Year

Dermot O’Sullivan

 

Past wooden stalls stocked with red onions and jackfruit, past battery cages sprayed with chicken guts and makeshift shrines pouring incense into the thick, sticky night, the bats of Chennai dart and click through the night market. In the distance, the wild percussion of a wedding procession forever drawing closer. And mixing with the oily sniff of salgados, trails of tacky perfume linger in the streets in the wake of the workers who climb the narrow stairs to cheap hotel rooms in the narrow streets all around the Praça. Booming from the televisions in every barzinho and juice bar is a lady in her late sixties who doesn’t look it speaking about the marks of torture on her body. Soon after, the vote, the thuck and spew of tear gas, silent sirens, fires on the streets … In Sri Lankan hills smothered in tropical forest, I watch telecom workers dripping engine oil on fastened leeches, the wet, wormy bodies curling and writhing on contact, the men wiping them to the ground and returning to the job of repairing the generator, made in Larne, Co. Antrim. Albee left. On dirt roads, buses tear clouds of dust from the flattened earth, hurtling past mud huts and concrete homes, stalls selling tea and packets of crisps, monkeys squabbling on the verges, fields studded with palms stretching into the distance, workshops full of hammering, many-armed gods peeking forth from huge lumps of stone. Baltimore. ISIS. Orlando. Aleppo. I show my ID and step into the air-conditioned elevator, sweat crawling like a swarm of insects down my back, thinking of his face, beautiful as a doll’s, of his heart, wild as a beast’s, desperate as a beaten dog’s. From the fifteenth floor lobby a brief glimpse of the bay: islands and peninsulas. And hills. Just like home. Snow on the high peaks, a blue bird day, sun raining down, herds of shaggy ibex crossing the snow fields on the ridge above, and in the valley below tourists from all over India dressed in ski suits are wallowing in a patch of dirty slush. Thousands of rivers all at once cutting through the Himalayas, gouging into the bedrock, shredding stone, roots clutching the riverbanks, trees leaning over the foam, the trance of water pulsing, pulsing, pulsing. And in a penthouse apartment in Mirpur 2, Democratic Primaries on BBC World News and Al Jazeera. Ramadan has begun and we know now who the next president of the free world will be, news filtering in from the provinces of a Christian hacked to death, a Hindu priest whose head was almost severed, and in Chittagong a police chief’s wife shot in the head. From the balcony, I see Dhaka’s high-rises, weeping with moisture, lining off into the distance, black clouds brewing rain on the horizon, the shrill bells of the rickshaws ringing in the streets below. The same bells ring in the delta lands where the big rivers nudge the flat-as-pancake islands, washing silt down to the Bay of Bengal, banana plantations, chillis roasting on jute sacks in the sun, geese trotting, fish in the pools where pooh floats, mosquitos and telephone masts, at dusk flying foxes flap heavily over all the little villages, mangoes being bought and sold, plastic barrels full of live fish, the call-to-prayer sounding now that the sun has set. Brexit happened. Bowie too. And Silom Road is loaded up with pink taxis, doors unfold and out roll the creatures of the night, old, earning, young, paying, or simply … in DJ Station on the balcony of the smoking area my friend supports the elbow of his smoking arm with the palm of his non-smoking hand while he explains to me how his father owns a construction firm back in Manila and that’s where he gets his money from which I know is a lie because I caught him chatting up a farang who was at the very least in his sixties. Beyoncé is playing now and Justin Bieber is next, I’m sure of it. Next Sunday is the referendum for the new constitution but no one cares about that here. My friend offers me a smile of despair and we go back inside for another drink. Melting phones and unlockable phones. On the sixteenth floor of a high-rise in São Paulo I crack open the Atlas of World History and see empires flow across the pages like spilt ink, the patchwork of warring medieval tribes that is Europe, the fragmentation of the Ottoman Empire and, on the last page, a map of the EU, which is already out of date. Slums, sewerage and in Rio scraps of primeval Atlantic rainforest pepper the hills, between the favelas and the motorways, drawing flocks of bats when the fruits ripen and begin to fall, graffiti splashed on the walls, “Mais Amor,” “Fora Temer.” And in the office blocks of Centro in board rooms pre-salt deposits are discussed and investment opportunities analysed even as riots draw closer and banks board up their windows and later that night passers-by snap selfies with the calcinated buses as homeless men scavenge metal from the still piping-hot engines, bare chests black with grime, police standing nearby with riot shields resting on the ground, not bothered to intervene any more. Noodle stands by the klongs, crooked strands of lightning wreathe the silent thunderheads, and in the shops portraits of the smileless, soon-to-die king are lit by shadeless lamps. Swirling around the darkening clouds, unnoticed above the heads of the diners forking pale noodles into their mouths, tense flexes of energy are awaiting release. Landslides in Kandy District, Israeli girl raped in Manali, suburban Addis Ababa resembles downtown Tallaght. Italian tourist shot in the head in Prazeres. The Congo. And nauseous with altitude sickness, shivering with the cold, I listen as my guide tells me the story of the Ramayana while outside the tent darkness falls on the peaks of Himachal, he recounting how Sita in the forest crossed the chalk line, speaking of the teeming city of the apes, floating boulders, the severing of Ravana’s head, and outside the sky is black now, the snow pale and visible, tired and clammy somehow. The pill’s not working. I need to piss. I stumble outside, crackling the layer of frost that now coats the snow, and cut a yellow patch into the whiteness. I crawl back into the tent, zip the door shut and lie awake thinking of the baking hot Indian plains and Hanuman and this girl who I remember from another Indian legend who lived a long, painful life, it seems to me, before she turned into a river. And when finally I sleep I dream of the Ganges beyond Varanasi, a black sludge of faeces and burnt bones, choked with soot and flesh, flowing eastwards, meditatively seeking out ocean, so it can disappear. Prince and Trevor. A mess of black beans and rice. An elephant with weeping sores on its legs. Getting cock sucked in toilets off Avenida Paulista. Air-conditioned hotel room in Kuakata, coming down with a cold. Carven Buddha heads crowding the museum. Reading David Foster Wallace discourse on the AVN Awards and September 11th while from a nearby temple Theravada chants growl, dip in and out of my mind. And in Phnom Penh with him, trying to imagine what it was like to be tortured in a deserted city, while the messages I read two days before rake through my mind like gunfire: “You’re amazing!” “I miss your smell.” Zika. Vague news of bombings in Belgium, photos online of smoke and rubble. Castro too, who caused so much trouble. In Venezuela years of protests rumble on, smoke and tear gas and flames. From a refugee centre in southern Spain, my friend calls me and tells me that every day it’s getting worse and the Syrian families in the shelter are … 7/11 cheesy-toasties, trinkets and cheap tank-tops clog the stalls of Rambuttri, faint thump of music drifting over the temple grounds from the Khao San Road. Too late to say sorry. I miss your smell. I miss your smell. I miss your smell. “Fora Golpistas!” Podcasts from libertarians, race-based nationalists, feminist-baiting trolls, Noam Chomsky, haters of Monsanto, banker conspiracists, flat-world advocates, Presbyterian humanists. “Zika was produced in a lab in Oxford.” My English friend turns down the hob and washes a wooden spoon beneath the tap. I light a cigarette on the hob’s flame. On the shelf by the stove is an empty packet of União sugar, a jar filled with what looks to be curds of dried mud, and a pepper mill rusted to uselessness. In this house full of artists all anyone ever talks about is money. A quarrel between the owners means that it’s years since the gutters have been cleared, gaps of rot are opening in the wooden eaves, and the new guy downstairs apparently once went to jail for murder. Through the wall the loud droning of Globo TV discussing the PEC, a stray cat—the house is full of them—flits through the kitchen and disappears. And in a bar on Koh Rong Island, the news breaks on a television in the corner, unnoticed by most people, that hostages were taken in a Dhaka café, that the radicals have finally done what they have always threatened to do, which is to not simply remain in the provinces slaying the odd infidel in a banana grove. In Santa Teresa on hot nights, sweat clinging to me as I write, I think of his arse mincing always in his black jeans as we’d trod the length of a wet field in winter, muddy trail of boot prints churning the grass to mud, bare hedgerows with frozen little birds warbling among the dry thorns, great clouds of vapour paddling from the mouths and nostrils of tremendous cows, the dense carpet of their flanks glistening with raindrops, the Martello tower in the distance hulking against a sky glowing with bitter red as the sun sinks on another short, equinoxal day. And the waves are cold all around the headland, unbundling themselves onto the shore, hissing on the sands. And in these twilight silences of an Irish winter, with the scent of a wood fire wafting in from somewhere across the fields, I feel as close as I ever can be to the dark, wet roots of the universe. I feel this darkness, this wetness, here in Brazil where I am plunged into the cauldron of a tropical summer. And I see him so innocently just wanting to be, to be alive, strutting in his puffa jacket, dreaming of happiness, glancing back at me every now and then just to be sure, sometimes smiling, and it makes me want to grab him in this deepening darkness, grab him and hold him because … And the fig trees, they persist, massive, gnarled, overlooking almost everything it seems since the dusty beginnings of human history, seeing ape-like hominids climb up into their branches like children into the arms of their parents, sheltering small roadside markets in the days of Harrapan, watching over the rent boys of Praça da Républica, stony-faced amid the honks of traffic, the bustle of pedestrians, the sharp hoot of a police car, and dripping their roots like lava in Campo de Santana, their slow, vegetable hearts sticky with sap and a kind of love that hot, frantic, flesh & vein machines, scurrying about in search of sustenance and sex, living and dying in the time it takes a fig to spread its arms to the sun, will never understand. Never understand. Greg Lake. Mosul. Saudi Coalition and Cohen. Olympic Games. Crates of mangoes being loaded onto the roof of a bus in a hot alley in Mumbai, destination Ahmedabad, the soft, sweet aroma cutting through the stench of the idling diesel engine, cows lumbering by munching rubbish, back-beat of honking from the main road. Protests, buses burn, in Gondal five Dalits drink phenyl, memories of 2002, girls gang-raped, the piles of charred corpses, skinny legs of infants blackened like roasted pig’s skin. Gujaratis are the friendliest people in India. On the terrace, he’s rapt in thought wondering will his boyfriend dump him, golden light on the coconut palms, mosquitos swarming as the light fades over Centro and the Morro de Providência … Walking through Bayon in Angkor Thom, up and down the stone steps, huge grinning Buddha faces watching me from every angle, stress mounting as I read and reread the text from my former landlord telling me that he is taking me to the District Court. Later a kid approaches us in an empty temple and points out bullet holes in the stonework, “Khmer Rouge, Khmer Rouge,” and then we grab a remork back to Siem Reap, sickly scent of durian in the air, silhouettes of trees and cries of insects trilling in the dusk. And above the plains of Tamil Nadu, in a temple on the peak of a rocky outcrop, nestled in a dark alcove smoking with incense, beyond a padlocked gate, a black god with a demon’s wide, staring eyes demands worship. Hung with garlands of flowers, it demands worship. Tongue of fire, claws drenched in blood as if in sweat, black, smoky skin, the hell of families starving, of wars that wipe out whole districts, of teens pushed into prostitution, punched and yelled at, pimped, parading through Phnom Penh buffeted by the jeeps and children begging on the streets, alert to the swagger of sex-tourists and the scent of dollars … Dublin’s grey coast, seals bobbing by the coal-black rocks, the grey lumps of the Welsh hills just visible on the horizon, by their presence shrinking the Irish Sea to a mere pond. Rickman. Crazed arsonist sets forest fires in the Western Ghats. A friend talks of the anti-capitalist message of his play Slups, another speaks of real values as those given to us by our grandmothers, another still, chiming with online commentators, calls for a collective reorganisation of society, sustainability, free food, networking systems. A family exits the bus and the women fall to the dust and weep: they had been on their way to the hospital in Pondicherry when they got the call. Accusations of Russian hacking. The back of the house is full of broken chairs, plants that have outgrown their pots, empty cans of Brahma, long bamboo sticks and a lone tortoise that nibbles on the fallen papayas, its sticky, prehistoric face forever clouded with fruit flies. Chennai’s rivers grey and stinking of sulphur. Mumbai’s tattered, clap-board and metal-sheeting slums sprawled at the foot of skyscrapers where the children’s first language is English. Churros with doce de leite, butter paneer, pigeon meat, buffalo curd of Bhola, pink Sri Lankan rice with pineapple curry, meatless chicken bones in Mondulikiri, green curries and street sausage, fish baked in banana leaf, black beany feijoada, Cornflakes and UHT. In every country food: mixed, marinated, flipped, fried, boiled, roasted, hands washed in sinks or bowls, titbits slathered in sauce, grabbed with forks, fingers, chopsticks, eaten by roadsides, on rickety tables, in air-conditioned halls, bus stations, narrow airplane seats and humble homes. Graffiti on Avenida Rio Branco calling for the punishment of military torturers, memories of 1798, the British Raj, slaves plucked up from Western Africa to be tortured in sugar cane fields, candomblé, Tamil Tiger bombs, Operation Searchlight, the reign of Rama III, the decline of the Khmer Empire, border clashes and close-fought elections, the huge, unresolved bear-hug of history enclosing us all. And Krishna calm on the carnage-choked fields of Kurukshetra: a warrior must kill just as a lover must love. A murderer must murder just as a mother must give milk. Holy cows and Khao San Road, where police load up jeeps with offerings from the street vendors. Princess Leopoldina’s chinaware alongside a video showing Carnaval sometime in the ‘80s, maybe. And the Juno probe locks into orbit around the gassy mass of Jupiter. North Korea. Indaiatuba. Kavadi’s metal hooks sunk into holy man’s skinny flesh. Fears of Europe breaking apart, rise of the right, fall of the West. Circus-theatre and empty bottles of 51. Frigates swimming past grey daytime moon bobbing in the blue. Blasts in Thai towns. Military tightens grip on parliament. Be careful who you speak to. Be careful what you say. Be careful what you think about. You need to be careful during these interesting days. Bell-hop hops to attention, another truck pulls out, next year they’ll link the road between the valleys and the marijuana fields will have to be moved further upslope to avoid raids. Votes being counted one by one, approaching a climax. Thousands upon thousands of women entering the hot flushes of menopause and men the barren fields of impotence. Babies gripping a teat in their lips for the first time. Music spills over from the neighbouring gardens, The Beatles, Blondie, memories. Jasmine blossoming. Parliament is to vote on it next week. Emptying the bins, spiders scatter from the corners as I sweep, a swarm of flies hovers lazily above the fruit bowl, mosquitos whine, and I pile my dirty clothes on the old wooden chair. In Shimla, locals head for a brisk morning stroll to the top of the hill, armed with sticks to fend off the belligerent monkeys. The Shimla Agreement, the heavy pines. Deeper in the mountains, the Hadimba Temple hung with horns and skulls. Junagadh’s step-well, cut deep into the bedrock, the stale, cloying odour of hundreds of years of accumulated pigeon shit, the light fading the deeper one goes. At the bottom a pool of dirty water strewn with sweet wrappers and, beside it, a tiny shrine surrounded by burnt out stumps of candles, charred incense sticks and untouched rupees. All the rulers that once held Uparkot Fort, sixteen times besieged, now emptied of tourists nightly by the wardens, patrolled by warthogs that chomp through unattended bins. Across the patch of flatland the Girnar Hills, cloaked in dry forest, where langurs roost appearing to the pilgrims at dawn like giant, black fruit. Once roused, they raid the tea-stalls, roam the forest in huge troops. Chewing on rubbery duck thighs in Koh Kong, watching the lightning shiver over the Mekong, the Tonlé Sap dried out by Chinese dams. Disputes over the South China Sea. Skewers of grilled eggs handed in through the windows of the bus, clamour of vendors, selling water, fried spiders, clusters of longans. There’s a samba party in Praça Mauá tonight. I’m tired and excited. Tinder and the slow crash of Ipaneman waves. The Battle of Sirte. And circled by the sun, soldiers train in barracks across the slowly drifting continents, holy prayers and harsh cruelties alike drowned out by the persistent rattle of the ceiling fan. Locked rooms. Kisses, moans. In forests tropical and temperate cell-by-cell vegetables accrete, fingers flexing, hibiscus burst, blood rushing in our veins. Our bodies, our bones, knitted out of the thinness of the sky, and our relentless disbelief in a world that never seems to die. Patiently Isabelle shells the peanuts, furiously Ravi shucks the cob. A motorbike bounces along a pitted ochre road, cylinder of gas strapped to the back, dogs from the dark houses yap, while in Kampong Cham a truck idles, and a bus in Santa Cruz pulls out. In Okha a boat docks, on the seashore where waters break noisily, and gently delete the rocks.

 

Dermot O’Sullivan is from Dublin, Ireland, where he studied English Literature in Trinity College, Dublin. His work has been published in various journals including The Honest Ulsterman, Causeway/Cabhsair, The Incubator, and Fence. He currently lives in Brazil, where he recently had his first full-length play produced.