‘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.