, the headiness. He took the cap off the bottle of gin and drank some and poured himself some beer in a water glass. He took up the pen and pad and began to write. The lines came fast and soon he had a workable first draft. After a while he made a clean copy from several sheets of crossed-out and corrected lines. He titled it ‘For Dis’, set it aside and began another, and another, working deep into the evening, by which time the alcohol was gone. He stretched out on the unmade bed for a quick nap and when he woke it was morning. There were sixteen missed calls on his phone, most from Goody, some from Dharini, and the remainder, he assumed, from journalists. In the bathroom mirror he saw a startled man in a stained once-white shirt. He washed his face and used the hotel toothbrush and went to the lobby. He had an idea that he might buy a shirt and a pair of shoes. He missed his lucky boots. He was standing in the lobby blinking at the light when the waiter who had given him the slippers appeared by his side. He said, are you okay, sir? One minute, Xavier replied. His pocket was buzzing. Without looking at the caller, he clicked off the phone and handed it to the boy. It’s yours, he said in Hindi. Change the sim card and you won’t be bothered by calls. Then he shook hands with the frightened waiter and stepped unsteadily into the street.
Warily he examined the day. Next to the airport flyover, the street consisted entirely of vertical signs for hotels, bars, and spas. Some of the neon signage was lit though it was not yet noon. He stopped at Hotel Waves and ate a paratha, chewing it slowly, unaccustomed to the taste of food. The only other diners were a couple at a table near the door. The woman’s nails were too long to push the buttons on her handset. Tenderly she patted the phone and held it to the man’s ear. He spat a bit of meat or bone into his plate and laughed. Correct, he said, correct! Xavier called for the bill. Outside, the midday sun was a curse on his head. A blue bus went past at speed and a small dog moved out of the way just in time. He passed a bar that had just opened and went in and ordered a brandy and club soda. The waiter lent him a pen and he took out the poems he had been working on the night before and smoothed the pages on the table. He started to make corrections to the second poem, ‘Saint Augustine’, and the third, ‘Saint Nicholas’, and made notes for two others and wrote a list of words and phrases in the right-hand margin – meek, mean, meat, nitid, itch, madden, midden, peace, pearl, buzz, froth, egg, scream, spin out knee-deep in death & egesta, rat chat, snake hissance, lizard fizz, bug thrum, beast din, fetid, feed, grot hilde, grimm the reaper, sore, soar, petal, laughter, water, word, world – for future rhymes, half-rhymes, and supra-rhymes. He watched his hand move into a steady independent system and when he finished the brandy he clapped his hands for the waiter who was watching cricket. This was what Indians did in a room with a television: they found a cricket match because somebody somewhere was always throwing a bat against a ball. He held up the empty glass and waited for the man to bring him another. He drank brandy and soda and found the correct arrangement of words on the page, a heroic activity at any time but especially in the middle of the afternoon in the last bar on the last street in the last city of the world. He finished the poem and began another. He drank and wrote and in time the sun’s bald glare receded and he put down the pen and looked at his hands.
What do I do now?
He was wearing the same shirt from the day before, from days before. He would try to call Benny Time. He walked against the traffic on the narrow street of bars and spas but could not find his hotel. The sun beat its old curse on his head. He stepped off the broken pavement to look up at the building signs and see if he could recognise the hotel’s name. He stepped off the pavement and heard a man shout and turned in time to see a cycle rickshaw swerve. Its back wheel rode over his foot. The pain was not unbearable; it didn’t feel like any bones had been broken. The rickshaw-wallah gave him a look and didn’t stop, as if it was his fault, which it was. His foot throbbed. A bruise was already forming and he wished for his boots. Where had he left them, he wondered, and who was wearing them now? He limped a few paces and looked for somewhere to sit. He couldn’t find the hotel; he had misplaced it and he would never find it again. He felt a pain in his side and stepped into the first establishment he saw, a workingman’s bar where the customers bought nip bottles and plastic sachets of water and drank standing up, the floor covered in litter of all kinds. He took a bottle of extra strong beer and drank it leaning against the wall and a man spoke to him in words he could not understand. Inanity, he thought, thy name is human speech.
I am for the birds.
To be run over by a cycle rickshaw, the most antiquated mode of transport in this antiquated land, not even an autorickshaw or a halfway-decent car. A cycle rickshaw, inanity and insanity, onward and onward. His foot throbbed and the pain in his side was no longer localised.
He was falling into himself, through madness and folly into himself. He was becoming light at last, sheer as a sheet of glass, each inflamed nerve visible from afar. He was invisible and his mind was invincible. The vulnerability of the body did not matter because he had fallen finally into happiness; and still holding the bottle of beer he walked out of the bar, grunting with effort like an old man. It reminded him of his father. He grunted like Frank but he was mad as Beryl. For no reason at all he remembered Dimple the pipe-maker, the model for a painting he had not offered for sale. He numbered in his head the pictures of Goody he would not sell. Goody nude, dressed, supine, floating. And what was it all worth in the end? More than money, less than time.
Behold, he putteth no trust in his Saints and his Angels he chargeth with folly.
The pain or ache in his side had spread to his arm and there was a circle of pain tightening around his chest. He wondered if he was having a stroke. He limped into a storefront with frilly window curtains. Such an odd word, stroke, such a tender word for so brutal an event. There was a woman at a counter and three chairs against the wall and the mentholated scent of eucalyptus oil. Hello Kitty waved from a table. He heard Chinese flute music and sat heavily on a chair and the woman asked him what kind of massage he wanted. He said something in reply but she didn’t hear him.
“Excuse me?”
“Boredom is best.”
He settled his shoulders against the wall to ease the tightness and the woman spoke again. When he did not reply she came around and examined his eyes, which were open. She slapped him lightly on the cheek, once, then again, and then she rang a bell. She pried loose the bottle gripped in his hand and locked the door of the shop. When the boy appeared, she told him to help her carry the man to the alley in the back. They dragged and carried the body out of the room and then the madam returned to the parlour and quickly unlocked the front door and went behind the counter to wait for custom. In the alley lined with air-conditioning units, the boy checked the man’s pockets. He took what cash there was and he took the driver’s licence and credit card. There was no phone; instead he found some pages of hotel stationery covered in cramped English writing. He let the pages fall into the alley’s shallow puddles where they lay undisturbed, the words still legible in the fading light.
2.
You become a repository for voices you don’t recognise. A jingle or aphorism that does not give up its meaning, a country-western whippoorwill too blue to fly, lucid gossip heard at a party, your father commanding No, something someone said about refinement and cruelty and the Taj Mahal; you be
come shortwave messages bounced back from the ionosphere.
Dismas was promoting The Loathed. He travelled, gave readings, signed books. And he read from the opening, a long paragraph about Xavier:
America, which has no history or too brief a one, and India, which swallows history and spits it out whole, are the two poles of this tale, and if you’re asking me to tell you my side of it, I’m going to have to go back a bit, to NYC, because that’s where I first met him, when he tried to send me on a murder quest, tried to make a detective out of me, and he gave me a nickname, the Bombayman, because he said only Bombaymen felt obliged to put the city down. I’d brought along some poems as an introduction. He said he liked them, because at least I was conscious of the sullen craft, which was more than could be said for most Indian poets, who seem to think all you need are feelings, who seem to forget that everybody in the world has feelings and the purpose of poetry is, and I quote, to get away from your fucking feelings. He said my poems were hindered by my conception of myself, which is a hell of a thing to tell a twenty-five-year-old. But I wasn’t the only one, all of us were, we Bombay poets, hindered by the self-destructive incendiary poet’s mythology we carried like badges of honour, like armour against the workaday world. I added a personal ingredient to the mix, my inescapable place as outcaste, outside caste, the affiliation that annihilated everything, my foreign education, my ambitions for myself as a writer and journalist, my hopes of raising a family untainted by a caste name – the reason I had changed mine to Bambai. I knew he was right. I was hindered by my own image and so I found it in myself to betray him, and here I must take a deep breath and say, Goody, as in the proper noun, Goody Laugh out Loud, Goody Lollipop, and I must say that in my guilt I attempted to reconstruct his history for the kind of biography I would never write, such false remorse directed at my friend, the poet and painter Newton Xavier, the consonant X, my doppelganger and hypocrite twin, X and I, another set of poles around which this story revolves, all this happening in the west of course, and that loaded phrase ‘in the west’, which, when I hear it, isn’t a locational indicator for me, I don’t hear it in terms of geography, it’s not a place name but placement, anthropology, an attempt at classification, a social science reference, all the categories of inside and outside you think of when you hear the word the way Xavier said it, Amurka, the stunned vowel first and last, a interrupted by murk, not abecedarian but aeolian, as said by the harshest consonant, X, who, once upon a time in the west, said, “Bombayman, your tragedy is you are the king of the jungle and you don’t know it. The beast of the east eats the best of the west. Welcome to Amurka slash Amurkaka.” He said it in an Indian accent: “The best of the vest.” He made an aphorism out of it, a jingle. We were in Chelsea somewhere, and he was drinking black coffee and vodka out of a red and green Christmas cup, it being the holiday season. He mocked the idea of a coffee chain named after a whaling saint but he drank the coffee, his glasses cloudy, and he kept nodding although I hadn’t said a thing. He asked about my visa and I told him I’d have to leave the country soon because it was about to expire. He said that was no reason to leave a place. He said I wasn’t a book borrowed from a library, though that was our fate in the end, to be books, borrowed or forgotten, and if we were lucky we would find ourselves on a shelf leaning against a friend. He said I should get myself an O-1, the extraordinary alien’s green-to-go card, speaking in the whisky-and-cigars voice he had earned, and when I think of him now, if I think of him at all, I remember him as a ghost, a once-friendly ghost I’m trying to raise.