Narcopolis (3 page)

‘I’m glad you’re back,’ I said.

‘I’ve been here all this time. What have I been doing? I don’t know. People tell me things, secret things. They’re kind to me because they like me and they tell me what to expect.’

‘What do they tell you?’

‘The same thing I will tell you, that we’re here, close to you, invisible, of course, but we are here.’

‘Where?’

‘I’ve never met anyone who asks so many questions,’ said Dimple, and she looked up at the window and smiled. ‘On the other side of the mirror, our hands are resting against the glass, trying to touch your face. Only a veil separates us from you, a transparent veil as flimsy as the one that separates you from your dreams. If you want to talk to us you only have to dip your hand beneath the surface of the water. We’re waiting for a glance or a word, some acknowledgement that we are here. If you dip your hand you’ll hear us. You should listen. Even if you can’t bear it, you should listen.’

I overheard a conversation, or more than that, an altercation, between a pimp and a tall man with a caste mark on his forehead. The tall man was wearing cowboy boots that he refused to leave at the door. I didn’t hear what the pimp said but the other man’s voice was difficult to ignore. He told the pimp that the laws of supply and demand applied everywhere, including the cesspools of the fucking Third World. You’re being childish, he said. You shouldn’t take it personally if your whores are unpopular. Ask yourself how you can remedy the situation. Could be all you need is a USP. Regular medical check-ups, that’s the answer, friend. Test result posted on the wall for all to see, but only if it’s negative. The pimp was a pockmarked giant with teeth that were too big for his lips. His mouth was open, as if he was panting, but he kept his voice even. He said, Did you call me childish? He used the same high-Hindi word the
other
man had used, ‘bachpana’. He could have reached over and broken his opponent in two without raising a sweat. The thing that stopped him was the expression on the other man’s face, which was serene, as if he had a gun under his shirt or at the very least a knife.

‘Just stoned talk,’ the man said when the dog-faced pimp had left. He was wearing a pair of headphones around his neck and I could hear strange music pumping into the air. ‘I said something, he got upset and then he calmed the fuck down. You want to know something?’

He dropped his voice slightly, which only served as a signal to the men around us. He said: The thing to remember is one small but supremely important fact: pimps are cowards. Pimps are worthless. Pimps make their money from the weak and the diseased, from men and women whose will has deserted them, who will never fight or put up any kind of resistance, who want to die. Once you know this, that a pimp is a cowardly little fuck, there’s no problem; you can stand up to them like a man. You’ve got to face facts and the fact is life is a joke, a fucking bad joke, or, no, a bad fucking joke. There’s no point taking it seriously because whatever happens, and I mean whatever the fuck, the punch line is the same: you go out horizontally. You see the point? No fucking point.

I thought: He’s trying to impress me. I thought: Chandulis are slaves to the pipe, which diminishes us in the world, and we make up the difference with boasts and lies.

Then the tall man sat up and yelled across the room at Bengali. He said, ‘Can I get a pyali, boss, today sometime? I’ve been here half an hour and I’m tired of waiting.’ Someone coughed and the room became still. Bengali, very reluctantly, it seemed to me, put a pyali on Dimple’s tray.

‘I don’t think they like you very much here,’ I said.

‘Ah, fuck that, I wouldn’t come to a place like this without protection.’ He looked meaningfully at his briefcase. ‘So, where you from originally?’

‘Kerala, South India.’

‘Undu Gundu Land, I know where it is. You get any trouble?’

‘If I make the mistake of speaking Malayalam to the locals, yes.’

‘Locals? Like me, you mean? Well, not to worry, things are changing: you Southies will be okay. We’re going after bigger game.’ He dropped his voice and said, ‘Mozzies.’

‘Is that the new strategy, guaranteed to win friends and generate income?’

He propped himself on an elbow to get a better look at me. ‘Chief? You should watch your mouth. Maybe you’ve got a bellyful of opium and you don’t care. Or you want to go off and you’re looking for an easy way. Or maybe your head is full of bugs, like me.’ He was smiling, a wide patronizing smile, and when he held out his hand, his grip was firm and moist. ‘
Anyway,
name’s Rumi. And you?’

‘Dom.’

‘With a name like that, you’re fucked. All you have in
common
with these people is smoke.’

I said, ‘What’s the music you’re listening to?’

He handed me the headphones. The sound was high-pitched, like the soundtrack of a movie in which random scenes had been strung together, or cut up and played backwards, or deliberately placed out of order. Bottles clinked and a door creaked open. A shot rang out. A child whispered, Is he here? Where is he? A woman wept and said, Nahi, nahi. There was the sound of water falling from a great height. A door creaked shut and a bottle smashed on a tiled floor. A woman’s high voice fell deeply through the octaves and a shot rang out. A man panted like a dog. A child wept and water lapped against the side of a boat or a body. A bottle of champagne popped and a doorbell rang. James Bond guitars played against cowboy string orchestration. The child said, Here he is. Where is here? The woman’s voice, soaked in reverb and whisky, executed another perfect fall and I experienced a sudden drop in my head like a vertigo rush. I heard the sound of water and Dimple handed me the pipe. I put it against my lips and heard a man shout, Monica, my darling, and I felt so dizzy that I had to close my eyes. Then a woman said, Is he here? and a child whispered, Nahi, and a shot rang out and everything went silent. I took the headphones off and gave them back to Rumi.

He said, ‘Bombay blues.’

I saw in the
Free Press Journal
that Newton Xavier was to make an appearance in the city. He would read poems and answer questions about his new Bombay show, the first in a dozen years, opening that week at the Jehangir Art Gallery in Kala Ghoda. I was excited at the chance to see him up close. I wanted to see what he looked like. I remembered the work I’d seen and the articles I’d read, which described him in lurid phrases that sounded like terms of endearment. Most writers agreed that he was an enfant terrible and brilliant; a postmodern subversive who rejected the label ‘postmodern’; a drunk whose epic binges were likened to those of illustrious alcoholic predecessors such as Dylan Thomas, Verlaine and
J. Swaminathan
, though he had lately sworn off the booze after a violent blackout that landed him in hospital; a wild child now in early middle age who ‘outdid the Romantics’ antics, at least in terms of tenderness and rage’, this according to the
London Review of Books
. The
Daily Mail
put it in plainer terms: he was ‘permanently drunk on booze, broads and beauty’ and he was ‘art-obsessed, self-absorbed’ and ‘mad, bad and slanderous to know’. He was worldly, acerbic, photogenic, precocious, and he wrote poetry. The
TLS
said his two collections of poetry,
reissued
under the title
Songs for the Tin-Eared
, were more chaotic than his paintings, though they explored the same themes, i.e. the world as a manifestation of the estranged mind, and the three major religions – Islam, Hinduism, Christianity – as evidence of estrangement. I pored over the reproductions of the paintings that I found in the magazines, especially the Hindu Christ series. These are the paintings he will be remembered for, I thought, the pictures of Christ with blue skin, with doe eyes, kaajal and a caste mark. Christ playing the flute or stealing the clothes of bathing village nymphets or meditating in a cave: strange portraits in vivid Indian reds and yellows.

Xavier was speaking at the PEN Centre in New Marine Lines. I took a train from Grant Road to Churchgate, and then I walked to the Theosophy Hall. There were about a dozen people waiting. Ceiling fans on long stalks circulated hot air and dust around a large room. The walls were filled with antique volumes locked away in glass-fronted cupboards. You couldn’t touch the books, which looked as if they’d fall apart at the slightest breath. All three volumes of
The Secret Doctrine
were there, arranged on long tables, small leather-bound editions that had disintegrated in Bombay’s humidity. I opened one and flipped through it quickly and read the biographical note at the end. As befitted a famous author, Madame Blavatsky divided her time between the world’s great capitals: her ashes were interred on three continents. Her portrait, which adorned the main hall, was the most prominent one in the room. The old fraud had posed with her great head cradled in one hand, trying with all her might to hypnotize the camera. Not even the ghost of a smile played on her lips. It was a strange setting for an appearance by the godless Catholic, Newton Xavier.

I took a chair at the front. It was May and people were fanning themselves with newspapers. I picked up a folded sheet that had fallen on the floor. There was a black-and-white reproduction of one of Xavier’s early paintings, a blinded bleeding Christ, his shortened arms raised, his hands nailed so roughly to the cross that spurts of blood flew at the viewer. On either side of this brutalized figure were two pristine busts, a man in a robe and a nude woman in a summer hat. The reproduction was washed out and all you could make out were the woman’s large breasts and the signature,
Xavier77
. There was a poem as well:

The sonnet connected in a strange way with his paintings. There was the obsession with religion and sex, the grandiose self-regard, the eccentric punctuation. I wanted to read it again but a woman in the seat beside me was complaining in a voice that carried through the room. ‘Very bad, very bad. Already forty minutes late. Who does he think he is, Rajesh Khanna?’

And just then they appeared, a grey-haired man in a kurta supporting another grey-haired man in a kurta, both apparently drunk, and, bringing up the rear, a peon in a short-sleeved blue shirt with PEN stitched in red letters on the breast pocket. The peon at least seemed sober. The first drunk, Akash Iskai, was a poet and art critic whose name appeared frequently in the newspapers. He helped his friend to a chair on the stage and shuffled to the podium where he launched into a long, unexpectedly coherent speech about modern Indian art.

‘Xavier and his old friends and colleagues in the Modern Autists Group invented modern art in India,’ he ended by saying. ‘I use the word advisedly, for these senior artists are.’

‘For God’s sake,’ the other man interrupted, ‘don’t call me senior, I’m not a fogey just yet. And don’t call them my friends: we went our separate ways a long time ago. If anything we’re old antagonists.’

The poet appeared unfazed by the interjection. The Modern Autists were reckless originators, he said, going where no one else had dared to venture. They were truthful innovators even when they were false and dissolute, yes, because they were babes in the urban wood. He called them chinless wonders, though I may have heard it wrong, he might have said sinless. I was nodding off a little by then. These bold men, for they were all men, overturned the dictatorship of the Academies and the Schools of Here and There, Iskai said. They made it new, in Ezra’s inimitable words, which, as poets know, is not a dictum as much as a piece of practical advice. At the mention of poetry, there was some unhappy murmuring in the audience. Sensing he had lost them, Iskai turned to Xavier, who sat motionless in his chair.

‘Perhaps you can tell us what the falling-out was about?’

‘Colour, brother Iskai. What else? It brought us together and tore us apart. I should mention that things were more desperate then. We were at the JJ School of Art, learning to paint by numbers, eating dead meat shipped out by the Royal School and the Bengal School, and then we discovered Picasso and Van Gogh and Gauguin. We were young, feeding off each other. Everything was wide open. Now, of course, things have changed. I don’t agree with their ideas about colour and I have no doubt they disagree with mine.’

There was an uncomfortable silence while the painter, spent from his outburst, stared expressionlessly at his audience. The silence stretched until a small figure at the back of the room raised his hand and Xavier pointed at the man.

‘Didn’t art school teach you anything about colour?’

Xavier said, ‘Certainly not, I learned about colour by looking at flowers. Let’s not talk about school.’

Iskai said, ‘No more questions, question time is later. We will proceed in orderly fashion, please. First, the guest of honour will make a speech. Join me in welcoming India’s own Newton Xavier.’

But the guest of honour was unable to get up from his seat. The peon shoved his hands under Xavier’s armpits and heaved. Nothing happened. Then Iskai suggested that Xavier read
sitting
down and the peon handed him a sheet of paper. The painter held the page in one shaking hand, the other pincering his spectacles in a two-fingered grip. He looked old and terminally ill. I wasn’t the only one who expected him to topple from his chair and it struck me that the people in the audience weren’t interested in Xavier’s poems or his views on colour. They were there to see if the bad boy of Indian art would live up to his reputation. They hoped to see him combust in front of their eyes, or implode, or die of a heart attack, or leap from his seat and rape an audience member. The worse his behaviour the happier they would be. It was voyeurism at its vilest and we were drinking in the details: the stains on his kurta – drink? blood? semen? – the disreputable rubber slippers, his binge stubble and rapid eyes, his death pallor, the wonderful fact that he was too drunk to stand.

‘Now you know what legless means,’ said the matron beside me in a stage whisper that carried through the room.

‘Madam, I have warned you before about your bad habit. Please keep quiet or I will be forced to have you ejected permanently,’ said Iskai, suddenly furious.

Someone had placed a glass of water near Xavier but in lifting it he shakily spilled some on the table and he put the glass down without wetting his lips. He was going to read a new poem, he said, speaking so softly that the audience had to lean forward to hear him. Then he started to read and his voice was mild, the words perfectly articulated, the accent round and rich and neutral, not British or American or Indian but godlike. Most striking of all was the tone of absolute authority. I heard the coldness under it and it gave me a shiver, even in that heat it gave me a shiver.

The poem, told in rhyming quatrains, was set in a future wasteland of war or famine or disease, where some unnamed catastrophe had culled much of the world’s population. To protect themselves against the invisible, nations had broken up into smaller states, each with its own government, religion, language and particular social customs. Travel between cities was insanely complicated and travel between states was banned by all governments. Citizens were required to carry passports with them at all times. Xavier’s poem concerned a rural Moroccan boy who falls sick while getting ready for school. His parents take him to a hospital in Fez and are told by the authorities that their son will not come out of his coma and further contact with him will only ensure their own decline or imprisonment, because they were out of their municipal precinct and had broken the law by coming to Fez, and were in fact continuing to break the law by remaining there. The parents are forced to abandon their son and return to their village, where the mother soon develops agoraphobia and the father becomes a systematic abuser of the female inmates in the small mental institution in which he works. The boy wakes up in a city he doesn’t know, alone in a room in the middle of the night, except it isn’t night at all, because a red light is streaming into the window. He thinks: I am dead, like Jed-di, like Ammi and Abba. Everyone died and I am in hell because of the bad things I did. He doesn’t know it but he has recovered. He continues to lie in bed, attached to a glucose drip and a monitor. Then he sees that the moonlight has become redder, so bright it seems the devil himself has come to pay him a visit. The boy walks to the window and sees the building is on fire. He runs down the endless corridors of the hospital, which, he soon
understands
, is deserted but for him. Then followed two quatrains of landscape description, the desert at night and in the early dawn, the necessity of finding drinking water, the portability and efficacy of dried fruits and honey, and the miraculous restorative powers of some varieties of cactus plants. When the poem returns to the boy, he is in his late teens. He is the leader of a band of rebel nomads, youths who travel by night and hide by day, living off the generosity of villagers. In the winter of the boy’s eighteenth year, he and his comrades come to a small town that the boy recognizes as his village, now grown into a place of some importance. From a hill the youths gaze at the sleeping town and the boy identifies the cemetery, the insane asylum where his father worked, the bakery and teashop, and so on, but try as he might he cannot locate his house. ‘Let’s go down and wander around,’ his closest comrade and second in command suggests. ‘We’ll wander around until it’s found, / Then we can rest.’ The boy does not reply. He realizes that the reason he could not identify his home is because the modest house in which he grew up is now a mansion with a pool and a garden and he can even see children’s toys scattered on the lawn. The group begins to descend into the valley when the boy changes his mind. They will skirt the town and travel on, he says. The poem ended with these lines:

Xavier continued to talk, though he was no longer reading the poem. ‘I woke up to bright sunshine this morning,’ he said, ‘or it could have been yesterday morning, who’s to know? In any case, I woke to bright skies and I thought, for some of us it’s a beautiful day. I.’

‘Why wouldn’t it be a beautiful day for you? You come to India only to escape the winter. The papers say you are moving from the UK to the US, to become a citizen of a rich, or I should say richer, country. They say exile suits you.’

It was the small man at the back of the room who’d asked the earlier question. Iskai said it was still not yet question time and he asked the man to wait. Xavier said he had never claimed to be a citizen of exile. The word was much too grand and fashionable to describe his condition, which was something less dramatic and had to do with restlessness and chance. He said: It was never my intention to become a citizen of the United States. I am and will continue to be a first-class citizen of my own country rather than a second-class citizen of elsewhere. What I am doing is applying for the status of Alien of Extraordinary Ability. It’s a visa category I recommend for green-card aspirants.

My neighbour said, Please wait. She took a notebook and pen from her purse. My son is interested in US for higher studies. What are the details of your visa, please? She waited with pen poised but Xavier didn’t reply. He was immobile, looking glassily in her direction. There was silence for four or five seconds. Then a single high-pitched snort burst from his mouth: he was sitting upright with his eyes open, but he was asleep. Several voices started up at once. Suddenly, it seemed, everybody had a question for Xavier. Iskai made his closing remarks but an elderly man stood up in the front row, and, by force of will, made himself audible above the crowd. His question was punctuated by Xavier’s distinctive snore.