Narcopolis Read Free Page B

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 well:
    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.
    ‘Perhaps you can tell us what the falling-out was about?’
    ‘Colour, brother Iskai. What else? It brought us together and tore us apart. I should mention that things were more desperate then. We were at the JJ School of Art, learning to paint by numbers, eating dead meat shipped out by the Royal School and the Bengal School, and then we discovered Picasso and Van Gogh and Gauguin. We were young, feeding off each other. Everything was