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M.T. Karthik

~ works, thoughts, events of 1977 – 2017

M.T. Karthik

Tag Archives: short

Book Review: Midnight Mass by Paul Bowles

20 Wednesday Dec 2017

Posted by mtk in Book Review, nostalgia, reviews

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I believed I had read all the fiction Paul Bowles ever published in these 18 years since his death. The discovery last week of the short story collection Midnight Mass, with the familiar Black Sparrow paperback binding – earthy tan with green and purple block print – was thus a very emotional experience.

20171220_143854_Film1

Immediately I was flooded by memories and thoughts of the man I considered my favorite author from the time I discovered him in ’87, the summer I got my first tattoo, until his death at the end of the last century.

Instantly, too, in that powerful way that great literature connects us with the world we are in, I remembered myself experiencing his works: where I was, the effect it had upon me. The empowerment and awe I felt after finishing one of his short stories or novels: blown away.

Paul Bowles was a huge influence on me as a writer and thinker. He was one of the most powerful allies in my struggle with immigration to the United States and in philosophical discourse in Europe. That he wrote from the subconscious as described by his wife, Jane, was the most romantic and amazing concept to me when I was young and I longed to be able to do that – not to understand it, but to do it.

The utter irrationality of the Western project, the neoliberal insanity we have all endured so long, was exposed by Bowles and then swiftly and violently shattered by the reality of life among the desert people of North Africa. In other works, a slow and seemingly disconnected series of events between locals in a village would be described with such lucidity and simplicity that the differences in thinking between east and west were made suddenly crystalline in the end – hits you like a koan.

The collision of culture was total and instead of Coca-Cola and the Golden Arches mowing down the village, the puny, minuscule westerners melted away in the heat of the Saharan sun, driven mad.

Midnight Mass is the last collection of Bowles’ short stories published by Black Sparrow and features at its center the elegant, drifting, rootless novella Here To Learn, a gorgeous story about a girl from North Africa who just keeps moving buoyed by her beauty, her wit and her ability to learn quickly how to negotiate the West.

The collection starts with the titular story, Midnight Mass, one of Bowles’ incredible parties; the Nazarenes careening around in their expatriated stupor of drinking, carousing and complaining, the locals bursting with romance only to become suddenly something else – the change of face.

There are stories about the locals and their fantastic, sometimes circuitous logic and its culmination in a kind of basic justice. There are tales about the utter undoing of our perception of a shared understanding of this world.

At the Krungthep Plaza is an amazing story set as the U.S. President is due to pass through a certain North African village. The machinations behind the scenes and the conflicts between locals, expats and the security teams are expertly related, culminating in a wild effusion of emotions that I can only described as angst against the way things are now.

It’s all just so great. I miss Paul Bowles.

(sigh)

Paul Bowles, 18 years after he died, was the best writer I read this year.

 

 

 

Mysolation, a short film concept

23 Thursday Nov 2017

Posted by mtk in Commentary, conceptual art, short film

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The Outsider Inside – a short film

16 Friday Nov 2012

Posted by mtk in fiction, Oakland, performance, S.F., short film

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a.p., airport, Balas, Brooks, consuelo, dangle, dj, earle, ferrara, fiction, film, Francisco, inside, James, jason, JFR, Karthik, Kevin, KoKo's, lloyd, Lounge, m.t., manning, mtk, narrative, OAK, oakland, outsider, Raj, Robert, rosencrantz, San, sf, short, tanner, the, Walt

“The Academy and the Government are always the last, the very last, to state the truth.”

– Dr. Robert Brooks

a narrative short fiction about two academics, one an invited guest of the other, who meet in the SF Bay and discuss aspects of the state of the world, briefly, but disagree.

produced and directed by M.T. Karthik
camera/lighting by Jason F. Rosencrantz
edited by MTK (with JFR); written by MTK (with JFR and Lloyd Dangle)
starring: James Earle as Dr. Robert Brooks, MTK as Dr. Raj Balas
and acting as “the students”: Lloyd Dangle, Walt Tanner and A.P. Ferrara

with Chris as the bartender and DJ Consuelo on decks
music: Alma de cera by Abel Duêrê, undercooled by Ryuichi Sakamoto, zigga zigga bite off 3 Feet High and Rising by de la soul, piano track by Vijay Iyer

thanks to OAK airport and KoKo’s Lounge

Before You Came, short fiction, 2008

28 Tuesday Oct 2008

Posted by mtk in fiction, NYC

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The bed is relieved. Two lovers lie beside each other, weightless. Amber light from a street lamp outside falls through the open window casting itself across their splayed bodies painting their skin – his chest goes deep red, her shoulders, a canvas to the shadow of the windowframe – a perfect rhombus in pale orange. She puts her arm over him.

“All right,” he murmurs, “We do it.”

“Mmmm,” she hums into his chest.

They sigh in unison.

That’s how the decision is made. He does not hide his anxiety and she senses it but says nothing more. His lips are chapped and he picks at the dry skin. The movement jostles her. She wriggles, and turns away, already drifting off to sleep. He lies awake considering a temp job.

The next day she tells her assistant, Lucy:

“We’re going to do it.”

High morning sunlight blazes through her office. Lucy enters, closes the door, flattens the blinds, then turns on the ashtray.  It was a gift — an ashtray that sucks smoke into its belly and diffuses it.

A gaily plaid-patterned pouch fluffs out under a black plastic tray containing the suction mechanism.  It looks like a sporran pulled from the navel of a Scot or, when there’s more than one cigarette resting on it, like a tiny set of bone-white bagpipes.

“Well, now you’ve gotta quit,” Lucy comments, shaking a cigarette loose from the pack on the table between them. Jennifer pulls a lighter from her purse.

“Mmm,” she agrees, “this one’s my last.”  She leans across the desk, lights Lucy’s, then her own. They smoke in silence. Jennifer rocks back in her chair as she puts the cigarette to her lips, then leans forward to exhale.  It is quiet between them in the office – the barely audible crackle of the burning paper, the long, slow exhalation of smoke into the ashtray, the soft beeps of fax machines and telephones from beyond Lucy’s desk.  Jennifer ashes.

“Well,” Lucy says, finally, “hope it’s a girl.”

The would-be father of her child sits on a bench in Union Square in a black overcoat with a wool scarf wrapped tightly around his neck; folded once lengthwise and then tucked into a loop made from halving its length — comme son ami Stan, comme un Parisian.

The scarf was a gift from Jennifer. He’d had it dry-cleaned only once: during The Horrific Autumn of the Void when Raj became convinced that noxious World Trade Center dust, porting asbestos and burnt humanity, had infected everything capable of holding it. He’d even rid himself of his beard, then. But it was back by winter – speckled with tiny white spacecraft each time it snowed.

Rajagopal Balasubramaniam americanized when he moved to New York, taking the name Raj Balas, because he felt it had a European feel. He was 19 then and the Mayor was a Jew – it was a good time to change your name.

When they first met, Jennifer thought it would be a one-night stand.  In Raj’s arms, after that hot night, she said:  “People from outside the U.S. aren’t put off by girls with a weight problem,” she said, “It’s like it’s not part of their culture to discriminate – or maybe it’s even better, you know, to have a little more on you?”

“You don’t have a weight problem,” Raj mumbled.

Since that encounter, seven years have fired by at New York’s inhuman tempo. They stayed together through four infidelities, three of which they discussed openly. Raj slept on the sofa fourteen times. Jennifer once left on short notice to stay with her mother in California but she returned after the weekend. They didn’t rush into things after nine-eleven, but knew then, for certain, where it was going.

It’s twilight in autumn when day darkens early and gray dusk speeds toward nightness – the hour of the shift change, when empty taxis return to their gates leaving tourists at street corners waving their arms in futility at yellow cars topped by bright white letters: “not-for-hire.” The city of New York breathes workers in and out – the drone bees of the great hive exhaled and inhaled, exhaled, inhaled.

In the park, Raj watches a woman in black moving fast against a stiffening wind. The woman runs to get to the subway steps. Traffic picks up.

<wheedley eedley eedley> goes his phone. “Balas,” he replies.

“Bigot!” whispers the voice of a shape-shifting creature known as a rakshasa. The streets are a tumult. There are chiseled cement barriers cast into the avenue, cracked and speckled with tar. A tattered leaf skitters across the stone surface of the pathway in front of him. It comes to rest near Raj’s shoe.  “Admit it, at least,” hisses the voice.

Raj holds the phone still against his cheek. A zephyr passes over his face. The rakshasa takes the corporeal form of a gray-flecked, tattered thing that flutters to a landing on the sidewalk.

He pockets his phone. The pigeon steps cautiously, lifting bony legs, stretching the wrinkly pink skin on its knobby legs. A scaly sheen of iridescent violet and sea-green glimmers in its neck.

“And yet you profit from avoiding conflict,” it murmurs, “you hypocrite.”

Raj looks left and right. He thinks a pigeon is talking to him. The park fills with people en route to the subway. From the pocket of his overcoat, he withdraws a crumpled, white paper sack.  He unwraps half a bagel, tears off a piece the size of his thumb and throws it down in the walkway. The pigeon pecks at it.

Several more birds gather, clucking and cooing. Raj feeds them. The light fades fast.  The thousand thousands descend from high-rises into the concrete street, all the souls of city traffic, like leaves drifting down.

Part Two
Lucy was born into a large Irish family that shared a small flat in King’s Cross, London, in the early 1980’s. There wasn’t enough room for a happy family, much less one with her father at its root.

These days, she plugs headphones into a sixteenth-inch jack attached to a radiating plastic box on her desk each morning at 7:30, faces the monitor, the door and the telephone, takes a one-hour break for lunch, returns to her hemispheric chamber for five hours in the afternoon, and then pulls out of the jack at 6, like a stopwatch, <click>.

And she does it again the next day … infinity.

This has gone on for seven years.

Lucy is a vibrant human being who has evolved into a robot trained to respond when things beep and ring:

<wheedley-eedley-eedley>

“Creative.” she sings into the receiver,

It’s Raj: “Hi Lucy, what’s up?”

“I see us as huge, flat, irradiant disks,” Lucy replies, “enormous plates of data stacked on top of each other in a hierarchy of information access. We constitute our consciousness of what is happening in the world right now from the information marketplace, consuming only what’s available at our financial level – on our particular plateau. Nobody reads anything that isn’t on the Internet any more, so it all comes down to TV.”

Ten year’s in the industry, and Lucy’s voice has been whetted for the phone: cool and metallic.

“If you’ve only got TV, you’re in the ghetto where everybody knows the same false shit. If you’ve TV but no cable, you’re broke or the nouveau chic who cut the cable after 9/11 and ran out and bought a DVD player. You watch videos, claim they’re documentaries.

“If you’ve TV and cable – and I’m talking just basic, now, because news and information ride the basic and premium packages equally – then you’re on the biggest, widest disk of all. We shop together, eat out together, form opinions together in electronic media and real time everywhere-now. We watch the same shit on a TV mounted in the back of a seat on the airplane.  Most of us have Internet access, which less than 10% of the world has …

“From our huge, flat socio-intellectual group it gets smaller – smaller disks of information consumers: satellite TV, digital, broadband, until you finally end up with the wealthy few flipping through free porn and catching Formula One live from Dubai,”

Lucy takes a breath, and in a series of quick motions, opens a drawer, pulls out a message pad and cuts the iTunes dj, midstream. “And these aren’t the Illuminati we’re talking about, Raj. These are the most powerful wankers on earth. Neroes, Raj, masturbating while Rome burns.”

In the park Raj shrugs back the chill, “I read the papers. Can you put me through, please?”

“One moment please.”

In her office, Jennifer stabs an index finger at the grey button marked “intercom” and immediately the office is filled with the airy sound of static, a plastic mic dangling in the wind.

“Hey,” she calls out.

“Goddammit, take me off.”

“What do you want?”

“Let’s celebrate …”

“I can’t.”

Cars swoosh by, a horn, in the distance, a siren. A heartbeat.
“C’mon, pick up the phone.” Jennifer takes a drag, eking out, “My hands are full here.” She exhales into the ashtray.

“When are you done?”

She sighs and flips her wrist to see the face of her watch. “I don’t know. Ten, maybe?”

“All right, look, I’m going to Gopal’s.”

“Look for pregnancy books.” Jennifer hangs up, then stabs at another line to call her mother.

“Hello?”

“We’re going to have a baby,” she blurts into the receiver. “We’ll start trying in the spring. It’s decided.”

“Are you getting married?”

“No.”

The dead nothing sound of the digital line between words, then the unmistakable sigh of her mother, “I’ll call you back.” <click>

Jennifer sets the phone down and immediately reaches for a cigarette. “This one’s my last.”

Part Three
Still radiator coolant in a puddle at the curbside bus stop shimmering electric green reflects the neon strip from a lotto sign in the window of the corner shop owned by the immigrant whose kid tagged “AMERIKKKA” everywhere after the buildings got knocked down.

Nobody here – where it’s taught early not to ask or tell too much – would say for sure that the Bush Mafia didn’t let 9/11 happen and most put up an American flag since it meant the Italians’d do business. Pimping and hoing continued at 96% efficiency while the legitimate economy tumbled blindly waiting for the murder of Arabs to save it.

Here, the same smells in an orderly way from the same places everyday, end in a mix remembered miles away as Brooklyn. Each twilight brings the sound of jet-fuel burning in the turbines of descending planes and a few hundred more people everyday. To see what exactly? New York died in the 20th century. The eleventh of September just sealed the tomb, neatly closing the era for historians. It was all so scripted.

Picture night over rooftops and chimneys. When everything is still, you see me. I am a New York night.

Ovid: There is, far above us, a way. It appears white at night and so we call it milky.

Picture a white skipping stone, pulsing, at night. That’s right, a satellite. See that skipping stone blipping regularly across the fluid blackness between the still points of ancient light that forms the great sea of time and space. I am the black sea upon which rests Ovid’s great white way.

On that first night of the new era, while you slept or tried to sleep, having nightmares or dreaming it all a dream, I was clickety-click, lickety-split, looking-climbing, seeing everywhere. I crept across rooftops from ocean to ocean, swam – one among billions of plankton – in the bitstorm on the infosea, avoiding whales of security teams: enormous beasts of agency drifting through the fluid ones and zeroes making as much useful information as stochastic noise.

I lay low, listening as they passed, singing their weird music that pushes them forever on. I became the white eyeball. Have you ever seen two men fight? I am a New York night and there is no greater authority on such matters. I host eight million egos. I catch a fight every shift.

There’s often a moment just before the shit goes down when it seems it won’t happen at all: a slouch in posture, a moment’s hesitation, the briefest instant of sanity or fatigue before the flurry of escalation that leads, ultimately, to assault. It might be a <sigh> that breaks the hard-built tension just before the nod, the push, the shove-jam-cock that ends with the <pop> of battery.

The deaths of 2,800 in my belly were the outcome of one such flurry of violent exchanges between the most desperate and the wickedest of the wealthy. The Oil Cabal Americans – whose religion is capitalism – drunk with newfound power from the success of their Millenial coup d’etat, spent the summer of ’01 baiting the fearless blackguards of the shadow markets over possession of dark crude from the shores of the Caspian Sea.

Then it was the spectacle on CNN worldwide, which means that there was a declaration of war all right, only it happened months before the morning of September 11. Perhaps years, decades and centuries come into it. Will we ever know?

No.

Instead we’re stuck with the birth of a fiction: the spectacle re-interpreted and woven into artificial jingo, accepted by at least enough people to let the war parade begin, middle and … will it ever end?

Part of the spectacle happened half a mile from the hard-angle of Gopal’s nose. It was spectacular right before his eyes. He stood on the roof of his North Brooklyn bookstore – where he’d watched the sun set a thousand times over the glittering Manhattan skyline, where he’d smoked a thousand joints after work over the last seven years – chin dropped to his chest, brow furrowed, staring in awe. He saw the fiery bursts, witnessed the collapse and the enormous hoary plume of ash, poisoned dust and rubble. He rolled a joint.

He’d have made a unique photo. His calmness from a distance linked him with no one. His hawkish South Asian nose was only accentuated by that perched posture on the bookstore rooftop staring at the nullification of the World Trade Centers. He looked more like a vulture than anything else.

Then Gopal went downstairs to watch the news. The kids had been let out of school and some of the teenagers drifted into the shop to hang out. Gopal told them their parents would want them home, and when the shop was empty, locked up downstairs, flipped the “closed” sign and went back up to the roof.

Jennifer was at her office when the second jetliner screamed past. She didn’t get back to the house until after 2 in the afternoon. She found Raj face down in his pillow and woke him with the news. He’d slept through the apocalypse.

They watched the replays of what had happened just half a mile away while he slept. They went to the roof. There they found Gopal, atop his, next door, smoking. They crossed over the flashing. It was Gopal who first said: “There’ll be backlash.”

Part Four
The First Gulf War never happened for Gopal, nor for his wife, Amrita. In May of 1990, just a few months before Bush’s Marines moved into Desert Shield, the newlywed Indian-American couple moved to Madras, she on a fellowship, he under contract. It was the month of the fire winds of Agni, that blow down from the slight eastern ghats across the desert of Tamil Nadu to the sea. Rajiv Gandhi hadn’t yet been assassinated. There was a drunken-ness in the fat, sticky afternoons.

They struggled with being Americans in India. It tore at their relationship. He drank late, often, and gave himself, swaggering, to Indian time. She found him condescending and patronizing and so was defiant when they went anywhere together. He thought her a hypocrite.

By April of the following year, while George H. W. Bush was declaring Kuwait a free republic, Gopal and Amrita were divorced.

Their families were generally unconcerned that a George Bush sought to crush Saddam Hussein and attack Iraq even then. Many secretly rather appreciated the cover that Bush’s war provided for the family misfortune – the hushed-up word and the secret bibliography of unmarried writers – “diworce.”

Bush the Elder’s war was declared over because it was bad politics. Amrita and Gopal called it quits for bad vibes. Late at night on a golf course in Bangalore, they made love, drunk, for the last time. Amrita pitied him and let it happen.

They moved back to New York and found friends who watched television at a frightening speed. Ubiquitous shrinking cel-phones led beep-beeping to workstations playing DOOM with three-dimensional range-of-motion in New York, capitol of capital – into which they leapt, single.  Well, Amrita did: she went to grad school, married a Manhattan Jew, and became something of a demi-goddess; dark, silent and lovely set against all those white people, a broad-leafed houseplant whose curved palm wove its way into everything. She grew into the role. She and David rented a flat on the upper west side. Pukka.

Gopal meanwhile, moved to Brooklyn to tend the bookstore, Subbu’s Books. North Brooklyn pronounced it, “Soo-Booze”.

When his late-uncle’s estate was settled, Gopal was a “recent divorcee”, living with his father in New Jersey. Gopal’s father received the bookstore and a small parcel of land in South India, from his Subbu-anna, which is how he was able to die where he was born, leaving Gopal alone in Brooklyn, with a fate less secure, tending an independent bookstore in turn-of-the-century New York.

They all had to learn the name, ‘Giuliani,’ then, an Italian family name he was meant to live up to while he secured the island for corporate interests and helped Disney draw worker bees to the hive. The succor: they would want to feel the rain in Central Park that had appeared to them as if in a dream; breathing steadily in a dark room anyway, while a low-whirring emanating from above projected sparkling light in the black-and-white, high contrast drops that fell on Diane Keaton and Woody Allen in Manhattan.

Hollywood and Bollywood produce dreams. And Mayors capitalize. Twenty years later, it was complete. Manhattan was a mall. Gopal had watched as Mallhattan made its way from meeting place to marketplace, marched through the Modernists and managed a much-hyped Millennium as it marked the exact end of the first Post-Modernism.

But this was all overshadowed when, at 600 miles an hour, a Boeing 757 slammed into the World Financial Center Two building downtown – an event that will forever be mistaken for the end of Post-Modernism.

Post-Modernism, an art movement of European abstraction that spread to literature and flourished in commercial quarters of the Euro-American entertainment sector, did not end on September 11th, 2001.

American Post-Modernism was authored in correspondence between R. Creeley and C. Olson as per a letter from the poet Olson in Black Mountain, North Carolina to Creeley, dated October 20th, 1951:

“And had we not, ourselves (I mean post_modern man) better just leave such things behind us – and not so much trash of discourse and gods?”

But to say it ended because of 19 Arabs or a cabal of white-supremacist’s covert Operation Northwoods is, you must know it, idiotic.

The fact is, American Post-Modernism ended two years before that fateful Tuesday morning, in October of 1999, with this utterance by the 107th Mayor of New York:

“Here’s how I know if something is art. If I can do it … it’s not art.”

which means American Post-Modernism achieved the respectable age of 48 years.

More than Orwell or Camus; and a generous figure given the very deep encroachment upon aesthetics made by commercial uglification at the hands of the sensationalist US American economic model.

More appropriately, though, Giuliani’s comment safely ends Post-Modernism in the twentieth century of the Christian’s calendar, the century when it thrived.

Mallhattan was Giuliani’s vision. It bullied, begged for attention, got it, and seized still more, until The Civic Act became so scripted that when he jailed three hundred homeless people in the last months of the twentieth century, it was taken as a matter of course.

Then, in the 21st century, they busted the cops who sodomized a man with a plunger and behind them discovered a THICK blue line: Amadou Diallo, an unarmed New Yorker, holding only his wallet and identification in his hand was shot 41 times by unmarked cops in the foyer of his own home. Holes in the soles of his feet revealed they were still firing after he was down.

Giuliani had the trial of the four police moved from The Bronx to Albany, and the four cops, who had histories of violent encounters and even petty corruption, were acquitted of all charges, including “misdemeanor reckless endangerment.” We marched.

Then 26-year-old Patrick Dorismond, father of two young girls, and a security guard who, ironically, hoped one day to be a cop himself, was shot and killed refusing drugs from an undercover officer. And in perhaps the most obscene move of his career, before Dorismond’s body was even seen by his friends and family, Giuliani launched a campaign to vilify the dead security guard in the press.

Facing a p.r. nightmare, Giuliani went on the offensive and ordered Police Commissioner Howard Safir to unseal a juvenile record on Dorismond, disclosing that he had been arrested for robbery and assault in 1987, when he was 13. But the charge, that Kendall Clark reported stemmed from a childhood fist fight over a quarter, was dropped and Patrick’s record was sealed because he was a child.

Giuliani declared that Dorismond was no “altar boy” and that his previous brush with the police “may justify, more closely, what the police officer did.” The police were then ordered – and had the audacity of power to show – at Dorismond’s funeral: cops in riot gear at the funeral of a kid they had murdered. We marched.
The name became heavier: Giuliani’s cops were out of control. Giuliani’s Times Square, Disney-fied. Mark Green, or perhaps Fernando Ferrer, was going to be Mayor.

And then, on the day of the democratic primaries, two planes flew into the world trade centers and Amerikkka was born. Giuliani and the cops … were heroes.

Gopal stocked up on Chomsky, Parenti and Zinn, restocked his Edward Said and Autobiographies of Malcolm X. In Mallhattan, Amrita went to pro-Palestinian rallies, where David carried a sign that said “ANOTHER NON-ZIONIST JEW FOR PEACE AND EQUAL RIGHTS”.

The war-fiction rolled on. And we marched.

Part Five
Subbu’s Books is a tall, narrow shop in a converted, ochre-brick row house at the end of a Brooklyn block that neatly separates two neighborhoods of different languages. Because of post-9/11 gentrification and development, the new customers are immigrants, artists, writers and film-makers.

Subbu’s sells newspapers, poetry, literature, magazines, how-to, nonfiction, a handful of first editions, calendars, selected best sellers, bookmarks, stamps, postcards and textbooks in Spanish, English, Arabic, Romance, Polish, Hindi-Urdu, Russian, Mandarin Chinese and so on. An image of the store’s founder, one V.V. Subbuswami, hangs, framed, garlanded, dusty, behind the counter. Today, Gopal, Subbuswami’s eldest nephew, makes purchasing decisions himself alone.

The block is silent but for the occasional whisper of rustling dry leaves on the asphalt. The birch out front of the shop has begun to turn; several leaves have achieved red and gold and a few yellow ones threaten to be the first to fall. Gopal hasn’t yet replaced the screens in the doors with glass and a thin, chilly breeze gusts through the shop. He props open the door to the washroom to sweep, mop and change the paper.

He was currently obsessed with American novelists of the mid-twentieth century, absorbed in a Van Wyck Brooks paperback of interviews.
After cleaning the toilet, Gopal picks up the paperback from the tank, closes the door and sits down to empty himself:

“In the summer of 1954, when he was forty, two years after winning the National Book Award in the United States for his first novel, “Invisible Man,” Ralph Ellison sat at Café de la Mairie du VI. In postwar Paris, with a group of expatriated Americans, he granted an interview to The Paris Review. It was his last day in Europe at the end of a well-traveled summer. He would return to the U.S. the next morning.

“I suspect,” Ellison said, “that all the agony that goes into writing is borne precisely because the writer longs for acceptance – but it must be acceptance on his own terms.”

Ellison, at perhaps the height of his freedom, embraced by some intellectuals and academics in New York and Europe at least, critically assured of his place in any history of the American novel – “Lolita,” would not appear until the following spring – continued:

“The Negro novelist draws his blackness too tightly around him when he sits down to write – that’s what the anti-protest critics believe. But perhaps the white reader draws his whiteness around himself when he sits down to read … he doesn’t want to identify himself with Negro characters in terms of our immediate racial and social situation, though on a deeper human level identification can become compelling, when the situation is revealed artistically.”

The interviewers describe the author as “overwhelming. To listen to him is rather like sitting in the back of a huge hall and feeling the lecturer’s faraway eyes staring directly into your own.”

Ellison, facing the literary attention of Europe and Euro-america, was direct and serious:

“The white reader doesn’t want to get too close, not even in an imaginary re-creation of society. Negro writers have felt this, and it has led to much of our failure.”

Gopal shits and reconsiders the text: “The white reader doesn’t want to get too close, not even in an imaginary re-creation of society.” He flips to the frontispiece. The little paperback had been published in the city, by Viking, in 1963; the exact year that, some thirteen thousand miles away, Gopal had fallen into this existence. “Too close to what?” he mutters.

When Raj arrives he tells Gopal: “We’re going to have a kid.”

“The aunties will have a fit if you don’t get married.”

Raj adopts a Valley Girl tone that he and Gopal once mocked, putting his hand up, palm out, “What. Ever.”  He rolls his eyes heavenward. Laughing, Gopal reaches over and high-fives the open palm.

“How old are you?” he asks.

“Thirty-six.”

Gopal shrugs and returns to his paperback.

As Raj picks at the shelves, he and Gopal spend the afternoon trying out the sound of their new names: Gopal-mama, Gopal-uncle, Appa, Dad, “Pops” and so on.

The rakshasa returns as an African-American male, 6’2″, puffy afro, in the alley behind the bookshop. Raj, who had slipped out back to piss in the street since Gopal had beaten him to the toilet, finds himself facing the demon dressed in an all-black sweatsuit with two parallel white stripes running down the pants leg.  White, block, sans serif lettering is printed across his chest: HOUSE NEGRO.

“Will you please wake up?”

Raj mumbles like an idiot, looking up and down the alley, peering back over-his shoulder at the bookshop for Gopal’s piercing eyes. “What do you want from me?”

“Come clean!” barks the brother from another planet. The rakshasa looks at Raj in disgust, steps toward him. “Take your clothes off, man, we’re swapping.”

The near-silent alleyway drips invisible trickles of water.  Several blocks away a garbage truck sounds its high-pitched, repeated <wheet-wheet-wheet-wheet> backing up to a curbside dumpster.  Raj Balas is standing naked and alone on a side street in Brooklyn, his clothes in his hands, his cock and balls hanging out.

Later, Raj lays his dark hand upon Jennifer’s pale breast – como Neruda; un reloj en la noche. He makes tiny circles with his index finger around the shades of pink.

They share the row-house next door to Subbu’s Books.  Their bedroom window looks out onto the tree-lined street. Opposite their building, the brick walls of a materials warehouse are tagged with graffiti: SOON.

“A pigeon called me a bigot yesterday.”

“I suppose it was only a matter of time,” she murmurs.

“I’m being visited by a demon. He says I’m a house nigger.”

Jennifer tenses: “I told you not to use that word in front of me.” She half lifts the sheets. “So what are you telling me?” she manages, “that your conscience is brown, too?” She rolls over, away from him, her long white back a wall of silence.

Part Six
On this day, a Sunday, they are expected in New Jersey for a garden party to be held at the home of Ramesh and Kalpana, septuagenarians who had emigrated to the U.S. in the same year as Raj’s parents and who had been close with his Uncle Subbu. “We were a Tamil family all alone here and they were Telegus,” his mother would say when he was young, with such respect and wonderment, “So, of course, Kalpana and I became like sisters.” Since his own father’s death, Raj had become closer with Ramesh-uncle and Kalpana-auntie.

The stems of chlorophyll-leaking leaves snap free, sending showers of technicolor shard drifting down to the earth, rusted and yelloween. Kalpana stands still, at the edge of the driveway on the concrete path leading to the door, looking out across the lawn.

Though she has been a resident of Northern New Jersey for the past thirty-five years, she’s never grown accustomed to the scent of fallen leaves soaked in rainwater.  The damp odor clings to her tongue, hangs thick in her nostrils. She and her neighbors order the leaves raked before the rains come. They are stuffed into bags and marched to the curb, where they stand like squat dwarves, a family of Oompa-Loompahs side by side before each house in their neighborhood.

Kalpana and Ramesh live in a private community set among curving roads over a collection of hills covered in poplars, birches and oaks.  Each home has a grassy, landscaped lawn with a copse of trees and a concrete drive connected by a sidewalk that runs along the road. A rectangular trail of grass between the sidewalk and curbside thematically unites each lawn.

From inside, she hears the phone:

<brrrrrrring>

Ramesh, tilted back in a cloth-covered easy chair in the living room, a few meters from the yellow Princess in the kitchen, makes no move to answer.  The La-Z-Boy is an immense cavern around his frail, aging body.  He is a tiny, thin South Indian man swallowed by a copy of The New York Times.

The recliner is positioned at an angle in front of a huge-screen television a few feet away. CNN is on, the volume unbearably loud.  A second ring from the old yellow phone in the kitchen: <brrrrrring>.

“I’ll take it,” Kalpana calls out, making toward the phone. “Helloo!?” Her voice is hard-edged, high-pitched and grating. When she answers the phone, she always sounds slightly irritated, to dissuade the endless parade of telemarketers and scam artists but more, to put the fear of God into anyone from her family who might call.

“Auntie?”  It’s the tinny sound of Raj Balas, swift in motion on a train marked New Jersey Transit.

“Aaaanh,” Kalpana says affirmatively, in a flat tone.

“It’s Rajagopal.”

“Aaaanh.  Aaaanh,” she repeats.  In the next room, the television blares.  Kalpana glares at Ramesh, who remains in his chair, unmoving.  “Who is it?” he shouts out from behind the Times.

“We’ll be there around 12:30,” Raj says.

Ramesh lowers the paper and looks across the living room into the kitchen. “Is it Lakshmi?”  Exasperation crawls into his voice.

“Aaanh.” Kalpana repeats, to Raj.

“WHO IS IT?!” shouts Ramesh.

Flustered, Kalpana screams into the phone, “AAAANH!”  On the train, Raj pulls the cellular away from his ear.  She lowers the receiver, covers it with her hand and shouts to Ramesh, “Pah!  It’s Rajagopal! Leave me alone! God!”

After Kalpana hangs up, she remains sitting at the kitchen table, staring into the living room at the vast, crinkly rectangle of the front and back pages of the Living Arts section that masks her husband.  Ihe television blares. She says calmly, “He is coming with Jennifer.”

“Yaarre?”

“Jennifer!” Kalpana repeats loudly.  “Che!  Why don’t you turn that thing down?”

Ramesh lowers the paper and mutes the television with a finger to the remote. He looks across at Kalpana.  “What’s he doing now?”

“He’s written an opera.”

Exactly 172 minutes later, Raj, wearing sunglasses and holding a gin and tonic, stands in Kalpana-auntie and Ramesh-uncle’s kitchen, opposite Prasad-Uncle, a 70-year-old Brahmin, in an open-collar and tee shirt, black polyester pants, who is shouting:  “Krishna says, ‘I am God!’; Christ calls himself the Son of God!  Mohammed, the Prophet of God.  Only Krishna says, ‘Who is God?  I. AM. GOD!”

A young boy runs past. Raj pulls his hips back and throws his arms out to avoid him, swinging his glass before him to prevent a spill, “Woah-ho!”

He leans back a little, pushing his free hand into his pocket; a maneuver meant to show deference to his elder with a demureness of posture in dissent. “but Uncle,” he begins, “I mean, the stories are metaphors told over and over creating a consensus on how we agree-”

“No,” replies Prasad-uncle firmly, “Consider Vyasa as a seat from which the story of God and man is told.  It is the role of a man to tell, and of God to write – it is Ganapati who writes the story after all.

“But who puts the story in the mind of man?  God.  Every dream and notion is God’s first. Until it is written it belongs to God and only the enlightened can understand it.”

“And when it is written?” Raj asks.

“Then,” Prasad-Uncle smiles triumphantly, “it belongs to man.

Jennifer approaches quietly and Raj leans forward to kiss her cheek, whispering, “What a circular viewpoint.”

She slips an arm around him. “We’ve got to get back, babe.”

On the New Jersey Transit the atheist Raj Balas is suffering helminths. These particular blood-borne parasites don’t die easily. They swim in the veins for generations. The wicked beast manifests itself in all manner of hallucinations.  Now it is auditory; an unending prattle in his mind as they speed toward Penn Station: “Faker, Fakir.”

Opposite him, Jennifer has fallen asleep, her full, white breasts gently rise and fall with her breathing; her shoulders sway left and right with the motion of the train.

Part Seven
Raj Balas’s opera characterizes Woodrow Wilson as a pedagogic Calvinist who led the U.S. into “the great war in Europe,” believing in an end to war forever and a new world order in which nation-states around the globe communicate in peace through ambassadors at a League of Nations Assembly.

The climactic moment transpires in the fifth and final scene of the third act, when the bespectacled, black-haired American President, a tenor, ascends an arpeggiated, slow-building, upper-register aria in the Oval Office.

It is the end of the war.  Wilson has prepared a grandiose plan of reparations. The following morning he will leave for Europe.  It is night.  Wilson is in his bedclothes.  First, the basses accompany him in drawn, syncopated half-notes.  Their rhythmic pulse is picked up by the cellos, that push the tempo en pizzicato.

Wilson falls to his knees.  The 14 points toward a new world order swell in volume as sectionals are added, from the strings to the woodwinds, the brass.  The cellos persist, but their frenzied pik-pik-pik can barely be heard over the ensemble of instrumentation.  The orchestra amplifies in a crescendo as Wilson climbs high above his clef into the effeminate heavens of the altos.  He rises. The opera climaxes in the fervor of the Calvinist at the height of delusion.  He stretches himself like a tautly drawn wire pursuing higher and higher pitches.  He sings, “The world shall know a peace as never before / The brotherhood of man in shared holy contemplation …” a portrait of the American President overextended at the pinnacle of doomed hubris.

From the 14 points aria, the story tumbles down through the post-war years. The production arcs through the failure of the League of Nations, its blown Senate ratification, Wilson’s fall from favor with the public.

In the closing scene, the aged, beleaguered Wilson, making unattended whistle-stop lectures across the U.S., collapses in a heart attack on the train, raving madly about meaningful dialogue between all people on earth.  And then he dies.

Winter brings calmness to the Apple.  The shopping season ends. Mallhattan rests.  Jennifer walks 23rd Street through a soft feathering snow.  It is dawn.  The silence is embracing.  She is expected on an all-day photo shoot at a warehouse in Chelsea.  Arriving, she finds Lucy outside, on a cigarette break.

Hugs. Cheek-kisses. Lucy mutters through the falling flakes. “How’s Mama-2-B?”

“Not counting her chickens before they hatch.”

“Hmm,” Lucy replies, flipping her cigarette into the gathering snow curbside, “Best not to put them all in one basket.”

For lunch at a German place in the central village, Jennifer orders beef and vegetable stew with potatoes, Raj, lentil soup and a beer.

“You don’t mind coming here, right?”

Raj stirs his soup idly, “No, it’s fine”

“Babe, I want to start soon. We’re ready.”

The tintinnabulation of silverware and words on glass, laughter from a table in the back. Raj stirs.

Jennifer puts her hand out across the table and touches the fingers of his left hand with hers. “I’m ready.”

They finish their meal in silence.

The rakshasa stamps around Raj’s subway car rattling through subterranean New York: a beast with wild fangs and spiky claws, it howls:  “You are drowning in pollutants!” It is the dead of winter – 23 degrees (F) outside – but in a metal box under the East River, Rajagopal Balasubramaniam is sweating.

In Conclusion

The following day, in the middle of the afternoon, Raj and Jennifer take a long, hot shower together. Using the special sponge, he lovingly soaps her entire body and receives the same in return. The difference in the color of their skin is never more apparent than in these moments, their most intimate, delicious reprieves from urbanity.

It is the first time in many years – since the scare – that they have not used a condom. Before Jennifer falls asleep, this is the last thing she remembers Raj whispering, softly in her ear:

“… and then we’ll say … to our little baby:

‘That’s how it was when you came into this world.’”

M.T. Karthik, 2001 – 2008

written in NYC, Los Angeles, Japan, India and Oakland

ritual du matin, age 40, Tamil Nadu, India

23 Friday Mar 2007

Posted by mtk in Asia, fiction, India, short film, Tamil Coast

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Shanti, fiction, 1999

31 Friday Dec 1999

Posted by mtk in clips, fiction, NYC, press clips

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Condé Nast, Inc., featured my short story, Shanti, in the January/February 2000 issue of JANE magazine, which it had very recently purchased from Fairchild Publishing.

This was the very first issue of Jane as published by CN.

I can remember feeling thrilled because my check had the logo of The New Yorker prominently printed on it – as a design element! My one and only check from CN in the 1990’s.

I got paid on December 31, 1999 to be exact. Which means this may have been the last piece of fiction published by Condé Nast, Inc., in the 20th century – no idea if so, I just know the first thing I bought was a pair of long, camel-colored boots for my editor, and the second was rent in Brooklyn.

I was paid what I asked for as a freelance writer with the intention of setting a rate: $1 a word.

Shanti is a chapter in my first novel, Mood [1997]

The Legend, short story, 1999

09 Friday Jul 1999

Posted by mtk in fiction, nba

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There was a lack of leadership at the end of the century.  We were all waiting to see what would happen next.

I remember where I was the day of the announcement.  I was living in Brooklyn and the Yankees were in the pennant race.  I was thirty-one and trying to make it as an actor or a writer, I didn’t care which.

It was October after a full moon and the air in the city had become cool.  I didn’t own a television then.  Usually I got the news from looking over somebody’s shoulder on the train, but that day it was impossible not to know; so I was in a bar.

My job was in Manhattan but I had a pretty kind commute – on the 7 – each morning.  In the evenings I used to drink a lot, so often I took a cab home.  The announcement was made during prime time.

I had been in the west village near Chelsea, so I headed East until I’d found myself in a suitably quiet place for a drink.

There were three others in the bar on my side, all men.  The bartender was about my age, too.  We checked each other out when I walked in but she wasn’t interested.  Let me know with a glance.  She was attending to us and going back to the telephone where she was involved in a casual conversation.  That’s how we heard. She told us.

She was on the phone with her roommate, I discovered later, who told her to turn on the TV.  The television was off when I walked in, which is why I walked all the way down the bar and sat by it.  I was putting room between me and the other patrons and the bartender on her phone call.  I didn’t feel like talking to anyone, just wanted a drink or two before going home.

She walked down the length of the bar toward me, though my glass was still half-full.  “Jordan’s on ESPN,” she said as she passed me with an air of excitement.  She reached up and turned on the TV.

I moved over to get some perspective and ended up next to one of the other guys.

“Perfect timing,” he was saying to his friend, “It’s storybook.”

We were all looking at the television for a moment as we realized at our own pace it was a commercial.  Then we turned away from the TV to notice each other.  The guy to my left was a know-it-all.  Cliff Claven-type.  His Norm was an appropriately fat guy to his left, who was listening, bored.

“There’s not gonna be any basketball this year – the league’s locked out,” says Cliffy,  “It’ll be the first strike in NBA history.  And look at this – Jordan’s going to retire before it gets ugly.”  He looks at the both of us, including me in their space.  “Storybook, man!  The guy’s all class.  His entire career.  C-L-A-S-S, class.”

It seemed about right.  We had all been waiting for the announcement, fans and not fans.  We had been well-prepared by the rumours and gossip for the last few months.  The other guy, Norm, wasn’t so sure about all the “class,” but he had his “favorite Jordan moment.”

“My company’s had floor-side Knicks seats for years,” he began, “I had finished doing the numbers for the annual report a few years ago and so they let me have the tickets, as a kind of a bonus, you know.”

The ad was for Nike – a long narrative about a couple of guys buying sneakers with all these idiotic effects meant to be impressive.  They were playing one-on-one at what was meant to be an inner city court, but that looked more like a Hollywood lot – an appearance by Tiger Woods – hits a three-pointer with a golf club or something – stupid.

“Jordan was off in the first half, shot maybe four-for-15 from the field … just didn’t have his rhythm,” continued Norm, “But during the warm-ups before the second half – the Bulls were down at our end so I could see him up close – he seemed so casual.  He was joking around and chewing his gum.  He stopped during the shoot-around to sign some kid’s little plastic basketball at courtside.”

Norm turned to face us – making a little circle.  He glanced over his shoulder at the TV to make sure it was still a commercial, before continuing.  “Knicks were up five at the break and the second half started with Jordan bringing the ball down.”

“Here we go,” chimed in Cliffy, “never let Jordan bring the ball down up five at the beginning of the second half,” he said, as if that made any kind of sense.  The Nike ad was followed by an ad for the new BMW convertible.  It was being featured in a movie.  Hot Babe racing at speeds meant to appear saucy, around curves on the Pacific Coast Highway – but it was stagey and excessive – a patina of production slathered across it.

“And it wasn’t that the rest of the game was so impressive – ‘cause he went 12 for 18 in the second half and ended up with 42 points, 8 boards and four steals on the night-”

“Wooooah!” chimed in Cliffy, “See?  See?”

Norm continued:  “But it wasn’t that.  It was that first bucket after the second half started.” Norm looked at us both significantly.  “He went coast-to-coast, juked twice and burned Starks and Oakley on the way to the rack for the slam.  It was like he was waiting to turn it on and once it was on there wasn’t anybody to stop it.”  We were all silent for a minute wishing we had that … when ESPN came back on.

“If the Yanks lose tomorrow, Joe Torre will have a decision on his hands – El Duque or Andy Pettite – but as Andy Schapp reports, the decision may have already been made.”

“Yanks better win the fuckin’ series,” I said.  It was the first time I’d spoken to them and they noticed.  I have a sort of a Mike Tyson voice problem.  It’s sort of squeaky.  I’m real aware of it now.  I mean, at the time I hadn’t fully developed my speaking skills to use it to my advantage so there was always a minute or two when it freaked people out – a grown man. It’s really why I became a writer as opposed to going into say, radio … or television.

Cliff blew right by it.  “Fuck yeah, the fucking Yanks better win the fucking series.  Better win the world series, too.  I mean, what the fuck?  After the season they had?  If they don’t win, heads will definitely roll.”

We talked about the Yanks for a minute as the time passed.  I know, I know, it has to seem stupid now, but I mean, we had no idea what he was going to say.  We were all just figuring he’d retire, we’d bullshit a bit and that’d be that … on to baseball.  We were strangers in a shitty little bar in the East Village.

By now of course the video has been shown umpteen times.  The stage set in Chicago and the introduction and all of it has been ingrained in our heads for as long as the little bitmaps will last in our memories.  But let’s just review what he said, how he said it.  I mean if we’re going to talk about a Legend, it’s good to be precise.

“Good evening, everyone.  I’d like to make this as brief as possible, but there are many people to thank.  I have played my entire career here in Chicago and I have always felt the deepest love for this city and the fans.  It is without a doubt in my mind that these are the greatest fans in the world.”

He always had that sweet disarming way of saying something just a little – off – that still sounded so right and perfect coming out of his mouth.  The man had skills.

“I have faced a lot of questions this past summer about my plans for the future and I have entertained all kinds of opportunities and thoughts on the matter of retirement.  Frankly, I don’t want to give up basketball.  I love this game.”

And that look, that smile, directly into the camera for the fans at home, for the commissioner of Basketball.  It was perfect.  He knew all along what he was doing.  There was never a feeling of doubt that he was in control, only of wonderment that he was alive.  It was like that on the court and afterward.  He was a great leader.

“That is why I have to ask for your support at this critical and important time in my career.  I need each and every one of my fans, everywhere in the world to know that I have enjoyed every minute of my career in the NBA.  I wouldn’t trade it for anything.  And now I need something back from you.  I need your continued support.”

It was at this point that we, I, anyway, began to wonder if he didn’t have a surprise in mind.  I had thought it before of course, he was famous for them.  But that night, I mean, he looked to the right and left, and then for a second it seemed like maybe he was changing his mind right there.  Before letting us all in on the biggest move of his career, it still seemed like he had something else in store.

I remember the announcement and the introduction perfectly.

“I am retiring from the National Basketball Association.  [smile. flash, flash, flash, flash,flash, flash]

I would like to thank everyone, but of course that’s impossible.  Let me just re-iterate my thanks to the wonderful people here in Chicago and to my fans around the world.”  He said things twice his entire career to emphasize his point in a different manner to get it across to as many channels of media on the spectrum as possible and was misunderstood by many as, “just being a jock,” – like Coltrane, Jordan was ahead of his time with the media.

“Again, I hope you will continue to support my efforts as I move on, away from the NBA and into public life in other ways.”

This was the stumper of course.  He had every free male in the nation caught on by then that it wasn’t your average resignation.  Cliff said, “What the fuck is he talking about?  Not baseball again, jeez, the guy was a sub-200 hitter on a farm club for God’s Sakes.”  Fickle, that Cliffy.

Then, the introduction:

“I would like to introduce now, my first partner in my new life after the NBA.”

When he walked out I swear you could have knocked me off my bar stool.  I was totally confused.  I had no explanation for what he was doing there.  I quickly tried to add up scenarios that would bring the two of them together, but never in my wildest dreams could I have figured what would happen next.

“Ladies and Gentlemen … a boxer, a pugilist of world-reknown,” he said ‘pugilist’ carefully and playfully, like he had looked it up for the event, toyed with it for a while and then decided to keep it for the fun of it, and he gave us a smile when he continued, “the world’s greatest fighter in my book, and I challenge anyone to deny it:  Ladies and Gentlemen, President Nelson Mandela of the Republic of South Africa.”

The flashbulbs made it impossible to see for a moment.  Everyone was standing.  Jordan must have made arrangements for the cameramen to be positioned, though, because the television audience had a clear view throughout the proceedings.

Then, he appeared.  Mandela.  It was such an incredible feeling to be watching it “live.”  Mandela walked with such cool grace – slowly and stately past the podium to his seat beside Jordan.

Michael had effectively taken the spotlight off himself at the peak of his most significant hour.  The entire experience was like watching a game.  He was masterful, in control.  And nobody was stopping him.

“Mr. Mandela and I would like to announce that effective immediately, I will be player-coach of the South African National Basketball team to participate in the year 2000 Olympics in Sydney, Australia.  I hereby invite my friends, colleagues and players from all over the world to tryout for the team that we will field in summer of 2000.

“I would also like to announce the creation of a new line of shoes, clothing and athletic wear designed for the new South African team by my own designers and to be manufactured by textile workers throughout Africa. All proceeds from the sales of these products – that’s 100% of the proceeds – will go, in two equal parts, first to the United Nations and second to a non-profit organization begun by President Mandela and myself toward the creation of a free, peaceful, healthy and well-developed Pan-Africa in the next millennium.”

I was numb.  My ears.  My ears were filled with a dull sensation that removed me from my surroundings.  I couldn’t stand.  I couldn’t possibly sit.  I stood.  I hugged Cliff.  I slapped Norm on the back. I pulled the bartender over the rail and kissed her full on the lips … and she hit me.

The End

[I can’t even remember when Jordan retired now. He quit, came back, jammed again, quit, came back… managed the Wizards for a time, always plays great golf – a giant. I wrote this piece in 1998 after a conversation with a friend about why U.S. American sports stars don’t take more active political stances anymore (cf. Tommie Smith or Arthur Ashe or many others). It seems relevant today, but nostalgic, and weirdly attached to an era when television affiliates in every city in the USA was running simultaneous and continuous reruns of “Cheers!”- sometimes twice a day – rather than fill the spectrum with any diversity.]

M.T. Karthik

Close the Piano, short story, 1998

12 Tuesday May 1998

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We presented him with an ashtray.  “The hardest thing to do is sing,” he said and charmed, set himself gently on the piano bench, crossed his legs and rested an arm across the closed key cover.

“The piano,” he said, leaning against it, “is a lovely example of how we are different, you and I.”  He ran his hand along the smooth, heavy wood.  “It is central to the way you Westerners compose.  Here in the West, you begin from this fixed collection of intervals and pitches attuned to half- and whole-step increments, labeled in alphabetic sequence, A-B-C-D-E-F-G.  It’s very harmonic and ordered.”  He looked at us.  “But it is so rigid.”  And several of us gathered in the sitting room politely shivered with laughter.

He was holding the cigaret unlit in the fingers of the hand that hung from his wrist, dangling off the edge of the piano, and with the other hand, he gestured with the ashtray until he finished speaking and paused.  He set the ashtray down beside himself on the piano bench.

“We make music from an older time,” he continued. “This is difficult to express.  That is why we say the hardest thing to do is sing.”

God, that bastard’s fat.  I couldn’t help thinking it.  I mean he weighed 250 if he weighed a pound.  I couldn’t imagine his wife under him; she’d have to be on top.  That thought made more sense.  But looking at him it was easy to believe that, even with his wife so small in comparison to his heavy-assed shape, even in their most intimate spaces, it was easy to believe, he probably moved with a kind of grace.  What a bizarrely perfect man this singer is.  We have among us somehow these ones.  They pop out of the womb, misshapen perhaps and lazy and somewhat sloppy and loose, and then from their lips or hands issues forth the sound of music.  And we are under a spell.  God, that bastard is fat.

Elephantine, his hand moved slowly to his lips.  Someone stepped forward, reaching out, and a flame erupted from their palm.  He made a series of tiny movements, registering first a kind of casual surprise at the appearance of fire, then a smile, then acceptance, leaning forward slowly until the cigaret just touched the flame, closing his eyes as he inhaled evenly.

He was still for a moment like that, his eyes closed, inhaling evenly, with the tip of the cigaret aflame.  And finally, leaning back a little, exhaling, slowly, opening his eyes and looking up at the young man who had given him a light, he locked eyes with him and briefly held him in a stare, then smiled, nodded and leaned back in full.  This whole series of actions endured perhaps a minute and a half under the eyes of everyone in the room.  The fellow was captivating.

My wife brought me here.  We are in the middle of the worst period of our six years of marriage.  She is a member of this community, an expatriated collection of her people, now hyphenated Americans.  When a touring performer of some notoriety comes to town we go to these kinds of community events.  I don’t do particularly well at them.  I have a terrible time remembering anyone’s name because the sounds of their language are foreign to me.  Though we’ve been married six years and spend holidays once a year with my wife’s people, I find it difficult to relate, still.

I have recently been unashamed to masturbate beside her in our bed.  We don’t even talk about it.  She’s awake.  Sometimes she watches me.  She will roll over on her side and lay on her elbow with her body half-raised.  Her breasts are perfect.  She stares at me, looks into my eyes and slowly peers down the length of my body.  We are connected then, but it is different.  I am masturbating.  We don’t even talk about it.  I come.

“Music is unlimited,” said the singer.  “The limitations we put upon the universe, this resonant space around us, these limitations are a result of our own limited minds.  Listen,” he said, and everyone fell silent.  There was the tinkle of glass somewhere in the anteroom; someone, a pretty young girl with magical silvery tones in her naked throat, giggled like rain on a bottle.  It was really a beautiful moment.  “Listen to these waves of sound all around us,” he whispered, “they are always happening.  We can take any of them and commune.  We can harmonize with any wave through an act of unlimited expression.  But we must master the act of harmony.”

My wife and I are clumsy in English though it’s the language we’ve been maneuvering in.  I have intended to spend more time learning her mother tongue, but it has never materialized. She talks to my in-laws in their tongue only when I don’t need to understand.  I don’t need to understand much.  Just to know that we are still somehow connected.

It can be a simple glance from across the room while she is curled into the red rocker we bought last year at an antique shop.  She has this gesture while she is on the phone.  It is half-aware of itself and half-aware of me.  She sits and curls her hair absently with her fingers and talks and though her eyes may have fallen on me a dozen times during her conversation they’ve never registered my presence.  Then when her conversation allows it, she looks right at me, almost smiles and sometimes stops her little hair curling and just looks — so our eyes meet.

We do have these few things left that are holding us together.

The singer continued:  “What is the nature of sound?  It is the vibration of the matter of our universe.  This has always been so.  Except once.  The sound came first.  You see, our universe was born from sound.  Then only matter resonated forth from sound into material.  Then it became an ever-expanding sequence of harmonic unfolding.  The first sound was the ground.  It gave form to the universe.  When we sing, when we make music, we are seeking harmony with the root.  We pursue resonance with the original ground.”

My wife’s people believe in marriage.  But not necessarily in love.  They do not have any kind of affection for the romantic notion that marriage has anything to do with love at all.  They find the appearance of love in marriage to be co-accidental.

Take this performer for example.  I can tell you a little about his relationship with his wife.  This fat, magical singer has a wife who does not argue.  She assists him in his work.  She is the one of them who compromises her ego, does so for his work’s sake and in return she receives his affection singularly.  It is an old way of thinking, a highly rational and intellectual way of doing things.  And it is the way against which my wife rebelled when we came together.

The singer continued to call us Westerners:  “You have a writer who says that the rest in the musical score is time. He writes that what we hear when the orchestra rests is pure time.”  He paused to take a drag from the cigaret — the act was an affectation, but with the weight of consideration.

He smiled and said it: “We take this to be the shallow view.”

He continued, “Time is an invention of the limiting mind.  Sound is in harmony with time.  When you construct from a device like the piano, sound will necessarily be limited to its form.  But music is wide.  It is in possession of all sounds and intervals between sounds, all times.”

Seven years ago —we were just kids when we met — this is the first thing I thought: God, that girl is so hot!  I still think my wife is beautiful.  She doesn’t tell me whether or not she still finds me attractive.  I have been wondering if her attraction to me then was to an image — an image of something other and separate from her people.  I have been wondering if she wanted me then because I was, to her, something different.  This idea is so simple it is stupid.

That we could have made this decision to be together these years because of a rebellious childish reaction makes me feel sick.  The possibility that the basis for our relationship may be a tour through sexually untried territories is ugly and very real.  I am tired of thinking about it.

The cigaret was to be ashed.  It was half-smoked.  He flicked it quickly into the ashtray on the piano bench.  He sighed and put the cigaret out.  He sat on the bench facing away from the piano with his legs crossed at the ankles.  He lowered his head on the pudgy rings of his neck, down onto his chest.  He coughed once and cleared his throat, then lifted his head.  “The hardest thing to do is sing,” he repeated.

Nothing was perfectly silent.  Every sound was perfect.  Then, one very low sound revealed itself from the background hum of the room.  It very evenly and steadily increased in volume and intensity.  So imperceptibly slowly the profound sound of the ground came welling up from the cavernous body of this man.  His round body resonated with an angelic hum.  He sang.  Across the room, my wife, who had been watching, standing with her arms crossed, her head tilted and with her fingers curling and twirling her thick black hair, suddenly, for a moment, she caught my eye.

A week later, at half three in the morning, having just come home, she said to me through her pitch-black eyes and in even, well-measured English, “I treat this place like a hotel because I hate you.  Do you understand or must I be more clear?”  And we went to bed.

[first published in the Asian-American Short Story Anthology, “Bolo! Bolo!” under the pseudonym, Raj Balas]

Needles

08 Saturday Nov 1997

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1997, consuelo, dj, gomez, hayes, hayes valley, Karthik, mtk, needles, palace, record, records, roommates, san francisco, sf, short, spin, stan, story

There was an uncomfortable silence.  Stan would be home for the meeting soon so Lenny didn’t have the time to say anything really valid about the needles to the rest of us.  It was just that dead time of day when we usually talk about other things like ball games.

I figured somebody had to say something so I asked, “Anybody catch the Lakers?”  Lenny had seen the game and he broke it down for us while we waited.  Stan came in the middle of it and he picked up the description.  “Deal with it,” he calmly effused, “eleven three-pointers on sixty-eight percent shooting and eighteen of twenty from the line,” and we were all appreciative if for no reason other than the solidarity it lent.

We sat for just a second longer before Stan segued into the meeting: “Where’re we at?”

Lenny was silent and let somebody else do the talking thank god.  Stan could figure from the silence that the stuff hadn’t turned up.  It was uncomfortable but it wasn’t like there was anything to dispute.  Lenny’s brother and his girlfriend had been the only visitors the whole weekend and now the needles were gone.  Nobody even commented on the weed.

I proposed we each chip in fifty bucks for new needles and then Len said he’d ask his brother about them but nobody said anything.  Stan wanted to know if he could take his share out of the rent and we all supposed that would be all right. The most uncomfortable thing was that without the needles the turntables sat still and mute.  The red light on the amp was on as if the music had been interrupted in mid-groove.  The silence was a palpable souvenir of the needles’ absence.

We were just about to end the meeting when Kevin piped up. “But it’s bullshit,” he said.

Len was visibly stricken by a pang of tension.  Stan sighed, “what?”

“Well I mean, check it out,” he continued, “I mean I didn’t take the needles and lose them or whatever and I don’t have fifty bucks to just throw around.”

Stan started to say , kind of under his breath , that he could front Kevin the fifty but Kevin said he had it.  “I just want to know what we’re going to do in the future if something like this happens again.”  Len started to say something but stopped and I said, “Well, it isn’t going to happen again,” in a tone of voice that pretty much put an end to the meeting with my age advantage and all.  We left it at that.

I hate my life.  I don’t know what I am going to do about it and sometimes I feel so trapped and paralyzed by my existence I feel like I’m going to explode.  I know it can’t go on like this.  I live with a bunch of guys I know, at least — it could be worse — but it’s like I’m in college again.  I never thought thirty’d be this way.

I don”t think I ever had an image of it being any way, but I wouldn’t have ever guessed this.   I need to make a new plan but for some reason it isn’t coming together.  I always zigged and zagged before and lately it’s like I’m out of gas.  How can that be? I’m only thirty.  Shit.

—–

1988.  Autumn and I say “fuck this,” and move to China.  At least that’s how I tell it now. My three years in Asia have been reduced to a sidenote on my resume.  I mean I guess it started out as Taiwan before and became Malaysia and Thailand and India and Japan after … and now it’s “an experience which has given me a cultural appreciation for Asian cultures.”  The point is I split and so did everybody else I know.

I remember when we sat around the university local  and threw our passports on the table. Kevin was going to Paris, Ken to Guatemala City, me to Taipei and Tracy to the Peace Corps.  She hadn’t been assigned to Malawi yet.  And we laughed like fucking kids and threw our damn hands in the air and sucked down pitchers of beer and it was all good.

Now  me and Kevin are here, Tracy works in DC,  and none of us wants to talk about Ken except his mother who always wants us to “stop by any time” when we’re in Texas visiting our own families.  And it’s all bloody and sore and itches like an amputated leg’s supposed to.

Whatever.  I have to get something going for myself.  My doctor says I only have fifty more years left.  I mean if I’m lucky.

Le fin de siecle is a fucking joke.  Lenny exaggerates pitifully when he makes plans for it.  He talks about Times Square and Paris and some island in the Pacific off the date line, but it’s been four years since he’s traveled.  And that was Mexico.  I know he won’t do what he says he’s going to do anymore.

When we were kids, the year 2000 was like this crazy place where we’d all be in our early thirties and kings of the damn world.  Now it’s a fucking lie about how little time means and how much hype time-sellers have to pitch.

My mother thinks it matters still. She isn’t a part of the revolution of apathy we are and so it’s a serious pain in the ass trying to explain to her about fruitlessness on arable land.  Time passes that’s for sure.  My hair gets longer and my ass gets colder and lonelier, too.  Nobody else seems to have a problem with it.

—–

Christ on the Rue Jacob!  I feel fucking great!   Good god, I want to scream at the top of my lungs for about an hour while the world spins under my feet.  Pass me the bowl there Lenny and let’s get this show a-pumping.  The guys have no idea what I’m doing back here except that when I leave the party it’s usually to make some notes.

Fuckity fuck … life is a gas, baby.   What are you going to do about that you apathetic fuck? Huh?  What are you going to do about the fact that it is beautiful and warm and there are people and places and love is a real goddamn emotion and the drugs are relatively good and  California is all free and you aren’t starving and dying in a Zairean refugee camp or in a ditch in Bosnia.  What are you going to do about the fact that you are on fire?

—–

When my father and mother crossed the border in 1957, they were in the back of a chevy longbed and they were not illegals.  The crossing was the last leg of their journey from Africa which took them two years and lord knows how much money.   The revolution in my father’s homeland cost him everything. He was lucky to get a professorship here.  No.  As he always says you make your own luck.

“My father wanted a better life for us,” is what I always say when people ask why we moved here.  They can tell I’m unhappy.

What is there left for me to do?  I haven’t had sex in three months.  I can’t seem to get the appetite for the chase or even for the event. I mean I’ve had opportunities and lately I even reject those.  What’s the point?

—–

I could try looking at it this way:  thirty is a good year to begin …

I could fall in love.  “You make your own luck,” is what he said.  I never argued with him though I think that’s a load of shit.  You make your own rationalizations is more like it.

—–

Let’s put the puzzle pieces together: December 31st, 1988 and I’m riding a 350cc ’81 Sanyang motorcycle across an empty field in rural China.  It’s Cheng-du province and Tiananmen Square is months away and when it happens I won’t know about it anyway because I am living with the Chinese.  And I’m flying fast through the cold, cold countryside.  My bike chokes and I feel it seize so I pull over for a minute but don’t kill the engine.  It’s all screwy.  I think there’s something in the fuel line.  I don’t know if the bike will get me back to the doctor’s ranch where I am staying.  I breathe a deep sigh over the ruddling hum of the engine and see my breath cold and white in the night air.

I look at my watch.  It’s midnight. I realize that the equivalent time in New York and San Francisco and wherever else was met with balls dropping and firecrackers and wet warm drunken kisses and Auld Lang Syne and eggnog and it all hits me like a wall.  No one here even knows what that’s like or what it’s about.  It means nothing.  It’s as empty as the tube in my fuel line past the block in the joint.  I sigh and feel strangely great.  I dance a little jig.  I am thrilled at being free of all the bullshit.  It may well be my one clean moment.

—–

I picked up the new needles today.  I got home this afternoon and opened the front door and called out, “We got music again!”  But no one responded.  I walked through the entire flat but there was no one around.

It’s been a beautiful day.  It’s warm and sunny out and the skies look like October:  blue and clear and light.  I walked down to the front room and the sun was streaming in through the windows all over the futon and the floor.

I sat in the long warm patch of light and tore open the bubblewrap.  The needles are light and beautiful.  They have tiny diamonds in them I guess.  What a gorgeous little design.  I handled the needles for a minute before sliding across the rug and putting one on: locking it onto the tone arm.

I walked down to the records room.  There’s vinyl everywhere and gear for days. I was flipping through the Lee Morgan and Horace Silver and that whole era of sweet-sounding music music music when I saw that someone had misplaced one of my records.

I picked the record out of the stack and walked back to the front room.  There were birds out on the fence.  I pulled the platter and cleaned the vinyl slowly with the brown brush and fluid. It hadn’t been spun in months, hell maybe years.

It was ‘Metamorphosen‘ on one side and ‘Tod und Verklarung‘ on the other – Richard Strauss, Deutsche Gramophone.  I chose the flip side.  The needle was new so I put my finger to my lips, licked it and then gently rubbed the diamond tip.  The prick barely registered on my wrinkled fingerprint.  It felt rough, like a cat’s tongue.

I fired up the mixer, the amp, the receiver and clicked the selector over while they all warmed up.  The crossfader slid gently through and I set the needle down.

After my father died I tried to find that fucking record.  All I wanted the morning after I had him burned was to feel warm and empty like I did that day, lying, thirty, in the sunny patch on our ratty black futon with nothing but cocktails and a joint to look forward to.

We, short story, 1997

08 Wednesday Oct 1997

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We’re drunk again and soon we’ll fuck.  That’s the order of things these days.  We meet in the evenings after work, make a dinner of inconsequential size and of indiscernible tastes, then go out for drinks at one of the locals until we’re so lit we can finally be honest with each other.  We fight like Burton and Taylor as we crawl home. She shoves me into bed and we fuck until we pass out. It’s an o.k. life but I keep thinking there must be something more.

She wants a baby but I want a dog.

Neither of us reads very much but we watch a lot of TV.  She watches crap.  Me, I watch nature shows.  The kind that show the lives of animals all over the world. And under the sea.  The ones on sharks are my favorite.

Everything I ever learned in school turns out to be bullshit.  My job is a joke.  I spot-test circuits on an electronic motherboard with two cables and a detector.  The hardest part is showing up.

I file reports and go to meetings.  People talk slowly about insipid things which mean as little as possible to anyone in the room.  The more meaningful the conversation becomes the faster it goes until the most important thing, the reason why the meeting was held in the first place, is blurted out and discussed at a barking, rocketous clip so there’s no time to blame anybody for any fuckups and no time for anybody to complain when they’re given an assignment.

My work is not meaningful to me in any way except that I receive a check for exactly $1843 every two weeks.   After taxes.

I have health insurance. My girlfriend is covered, too.  She makes as much as me at her job and has a full health plan also (mental to dental).

All of our friends are incredibly boring. But they use us and our resources to have a good time.  So we all get drunk together and laugh at things which only we can possibly think are funny because the language we speak is incomprehensible to anyone who hasn’t spent at least a year in our circle of friends.  We have developed this language as a method by which we can keep undesirables out.  Our friends’ girlfriends and boyfriends who do not check out don’t last long because it is especially hard for people we don’t like to keep up with our language.

We quote obscure lines from movies and television shows as a method of relating.  We see mostly mainstream films, not because we like them, but because they are easiest to make fun of.  We do not discriminate on the basis of sex, color, creed or race, only on the ability of others to keep up with our language and contribute to it.

We have no culture and no history because we are mostly made up of mutts. Part European, part whatever but none of us has a cultural background of any measurable depth because we are Americans.

I play a lot of computer games because they are easily accessible to me at work.  I also use my computer to send e-mail to all my other friends who also have jobs with e-mail.  We are never out of touch because most of us have cell-phones and beepers as well. Sometimes we fuck each other.  But mostly we get along because it would be boring otherwise.

We own a lot of things.  Most of these things are things we have read about in magazines or seen in movies.  Rarely do we buy things we have seen on television because the ads on television are stupid and we make fun of them.  We buy what we are sold but rarely do we buy what we want.

Sometimes we travel to other places.  Usually we only travel for a reason – such as family or friends’ weddings or funerals.  However sometimes we travel so we can say we have been places.

We can say we have been many places and our recollection of them is manufactured in such a way that we can relate stories to one another about the places to which we have been.  This allows us to all go to the same places at different times and always have the same experience of them.

We rarely leave the continent.  But Mexico and Canada accept our money so we go there from time to time to get away from it all.  Mexico is barbaric and uncivilized.  We avoid its nontourist destinations.  We use it to get things we want cheap and to be treated better than we deserve for very little money.  This is fun.

Canada is intellectual.  We go so we can say we have been there and have conversed with Canadians on a wide variety of topics.  We quote Canadian facts and figures about our own country.  Then we make fun of Canadian mannerisms, accents and figures of speech.

We’ve each been to Europe once.  Mostly after graduation.

We are Americans and as such we vote regularly but rarely in elections; only in surveys and opinion polls.  Still we follow the polls and watch CNN and other news programs. We quote soundbites which are filtered to us through the media. There is no time to learn anything about any of it and even if there were we are cynical and know that it is all a crock of shit anyway so we would never bother.  We believe that surely people who do bother are already working on it and so we have the information presented to us.  Our own lives are not affected adversely by most changes in policy and so we are willing to wait for injustices to be reconciled by the efforts of those they affect.

We trust apathetically that people who are unhappy will eventually be made happy by the system in which we have been raised.

Today, I left work and went to meet a friend at a coffeeshop.  He was a friend of a friend, or maybe three friends away, who was supposed to bring me a resume because my friend said he might be a good employee for my company and I knew if I helped this guy out it would score points for me with my friend.

I ordered a coffee and waited for the guy to show up.  I was sitting outside and several people came and asked me for money.  I gave some money to a few of them because I always feel bad for people in a bad way.

One guy got really aggressive with me because I wouldn’t give him any money.  I refused to give him money because he was rude to me.  I gave money to someone else nearby and pointedly told the guy to leave me alone.  It reminded me of feeding pigeons at the park.

My friend’s friend never came.  I had time to kill so I went to a bookstore.  They had comic books and I bought one and decided to read it in the park.  The comic was an illustrated remake of a short story written in the 1800s by Anton Chekov called “The Bet.”

I read the comic and went home.  We ate.  Then we went to get drunk.  I came home early.  Now I am sitting at my computer writing this entry.  I will e-mail it to all my friends and leave it saved here on this computer screen just before I pick up the .45 I bought last spring with Ernie and Ellen at the flea market in Marin and scatter my brains across the keyboard, the monitor, my desk, and the window here, which looks out onto our backyard and several rows of calla lilies, California poppies and jasmine.

Tonight the jasmine will bloom and our yard will be graced with a delicious tangy scent.  My girlfriend will have to fuck herself.

Chat County Hospital, short story, 1997

15 Friday Aug 1997

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My father should never have had a son.  Nor any children at all for that matter.  But this is not an option for our people.  Or I should say it has not been until now.  He tried his best to be two things:  a father and a scientist.  He succeeded as equally as he failed in each of these efforts, with absolute precision.  The result is that I spend most of my hours wondering why I’m alive.

Purposeless, I wander around the empty corridors of life’s hallways.  I sometimes open doors and stick my head into rooms.  I even walk in one or two to check out the wallpaper, the paint on the trim.  But mostly I just walk past door after door; past the infinite choices.  I examine the stark grey interior walls of life’s dusky halls.

He is still alive.

Even now he looks over at me with glassy, wide-open eyes, but he shows no recognizance.  He veils me with his illness.  And I am filled with a nauseating, selfish apathy.

No one knows my disconcern.  I wait on him dutifully and assist him when he is in need.  Soon I will change his urine bottle and then I will drain the fluids from the plastic bulb affixed to a long tube which veins byproducts from his entrails.  I am a model child.

But I am cold and dry to him and his illness.  I am incapable of reform or catharsis because the bastard went and got sick during our angry years.  We havenÕt begun to want to resolve.  (He gave me my stubbornness.)  I hate his fucking attitude and I haven’t forgiven him for my youth.

He took it from me.

He knows, too.  Behind those glassy eyes he knows it is too soon.  And he’ll decide.  Once again he has control over our relationship.  He’ll decide if he lives so we can heal old wounds or if he leaves so his part of me rots for the rest of my life.

I don’t hate him.  I must love him or I couldn’t be driven to such deep emotions.  I don’t hate him.

I can say clearly and truthfully (and here I must be honest or I am more lost for it) that I don’t like him very much.  I’d never have chosen him.  I’d never spend time with someone like him.  But that could be because of what’s happened since I was born.  Maybe there is a somebody like me with different teeth and bones who would.  A woman with less calcium and more osteoporosis.

If I had him for a class, I wouldn’t be like the students of his who parade in here with get-well-soon cards and flowers and plants he may never see if they’ll die before he does.  I wouldn’t be one of the students whose name he knows who’s been to his house for barbecues and to help him plant roses or okra in the garden.

I know what a bullshitter he is.  I know it’s so deep he’s even fooled himself.  I wouldn’t be one of the students who spends my idle hours learning even more from the fantastic wealth of knowledge he has to give, to teach (I acknowledge that much is true — he’s got an incredible memory).  I’d never want to sup from his vast table of words and equations or chew fat from his multicultural polyglothic plates.

No, I’d recognize him early. I’d come to class, do what I’m told to do. No more no less. I’d see him for what he is.  I’d never fall into his net of worship and gardening.

This story is an old sigh.  But wait, I must tend to my father. The old man’s bladder has impolitely intruded on his linens and across his already-stained hospital gown. He’ll need a bath.

I have been cheated by my vagina (I use the clinical term here in the hospital, call it what you will but if you’re playing me you better have a sweeter nothing than that) and by my bloody, crimson blood.

Not by the monthly, moonly blood of my insides.  But separately and coldly by first my lack of a cock and second by an ageless river of blood known as Hindustan.  The Brahmin Rive De Sangre of my past.  Multi-cult-you’re dead.

“Hey Tikku-Tikka!” comes a voice tinny and thin.  His only friend has come to try to cheer him out of his catatonia.  “Yene pa? Sowkyum, ah?” he speaks in our native tongue before continuing in their adopted language, “Why you are always sleeping only, sir? Don’t you know vinter has long since uppity-gone and spring is coming?” He winks at me as he continues to speak to my unconscious father.  “Now only is the time to rise out of your silly hibernating.”  Each of his ‘t’s’ are hard, the way the British emphasized them through Brahmin teachers.  He and my father studied together years ago.  They speak the same language.

“And Shanti, what yaaah?” he says to me, “Beautiful girl you are like a spring flower only – like lotus.”  He tries to make me smile and dutifully I give him a tiny corner of my cheek.

“Doctor, sir,” I ask — my father is lucky his closest friend is a specialist — “How is my father?”

I am to the point.  I am to the point when it is just stupid play-acting for me to beat around the bush.

Dr. Subramanian or “Dr. Subi” as all his American friends and patients call him whispers across my father to me, “Hold on, Shanti, Subi-Uncle will make this good. Give it time.”

I want to scream into his face, “Oh you fat fuck!  It’ll be made good like you made my brother good?  Like you made my mother and father’s marriage and my family all made good?” but instead I say in my finest South Indian accent (readopted for my request), “Will you please stay here for some time for me?  I must go to the toilet and then … I am feeling hungry.”

He looks uncomfortable in his ill-fitting suit with the idea of sitting here away from his Mercedes not on the way to his tee time (or his tea time) at the club.

“Never mind,” I whisper.

“No, no,” he replies, wagging his head like a googly doll, “go ahead.”  And I leave this room for the first time today.

*****

The sky is a flame.  Twilight is my hour of peity.  All these long weeks, these purpling, pinking moments have marked the passage of my servitude. One.  Two.  Three.  Four. They say prayers are heard and answered best at the end of a worthwhile day.

What bullshit. There is no machination or imagination behind any of this.  Time just sweeps along and we stupidly with it naming things: sun, sky, clouds, God.

I am hurt and angry and impossible to assuage with talk of prayer.  Only the sweet angel Time can cure me, Time so vast and beautiful … fucking sexy draped across the sky in quick-sinking sunlight.

I will come.  I will come.  I am.  Oh, I’m coming.  I’m coming.  Oh God!  I’m coming in Time …  in Time.

I am not fingering myself.  The hands, the lingering fingers of the sun tickle my insides as he fades away.  “Rosy fingers of dusk” is more like it. There’s time to clean myself up before I go back to his bedside and to night.

Tonight.

My brother hated me.  He loved me too much like I love my father and so he hated.  He hated, too, all of the boys who came to try me.  He hated the attention and the eyeballing and how I’d suck on my little finger and laugh. (“It’s not a pinky, silly, it’s a brownie!”)  How I’d have any boy I wanted while he got only the Mexican girls.

The white boys, the black boys, the Mexicans, they all showed an interest in broadening their cultural awareness.  They all looked, saw and learned what da Gama opened up to the West:  the legs of the most beautiful women in the world, opened up for sale by a tiny Portugee with an overaggressive cock.

“ohhhhhhh, de la India!!” said the gas station attendants, “Y porque tu puede hablar espanol?”

“Oh, no,” I’d giggle, “just un poco espanol.”

My brother hated them and all the American men who took me from him.  No, not just me – todos las mujeres de la India.  No wonder he was so fucked up.

Listen sisters,  a poem.  A poem for my Indian sisters:

You’ve come so far
and I’d be the last one to say
but please turn on your backs
for our Indian brothers today

Give them good cheer
they are alone and afraid you see
because they don’t want any of these bitches here
and they can’t have you or me

Sometimes I dream that he had gotten away.  That the letter never came and that he had gone out West.  In my dream he’s gone.  And in my dream other letters come.  There are stacks of letters from the Golden State in my dream.  I read them as I pack them into a small, brown valise.

“California is like heaven,” he writes, “or home.  The ocean my dear Shanti, it is our mother.  Our father, the sun firing infinite jets of love into her belly gave us life …”

and other letters: “We are all here  … black, white, brown, yellow and peach.  At night we trickle, laughing secretly down the dormitory halls of this city and we make love in colorful combinations.”

And in the dream as I read and pack these silly, naive letters one by one into the valise, I know that I am going West, too.  I’ve jumped aboard the freedom train like my parents did before me only this time it’s stopping further still down the line. Stations further from the bloody fucking cult-you’re past.  You’ve lost us already.

Tonight, without telling me, the good doctor Subi-Uncle will pull the plug.  My brother is dead, my father dying and me?  I’m free and free and free as el vallejo de San Joaquin in the Golden State of California.

M.T. Karthik

This blog archives early work of M.T. Karthik, who took every photograph and shot all the video here unless otherwise credited.

Performances and installations are posted by date of execution.

Writing appears in whatever form it was originally or, as in the case of poems or journal entries, retyped faithfully from print.

all of it is © M.T. Karthik

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