Narcopolis (22 page)

a

b

a

a

c

a

a

d

d

a

e

e.

In the next stanza the
e
rhyme takes first place:

e

a

e

e

b

e

e

c

c

e

d

d.

And in the third stanza the
d
rhyme takes first place and so on until the final stanza when each of the words occurs once, for the last time. The arrangement and rearrangement of rhyme words allows each to be first among equals, even if it’s for one stanza only. It’s as ingenious a form as any you can name and certainly more demanding than most. Here, Soporo stopped and raised both hands in the air as if he was placating an angry mob. He said, Okay, okay, bear with me for a moment. The point is this: why did the poet invent such a difficult form? Did he have nothing better to do? Was he some kind of curmudgeon who wanted to make a difficult art more difficult still? Or was he simply perverse, which he must have been to some extent, after all he was a poet, and a good one. When asked, the poet said at first that he didn’t belong to those who may be asked after their whys. Then he said he wanted to make a form that was akin to wrapping himself in chains, because within the prison of the form it was pure exhilaration and freedom to write such a poem. So, there’s freedom and there’s freedom. Now, said Soporo, here’s my confession. I may take heroin again. I may do it tonight, when you’ve all gone home and I’m alone in my room, reading a book and drinking tea, or not even reading, just looking out the window at the street and the cars going by. I don’t smoke, I don’t drink, I don’t take drugs and I live alone. I look at the cars that are full of people and I look at my hands and wonder what to do with them and it’s a possibility, it’s always a possibility that I’ll go out and catch a cab and take it to a place I know. I may do it and I may not. Either way, I’m free to make a choice because it affects no one else in the world except myself, and that, friends, is the happy and unadorned truth of the matter.

Soporo said he was tired. He would have liked to talk for longer but he got tired quickly these days. He said there was just one last thing he wanted to do before they called the meeting to an end. He wanted to say something about planned obsolescence. The first English movie he saw was in 1979 or 1980 at Eros, which at the time was Bombay’s grandest movie theatre, located near Churchgate Station, as they all knew, and if they didn’t they certainly should. The movie was set in Los Angeles in the not-distant future, in fact, in the near future. As far as he could remember, it was about a corporation that made highly intelligent fighting machines, human-looking creatures built to self-destruct after a few years, five years, or four, because the corporation, being a corporation, was run by paranoid bureaucrats who didn’t want a race of super beings running around the planet. As the time grows closer to their annihilation, the brilliant killer machines, blessed or cursed with human sweetness and human rage, become desperate. They decide to find the head of the corporation, their creator, the god who made them in his imagined image, though in reality he is nothing like them, he is unbeautiful, intellectual, distant. They dream up a way to enter the fortress in which he lives and persuade him to reverse the death sentence embedded in their cells, the sentence of accelerated decrepitude, as they call it. This is defiance and the viewer sitting in his seat feels some of their exhilaration as the humanoids call their god to task. But even god cannot change their fate: once written it is irreversible. The leader of the renegades speaks softly to his maker. I want more life, father, he says. Then he kisses him and crushes his skull, as sons tend to do to their fathers. The group of beautiful machines dies one by one until only the leader is left, the most beautiful and dangerous of them all, and when it’s his time to die he makes an unexpected gesture of mercy. He allows the detective who has been hunting him to live, the venal human detective who has killed his lover and his friends, who has pursued them and shown no mercy, he allows this killer to live, saves him in fact, because at the last moment, as he sees his own life come to a close, he gives in to sentimentality. And which viewer does not feel a little of his torment? Here Soporo paused and his gaze wandered around the room and settled on the cross, as if he had never before seen such a strange object, and he repeated the words
planned obsolescence
. I wonder, said Soporo, if you’ve heard the phrase before, because I saw it recently and now I don’t remember where. But the idea is that companies design products with a short life, like the pretty computers I see these days, with the shiny logos, the biblical half-eaten fruit and so on, pretty objects that are built to self-destruct, so you buy another in a few years, and another and another, and in that way you feed the insect empire, the insects in their insect suits, thinking insect thoughts with their sexed-up insect brains. Yes, and finally, Soporo said, to end, he would make two points. First, nothing he’d said that day was original or new, they were ideas he picked up from the air, from things people said or didn’t say, from shreds collected long ago or a moment earlier, collective, shared notions or emotions. Second, he wanted to suggest an antidote to obsolescence, planned or not, and to decrepitude, accelerated or otherwise. His idea was a group lament, a gong, which, in China, meant something collective or shared. The lament he had in mind was a short one, and how could it be otherwise, since no lament could be long enough to express the grief of the world? His suggestion was that each person spend a few minutes thinking about the people they’d lost, those boys and girls and men and women who had been taken by garad heroin, and that they say the names of their dead ones, say them quietly or aloud, it didn’t matter, but say the whole name, because that was the way to do it, say the whole name and remember, that was the way to honour the dead.

There was a time, even after he’d moved into two small rooms at the rectory, when he was at Safer almost every day. Now he went only three times a week, for meetings and for housekeeping, to settle accounts, buy provisions, medicine, clothes and linen, and to fix problems when they arose. He was a kind of liaison between Father Fo and whoever was in charge of the day-to-day, which would be Bull. The arrangement left him free to do whatever he felt like, which, lately, wasn’t much. He was on the terrace talking to Charlotte the cook, telling her the same things he’d been saying for months, repeating them as if she was a child, which she most decidedly was not. Use less oil, he told her. Don’t overcook. When you’re cooking prawns put them in last and turn off the flame. Do what the Chinese do, high heat, bite-size pieces, a couple of minutes of cooking and, Charlotte, are you hearing any of this? And that was when Bull asked to see him. They took a stroll around the terrace while Charlotte chopped the veggies and marinated the meat and washed rice. It’s about the new turkey, said Bull. He’d run away the day before, taken off while they were on their way to Soporo’s lecture, and now he was back asking to be let in. The guy was a hard case, an asshole, part of the prison rehab experiment, Bull said, and he should be taught a lesson. Bull thought they should let him stew, let him spend a couple of days on the street and he’d return a changed man. Otherwise, he was going to be a lot of trouble, he was going to be more trouble than he was worth, Bull could smell it. Soporo grinned suddenly. He said, Suppose I’d said that about you when you first turned up here? Do you remember what an asshole you were? Bull said, You can’t save everybody, you know. Some souls are beyond saving. They went down to the third floor where Rumi was waiting on the other side of the staircase gate. He was nodding out on the steps. He opened his eyes when he heard Soporo and Bull, but he didn’t get up. I would let you in, said Soporo, but I’m told that it may not be a good idea. Rumi looked Soporo in the eyes and said: Please let me in. I give you my word it won’t happen again. I don’t believe you, said Bull. You’re not making the decisions here, said Rumi. You see? Bull told Soporo. You see what I mean? The guy’s beyond rehab, we’re wasting our time. Rumi said: Mr Soporo, I give you my word, sir. It won’t happen again. This time I won’t let you down. Soporo told Bull to open the gate, which was unlocked, and Rumi went up without another word. That day he didn’t say much. He ate his meals, did his share of work, slept well. In the following days, too, he seemed changed, as if he’d reconciled to the sober life. Later, after the terrible events that followed had been analysed and analysed some more, the inmates remembered how different he’d seemed in those days, how interested he was in everything, in the running of the centre, in its history, and in Soporo’s personal story. It was inspiring, he said, so inspiring that he wanted to know everything about the man. Then, three days later, he did it again, disappeared for a night and a day and returned just as dinner was being served.

Bull called Soporo at the rectory saying Ramesh was back and demanding to be let in, but this time they couldn’t do it. There were rules. A prison intake was only allowed the single slip; two, and they were within their rights to send him back to Arthur Road or Yerawada or Tihar or wherever it was he belonged, because one thing was certain, he had no place at Safer. Also, he’d been asking to see Soporo in person, not asking, demanding, as if he was in a restaurant and he wanted to complain to the manager. Bull hadn’t allowed him in and he’d gone to the abandoned yards across the street where he’d walked into one of those drainage pipes and no doubt was getting high at that very moment. Bull suggested they wait until morning, then call the authorities and let them take the guy away. We’ll see, Soporo replied, and he put down the phone. His back was acting up, had been acting up for days, and he felt like he was coming down with something, a cold maybe, and he put aside the book he was looking at and went into the kitchen to make a cup of tea. He put water on to boil and cut ginger into long strips and put half a lemon into the squeezer. He poured the hot water into a big cup, dunked and removed a bag of Ceylon tea, added the ginger and lemon and took the cup with him into the living room, where he measured a teaspoon of honey from a small bottle on the dining table. He sat in his chair by the window and looked for the moon above the rooftops and though he couldn’t see it he thought he saw its reflection in a building window. He looked around the room as he took a sip of the tea. It was small and unpretentious: on the floor were books stacked against the wall, because he had never gotten around to having shelves made, and there were postcards taped to the mirror and money plants in glass bottles and plenty of light (the apartment faced east) and some air. It was a quiet place; in Father Fo’s words, ‘serene and modest’. He took another sip and winced a little: there was too much lemon. He thought, I’ll be sorry to leave here.

He put on his shoes and took a stick with him, because at night the streets belonged to the dogs. As he left the church, walking quickly in the dark, he banged into someone, who fell to the road shouting: Aiee, aiee, my foot. Who is it? Devil, devil. Then he recognized Tara or Sitara, who swept and swabbed the church and helped Charlotte in the kitchen. She said: Forgive me, Father Onar, I didn’t know it was you. Please forgive me. Where are you going at this hour? As he helped her to her feet and assured her he was fine, he told her not to call him father, but he had said this to her many times before and he had no doubt she would forget the words as soon as she heard them. Soporo came out of the church grounds and walked away from the main road towards Bandra East. After a while he saw the drainage pipes, a dozen of them, giant pipes spread haphazardly around the periphery of the yard, and then he heard someone singing and followed the voice. He could make out only some of the words. A man with a beautiful house, a beautiful wife and a beautiful car wakes up one day and realizes that none of his prized possessions belongs to him. The song was disjointed and out of key until Rumi came to what sounded like the chorus, something about living in a big womb. He was sitting at the lip of the pipe with paraphernalia spread around him, a candle, a box of wax matches and a lighter, vials with caps of different colours, half a dozen loose cigarettes and silver foil. When he saw Soporo he got to his feet, though he continued singing for a minute. After a while, Rumi said, Mr Soporo, sir, how nice of you to grace my humble abode with your famous presence. Please sit if you can find somewhere that’s not too shabby. Oh, I almost forgot, you’re no stranger to shabbiness, are you? Then Rumi smiled, or tried to smile. He said, I knew you’d come. I know who you are. Soporo said, No, you don’t. I knew as soon as I saw you, said Rumi. And I knew you’d come. I even know what you’re going to do next. You’re going to let me come back to Safer and stay as long as I want. If I ask for money you’re going to give it to me. You’re going to let me do whatever in other words the fuck I feel like. You know why? Soporo found a concrete block in the yard’s debris. He sat down and sneezed. He said, Tell me why. Rumi said, Because you don’t judge, you never did. You accept everything without condemnation. Why do you think I told you those things? You were like a doctor or priest, never surprised by anything, least of all what people did. I knew you’d never tell, so I told you. I left out things, of course. Then Rumi told Soporo some of the things he’d left out. For instance, he said, he’d left out the story about the insane woman who lived under Grant Road Bridge, the lice-infested crazy woman with her lice-infested baby. So inadequate, he said. Everything. I mean, what can you say about such a baby? What can be said about the mother? Then he pretended to think. And who else? Yes, a beggar woman on Arab Gully. She wanted to die, begged me to kill her, and I wouldn’t, because I hadn’t appointed myself God’s executioner. And then I did, because it was my social service. So, the question is, what’s the worst that can be said about me – that I put two or three people out of their misery? By the way, I’d do the same for you, but what would be the point? You’re already dead. He sat down and soon he was nodding so low that his head touched the ground. Soporo got up at last and went to him. He saw a rapid pulse beating in Rumi’s throat. A crow squawked somewhere nearby; at that time of night it was an unexpected sound. There was a smell of burning, garbage or leaves, and a plane passed overhead, flying incredibly low. Soporo looked at Rumi and thought, How easy it would be.