Narcopolis (4 page)

‘Forster said patriotism was the last refuge of scoundrels. Johnson said he would rather betray his country than betray a friend. Yeats said the worst are filled with passionate intensity. Your early paintings eschewed patrilineal posturing for flat evocation. In this light, I find your anti-citizenship stance simply unconvincing. If US citizenship doesn’t matter, why not take it up? My question, therefore, is two-part. Aren’t you pandering to the home crowd when you make such statements? And, connectedly, have you taken a position vis-à-vis recent developments in that most programmatic of all states, the Soviet Union?’

Iskai said, ‘Newton?’

Xavier got to his feet, said, ‘Yes, such as it is,’ and fell backwards into the arms of the peon, who lowered him gently to his chair. Then he said, ‘It is only now that I know what colour means.’

‘What does it mean?’ asked the short man at the back.

‘What?’

‘You said it’s only now that you know what colour means.’

Xavier looked at the man for the first time.

‘Colour is a way of speaking, not seeing. Poets need colour, and musicians too. But painters should forget it. Colour, if you don’t mind me saying so, is a crutch, like the necessity of God. For some nineteenth-century European painters, the absence of God was as intolerable as the absence of colour. They used the entire spectrum for every negligible little thing, a rain-slicked street, a house on a cliff, boats on a lake. I’m sorry to say it makes little or no sense for a painter in Bombay or Delhi or Bhopal to use a similar approach. Where’s the context? If you want to make something genuine in this climate you have to think about indolence and brutality. Also: unintentional comedy. But there’s no use saying this to you. You’ll only misunderstand and misquote me, and I will end up sounding pompous or foolish, which is really the same thing.’

Iskai said the meeting was over. He said Xavier would not be signing books. He thanked the audience and pointed them to the exit. People talked among themselves and nobody got up to leave. Even the elderly critic in the front row seemed satisfied. Xavier hadn’t let them down.

I sat where I was. I’d had a long and exhausting day. I’d just begun work at a pharmaceutical company where my job was to proofread the house newsletter. It was dull business. I spent long hours correcting articles on the umbrella benefits of broad-spectrum antibiotics, or the latest research in the treatment of fungal complaints. But the job put me in lovely proximity to high-grade narcotics. I had access to government-controlled morphine, to sleeping pills, painkillers, synthetic opiates, to all kinds of fierce prescription downers. That morning, unable to stop by Rashid’s on my way to work, I’d taken two strips of Prodom from the shop stores. They were a miracle cure for whatever ailed you, two pills and you were staggering around as if you’d been drinking vodka all morning. It helped me forget that I was opium sick. Later I stopped at Rashid’s for an hour and made it to PEN in time for the reading. With the downers and a pipe of O under my belt I was numb, if not
rubbery
. I wasn’t as wasted as Xavier, but I was in the same neighbourhood. When I opened my eyes, I saw I was the only audience member still in the hall. Xavier was asleep in a wheelchair and Iskai spoke to him in a low monotone. Nobody noticed except Madame Blavatsky, whose eyes followed me around the room.

‘Come on now, Newton, do wake up. I promised to get you home in one piece. I know you can hear me, so wake up, old boy, it’s a question of will.’ When he saw me getting to my feet, he said, ‘Look, could you help me out? The bloody peon has disappeared: it’s probably past his official working hours. Would you mind taking Mr Xavier down while I go and find a taxi?’

I agreed, of course, and pushed the wheelchair with the still-unconscious Xavier out of the building to the gate. But when the wheelchair stopped, he opened his eyes. He was perfectly composed.

‘Okay, thanks. I’m assuming Akash left you here to look after me, but why aren’t you looking for a taxi?’

‘Mr Iskai went to find one.’

‘That might take all night. Let’s go.’

I was still unsteady on my feet. And when I saw a taxi out of the corner of my eye and turned to hail it, my own momentum carried me twice around. I fell heavily to the road, hurting my elbow. The PEN night watchman picked me up and put me in the cab. Then he did the same with Xavier. He told the driver to take me to my hostel in Colaba and to drive Xavier to his hotel, which was in the same general direction. And so it was that Newton Xavier ended up dropping me home. He did it angrily and he made a bitter speech.

‘Unbelievable. Where did Akash find you? You can barely walk and he puts you in charge of me. I end up minding the minder. What a lovely pile of shit.’

‘Let me understand this, you’re berating me?’

‘You’re welcome, asshole.’

He stared out of the window as the taxi sped past Hutatma Chowk and the tiered breasts of Flora and her friends, toward the sodium lights of Colaba Causeway and the Victorian ruins piled one on top of the other, once-grand facades behind which squalor lived, and more squalor, cobbled alleys lined with cots on which the better-off pavement sleepers settled for the night, as the speckled water, the septic seething water, the grey-green kala paani, the dirty living sun-baked water lapped against the sides of the broken city. This is how I would describe the taxi ride later, when I embellished the story of my evening with the famous drunken painter, who was taking small contented sips from a nip bottle of whisky.

‘Wait a minute,’ I said. ‘Didn’t I read somewhere that you were on the wagon?’

‘On, off, off, on. I have a friend who says you never really quit, all you do is take breaks.’

He nodded politely and took another sip. Then, as if he were asking about my job or the weather, he said, So, what are you on? I debated it. I did, for about half a minute, and then I thought how laughable it was that I was bashful about confessing my drug use to an alcoholic. I told him, and of course he wanted to see Rashid’s. He’d tried opium in Thailand, had in fact spent a month in Chiang Mai smoking too much for his own good, but that had been many years earlier. He’d heard about Bombay’s drug dens and he would be in my debt if I took him to the khana. If there was anything he could do for me in return, I should consider it done. And there was nothing to worry about; he would not talk about it. In fact, he had more to lose than I did if word got out that he’d been carousing in Bombay’s red light district. He could keep a secret. The question was, could I?

It was late, but I knew Rashid’s would be open and it was a simple thing to redirect the cab and keep the driver waiting with the promise of a tip. On the way, the painter continued to sip at his whisky without offering me a taste, and soon we were falling up the wooden steps to the khana, where Bengali sat bent over a newspaper and Dimple was making herself a pipe. For a moment I saw the room from a stranger’s eyes; I saw a wavering image, unreal, something out of the sixteenth century. I stood there in my bell-bottoms and I felt like an interloper from the future come to gawk at the poor and unfortunate who lived in a time before antibiotics and television and aeroplanes.

I ordered two pyalis and let Xavier go first. Who’s the old man? Dimple asked, having assumed from Xavier’s subdued manner and tone of voice that he was from Elsewhere (a place where Hindi wasn’t spoken or understood). But he replied in the same colloquial Bambayya she had used.

‘My dear, I’m not that much older than you. My hair’s white and my bones are rickety but that’s because I drink. I look older than I am. Whereas you look your age.’

I told Dimple she’d seen his work in a magazine some weeks earlier. She didn’t remember, but Bengali did. He spoke from deep inside a nod. Christ, Bengali said, from the Sanskrit ghrei, to rub, which in Greek became Christos, the anointed, which may mean that Christ is an Indo-European concept, much as your paintings suggest. And that was when Xavier realized that though Bengali’s eyes were closed he was looking directly at him. I reminded Dimple that she’d been disturbed by Xavier’s pictures, which was a pure reaction, maybe the most gratifying response an artist could expect. I was addressing Dimple, but I was speaking for Xavier’s benefit. I was showing him off to her, it’s true, but I was also showing her off to him. Addicts are alike in that way, we’re always eager to show civilians our subterranean relationships and outlaw skills. At the time, I still thought of Xavier as a civilian.

‘And now here he is in person,’ I said. ‘Isn’t it incredible?’

It was at this moment that Bengali whimpered in his dream and uttered a sentence nobody understood. We heard only the last word: kaun?

Dimple shook her head once. There was nothing incredible about it, she said. I thought it was so because I spoke English, because I read books, and because my parents paid for my education and my upkeep. For me everything was surprising, the world was full of wonder, the most random idiotic occurrence was incredible because my luck made it so. For people like her, for the poor, the only incredible thing in the whole world was money and the mysterious ways in which it worked.

She’s right, Xavier said. Only the rich can afford surprise and or irony. The rich crave meaning. The first thing they ask when faced with eternity, and in fact the last thing, is: excuse me, what does this mean? The poor don’t ask questions, or they don’t ask irrelevant questions. They can’t afford to. All they can afford is laughter and ghosts. Then there are the addicts, the hunger addicts and rage addicts and poverty addicts and power addicts, and the pure addicts who are addicted not to substances but to the oblivion and tenderness that substances engender. An addict, if you don’t mind me saying so, is like a saint. What is a saint but someone who has cut himself off, voluntarily, voluntarily, from the world’s traffic and currency? The saint talks to flowers, a daffodil, say, and he sees the yellow of it. He receives its scent through his eyes. Yes, he thinks, you are my muse, I take heart from your stubbornness, a drop of water, a dab of sunshine, and there you are with your gorgeous blooms. He enjoys flowers but he worships trees. He wants to be the banyan’s slave. He wants to think of time the way a tree does, a decade as nothing more than some slight addition to his girth. He connives with birds, and gets his daily news from the sound the wind makes in the leaves. When he’s hungry he stands in the forest waiting for the fall of a mango. His ambition is the opposite of ambition. Most of all, like all addicts, he wants to obliterate time. He wants to die, or, at the very least, to not live.

Dimple said, ‘I need a translator to understand you.’

‘I think I do too,’ said Xavier, ‘I think maybe I’m going off my head again.’

I said, ‘Saints and addicts, I like that.’

And that was when Dimple asked the question I couldn’t answer for many years. She asked why it was that I, who could read and write and had a family that cared enough about me to finance my education, who could do anything I wanted, go anywhere and be anyone, why was I an addict? She didn’t understand it.

At the time, I couldn’t either. I didn’t know my own compulsions well enough to reply. Instead, I broke out the pharmaceutical morphine I’d stolen from the office stores and made myself a small shot. Xavier had one too.

When she tapped the stem he took the pipe and held it comfortably, the way a man holds a telescope, with two or three fingers. She said later that she felt his eyes travel the length of her body and settle on her cunt and all the while he pulled at the pipe, the sound loud in the room, and she felt that he was sucking at her amputated penis, sucking in a way that would end her life if she didn’t resist him. Some time later, she heard the sound of water, running water, as if a tap were open somewhere, or not the sound of water exactly, but a voice imitating the sound of water, a voice that was low and uninterested and busy and she realized it was his voice and he was speaking to her. Eunuchs used to carry quills in their turbans, he said, like a portable penis that could be attached when they wished to urinate. I’m sure you could get something custom made, bone or hard plastic, a funnel of some sort, something you could carry with you. Imagine how much easier it would be. You wouldn’t have to sit, you could stand and pee like a man. She noticed that his eyes protruded like the eyes of a snake or a lizard, pop eyes that didn’t blink or waver. She understood that it was very important to close her own eyes and breathe calmly. But when she shut her eyes she felt him in her anal cavity, a dry grating pressure that threw words into her head she could not dislodge: Satan. Shaitan. Shat On. She opened her eyes in panic and just then he exhaled a great cloud of smoke, too great for a single pair of lungs, and she saw only his torso clad in white kurta and churidars: where the head should have been there was thick vapour, as if a burning sword had decapitated him, as if inside he was all smoke, a man-shaped river of smoke that was leaking into the room. Later she said it was at this moment that she began to pray and the prayer that rose to her lips was not Muslim or Hindu but Christian, and she said it to herself in English: Hell mary midriff god pray fussiness now and at thee owruff ower death.

I got up at midnight. There was a twelve-thirty curfew at my hostel and in any case it was time we were on our way. But Xavier wanted biryani and kababs, which he hoped Bengali would be kind enough to bring from Delhi Durbar’s late-night window. He wanted more whisky and maybe another pipe. When I got up, Dimple did too. Xavier asked why she was leaving. Was she afraid of being alone with an old man? She told me to go ahead. She would stay and shut up shop.

The cab was still waiting and I took it home to Colaba. In my room, which faced the street, there was a smell of camphor from the evening’s anti-mosquito effort. I opened the window and the moonlight lit up the bed and desk and mirror (the only furnishings) as if I’d turned on an electric lamp. I arranged myself in the usual way, on my back with my hands folded across my chest. I slept and woke suddenly and found that the sheets were wet and there was a gash between my legs. I tried to stop the blood with my hands but it soaked into my trousers and filled my shoes. I fell asleep with my shoes on, I thought stupidly, touching the crusted blood that had formed on my thighs. I looked on the floor but there was nothing there except moonlight and dust. I was reaching blindly for the telephone when I woke up. It was noon and I was in the same position in which I’d fallen asleep. Though I’d slept for ten hours I was exhausted and sweaty. I had a shower and ate lunch in the mess. I did the laundry and went back to my room where I arranged and rearranged the objects on my desk. By four in the afternoon I could think of nothing else and I was on my way out the door when the hostel manager said there was someone waiting to see me. In the lounge, a grand name for what was in reality nothing more than a corridor without light or air, was Akash Iskai reading a newspaper. He wore a blue T-shirt that had been washed many times and he looked slightly less like a Hindustani musician than he had at Xavier’s event. The poet had
gotten
my address from the PEN watchman, who said Xavier and I had gone off together in a taxi. Iskai had
assumed
his friend would be fine, but he knew now his friend was not fine at all. Xavier had disappeared. He wasn’t at his hotel and he hadn’t turned up for a press conference at the gallery where the new show was about to open. Where was he? Did I know? Iskai said he felt responsible for the latest disaster that had overtaken the poor man. He would be blamed if something had happened because the PEN event had been his idea and he had organized the funds to bring Xavier to Bombay. I thought about what Xavier had said the night before, that he didn’t want it to get around that he’d been smoking opium. And, I thought, Xavier is a man of the world. It would be wrong not to offer him the minimum respect one gave an adult, which was the option to let himself down, with a crash perhaps, if that was what he wished to do. I told Iskai that Xavier had dropped me off first and gone in the direction of his Colaba hotel, that he seemed fine at the time. And of course I hadn’t noted the taxi’s registration number, why would I? Iskai went off, still upset, and I went to Rashid’s.