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.’
Chapter Three A Painter Visits
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 welclass="underline"
Sonnet
God & dog & dice & day
Live forever, like Man.
Nothing dies; no way, I say.
The world turns according to plan,
Everything endlessly recycled
Into endless Life:
The way you laugh & say, ‘Like hell,’
This fly, the light, his gone young wife,
All are alive & will always live,
Here, or elsewhere.
So — open your arms to me, give
Me the scent of your skin & clean hair,
Hold me, your lost brother,
Love me so we live forever, everywhere.
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.