‘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.