Hello! Brothers & sisters, see a narrative on how everyone is up for Holiness

Chennai: The old aphorism “the road to hell is paved with good intentions”, often attributed to St. Bernard, is an epigrammatic take on the inconceivability of human life without good and evil. The idea- the essential polarity of these two attributes- has tormented the greatest of poets, artists, thinkers, saints and masters of political praxis inspired by messianic calls down the ages. Yet the ‘river of life’, amid great uncertainties, moves on with both.

The predicament in a “Godless world” could be even worse, from masochism, anarchism, nihilism to even cultural fascism, each ideological shield popping up as it were, as both instruments of knowledge and action to the utter peril of humanity and human creativity.

When Nietzsche’s ‘Zarathustra’ extolled, “I demand the greatest good precisely because one is capable of all the evil”, there was a profound message in it. It alluded to the self-overcoming of one’s being, what the great German thinker called, “without hatred for the past” – my Philosophy teacher in college told us it is very difficult to find an apt translation for its German equivalent — From Buddha, to Christ, Mahatma Gandhi, the late Kanchi Parmacharya, Sri Chandrasekharendra Saraswathi and Ramana Maharishi to a Ramchandra Gandhi, we find those souls wrestled with those very same moral issues.

Sahitya Aksademi Award winner and Kerala-born writer, Jeet Thayil’s latest masterly novel, ‘The Book of Chocolate Saints’, looks as yet another massive objectification of these very same predicaments, told through the story, in a remarkably different literary mould, of a maverick who thought ‘monogamy was monotony’, a highly gifted Indian painter who gave up writing poetry early, pulled up in school for dirty drawings in toilets, later living in New York, straddling different worlds, journeying back and forth from there through various Indian cities to destination New Delhi, until ‘breaking news’ TV channels run the scroll, ‘Newton Xavier Disappeared, Feared Dead’.

However, in a later conversation in the novel, between a journalist, Dismas Bambai and Goody Lol, Xavier’s partner and muse, it is revealed that the artist who was purportedly ‘abducted’ had been later released by a conservative Pentecostal group, on a street in Fort Kochi, “but only after carving a Swastika on his forehead.”

As Goody exclaims, “Holy war is contagious and everybody wants it. The future is holiness. We’ll be saints, to quote New (short for the painter Newton Xavier).”

That stunning one-line summary of the mindset of the present world, post the 9/11 bombing of the twin towers of the World Trade Centre (WTC) in New York and an attempted foray into the Pentagon, is what the author appears to be cautioning us against.

The wave of cultural insularity that is engulfing societies, across religions, ethnicities and so on seems to be an ironic throwback to what social reformists like Swami Viekananda derided long years ago as the religion of ‘touch-me-not-ism’ “Don’t touch me; my religion is in the Kitchen and my God in the cooking pot.” That heuristic device to turn the world’s attention to the need for a universal religion based on brotherhood and love, appears to be kicking itself backwards in time to proclaim an insular world-view!

The paradox of this cultural condition in a globalised economy, where countries are jostling for strategic spaces and markets on the world stage, is a message that subtly comes across in this novel. Whether it is a Tamil software professional in Boston told not to speak in his language to his wife back home while waiting to take a flight from the US or Amrik Singh, as in the novel, having to cut his hair short to avoid any misidentification with a Muslim ‘terrorist’ post 9/11, the work is strewn with such insightful reportage, weaved around the central characters of Xavier, Goody and his other friends.

“Sikhs are being singled out because they wear, distinctive turbans that resemble the head wrap of terror chief Osama Bin Laden,” writes the author, adding, “the New America – post America, the dream of equality cuddled into race paronia.”

This is just one of the scores of stylistically brilliant and pithy summations that is a delightful aspect of this narrative by Jeet Thayil, whose earlier novel, ‘Narcopolis’ won the 2012 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature.

The author, having been a journalist himself, uses to the hilt the technique of face-to-face interviews with a whole range of personalities by the scribe in the novel, Dismas Bambai, to string garlands of pen-portraits of the protagonist as shared by a diversity of voices.

They not only show how often it is a thin line that divides fiction and real life – for instance one of the persons interviewed is the well known Bengaluru-based journalist T J S George, who recalls how Xavier came down to the garden city to perform the last rites of his once insane mother who died in the National Institute of Mental Health there.

Such voices not only enrich a tapestry of ‘forms within form’ of the narrative, but they also seem to enable the author to simultaneously span several time zones, link the past and the present in one seamless continuum as it were. The ‘future’ as the author indicates in his epilogue, is the “picture of Goody Lol….where all of us will eventually reside,” an unabashed affirmation of Women’s empowerment.
 Goody Lol also has the “rights to Xavier’s estate”, one important reason writer Dismas Bambai is desperate to meet her again at her Defence Colony home in New Delhi, for Bambai wants to publish his next book, “The Book of Chocolate Saints, his oral history of Xavier, using a representative sample of Xavier’s poems.” “For that he would need Goody’s permission.”  

Implied in these interactions is a stinging self-critique of the craft of journalism itself, as it is practiced today with premium on sensationalism and “embellishment”, an aspect that Goody Lol does not like about Bambai’s earlier book on the ‘Bombay Poets’ led by Nissim Ezekiel. “Not a shred of evidence, hearsay held up as truth, but so many people took it seriously,” sighs Goody. A point to ponder and a novel set to make waves.