Gary Indiana’s fictional vignettes “A Night at the Taj” originally appeared in Aura Rosenberg’s Head Shots, a book published by Stop Over Press in 1996. It has been excerpted here to coincide with Rosenberg’s current exhibitions at Pioneer Works and Mishkin Gallery surveying over five decades of the artist’s work.

Room 23

He says he does not remember where he was between 10 pm and midnight last Thursday, that he has a gastric disorder, that there may be a computer chip lodged in his brain that produces false memories and enables him to speak French, that he does not know any Muriel, but if he does it must be a stranger who approached him at a sausage kiosk outside the main rail station in Düsseldorf two weeks ago, claiming somebody’d stolen her suitcase and for various reasons she wouldn’t go into she couldn’t report the theft; that woman, who gave her name as Anna, traveled with him to Cologne, where they spent one night in a two-star hotel (the sex was melancholy, perfunctory) before proceeding to Amsterdam, where she assured him that certain friends were picking her up outside the station; he then took a train to Brussels, in Brussels changed for the Paris Express, in Paris he checked into a three-star hotel in the 19th quite near a Monoprix supermarket, he’s certain he stayed there at least three days before coming here. He does not know why his name came up in connection with the murder of Anna or Muriel, which apparently happened in Rotterdam, a city he’s never been to, or how this inquiry made its lightning way to New Delhi. His passport’s been confiscated, presumably for a routine check, and now his other arrangements are stalled. He is supposed to contact an R. Kumar in a flat near Connaught Circle, sign over some bills of lading, receive a packet of securities, fly to Agra, phone someone else from a coffee shop in Agra, exchange the packet for American currency, return to Delhi, from Delhi take a plane to Tehran and another plane to Karachi, in Karachi he’s to rent a car and drive down to Peshawar, give the money to a contact there, and the rest of it he can only imagine: the cash turning into guns, the guns going over the border into Jammu, and by that time he’ll be back in London, having the chip scalpel out of his wetworks or what have you.

Using a powerful technique he learned from Sherpas, he’s lowered his metabolism to a degree just shy of clinical death, the earphones feeding Mozart’s Requiem into his head, the Deutsche Grammophone Berlin Philharmonic version, Anna Tomowa-Sintow, soprano.

Room 72

“And why couldn’t it have been Victoria Frankenstein who created the monster from spare parts and set it loose among the ignorant villagers? Countess Dracula the implacable undead sucking life from the hapless Harker? We should pussify and cuntify all this dire literature, transsexualize these historical figures, replace the totemic lingam with a hole-o-rama. We need a girl Hitler, a lady Stalin, a clitorified terror as potent as the phallus, vaginated myths with all the dark charge of cannibalism and piracy.”

“Bit strong for the Women’s League.”

“Oh? Have you taken a look at their gods?”

“Stop pacing, Bunny. You make me nervous when you’re pacing.”

Room 81

She kneels with knees spread wide apart at the end of the bed, bent forward on her elbows doggie fashion, breasts dangling like bloated wine skins, glory hole and Mr. Fuzzy floating in space, while he, standing across the tulip-patterned spread, pumps his modest but impressively pointed manhood for her delectation, his skinny frame and incipient potbelly a peculiar contrast to her long, freckled Rubens of a figure. They’re on their way to Karnataka to visit his relatives, mainly to dispel the popular family notion that he’s queer, that he lacks his older, married brother’s testosterone, that he’s pissed away his twenties scribbling lame sestinas on cafe napkins while sponging off his mother and sister. She’s thrilled to parade his ethnicity among her passionless leftist chums back home, while here she does a strong impression of a zesty but basically submissive near-wife, ten years his senior and therefore sensible and security-minded. This brainy big white woman spells success like a numbered Swiss account. Now he’s between her legs with his fist grinding into her snatch, red hot prong pressed tight against her shin, lapping the sour sole of her foot. Her vagina fits him like a glove of slightly congealed gelatin. As he shoves his skinny brown penis inside he wonders if this time she’ll let him put it in her ass. He won’t feel he really owns this great white whale down to the ovaries until he sees her shit on his dick. He tells her he’s fucking her fine fine pussy, he orders her to fuck that big, hard dick all the way down to his aching balls, he whispers that his balls are bursting with so much come he could populate Nigeria: his voice is a bit too piping and priggish for this sort of steam discourse, she likes a lot of verbal but he’d like to pull out and poke it up her poop chute without a lot of chitchat. The thought makes him come before she’s even half-lubricated, he slides out with a pop and spanks her fanny with his spurting rod, his jism slimes down her ass crack as he wipes himself on her rosebud. She crawls away from him and sprawls with her shoulders against the headboard, starts doing herself with her fingers. He tells her to wait, says he can get it hard again after a cigarette. Oh sweetie she says when did you ever.

Lobby

The excessive lobby, constructed by Nehru to showcase the postcolonial miracle, acres of shiny marble that look like wet linoleum, with a raised conversation area, carpeted, full of ecru divans and plushy chairs that the honored guest sinks into and disappears altogether, crisscrossed by Japanese executives flushed from drunken exertions in a karaoke bar, a fat lady from Des Moines clutching Asia Week and the Wall Street Journal as she feeds herself sweets, a massive Sikh in an orange turban lighting a cigarette with a pounded gold lighter, and now three men in tuxedos, a sharp-faced Eurasian in his early thirties and a taller, younger Chinese man whose feral mouth’s full of crooked gold teeth, supporting between then a lanky WASP, fiftyish, whose name is certainly Dickie, followed by a Danish or Dutch girl with flowy corn-colored hair, in a magenta kurtah and baggy white slacks, they’ve just excluded from the regulation Ambassador taxi and wobbled up the steps and burst into the lobby, making it known to the doormen that Dickie’s made a little too free with a bottle of Shenley’s, they get this octopus of sprawling flesh over to a divan and prop him in something like a sitting position, the Eurasian says:

“Kirstin, see if they won’t give you Dickie’s key.”

“He looks really awful.” 

“He’ll look even worse if he pukes himself right here.”

“What on earth did you give him?"

“Chan, loosen Dickie’s tie. Dickie—” the Eurasian slaps him hard, smiling, “—you’re home, Chan, loosen his tie a little, Dickie, listen to me, Kirstin’s getting your key, Kirsten, go get the goddamn key.” 

Room 60

“Sister Mary Albert, this ’ere cross ayn nothing bu’ plywood.”

“Aye, begorrah, Father Albert, nay but plywood cood be scavenged oot a tha leprous jhuggi colony.”

“Idon seem proper, bu' ah suppows ill hefta do.”

“This ’ere’s the ’ammer Father Albert.”

“Eh ken see tha’ Sister Albert. Wey aright then, avert yer eyes Sister Albert.”

Father Albert slips out of cassock and stands before her all naked except for the loincloth. 

“Begorrah Father Albert, yer the spittin’ image o’ the blessed savior.”

“Thas blasphemy nearly Sister Albert, the savior’s eyes was far more prettier than these here tired old sinnin’ Scottish eyes.”

“Sure the savior hed pretty eyes Father Albert.”

“En the savior’s beard much flowier en longer than this ’ere scraggly untoward bush of blighted Scottish fuzz.”

“Sure the savior hed a bonnie beard Father Albert. En here’s the nine inch nails, Father Albert.”

“Well then nail me to the blinkin’ festerin’ plywood Sister Albert, what ye be waitin’ four?”

“Will ye be wanton’ me te nail yer feet as well as yer ands Father Albert?”

“I want the same’s was done to the savior, Sister Albert. The crown a thorns ye’ll find in the brown suitcase.”

“Ah doon have a Roman spear for the side Father Albert.”

“Ah jes wonna be crucified Sister Albert en fer tha’ aye doon need the bleedin’ spear naw do aye. Fer the love a Mike Sister Albert mind ye hit the nails not me fingers.”

Room 57

“...certainly my last night on earth, which you could then explain as fear of deterioration, either mental or physical, or the cumulative frustration of an economic nightmare that follows precisely the same scenario time after time, though this is not a place where one’s money worries at home figure very large in one’s thoughts, it’s not simply easy to see that others are infinitely worse off, it’s unavoidable, there is no empty space, no existential vista likely to remind you that you are alone in the world, quite clearly you aren’t but this is what being alone in the world will be for everybody in the future, a dense cluster of miseries with unbelievable variations spread like marmite over every square inch of public space, and little oases belonging to the rich walled off with sentry boxes and armed guards at every entrance, it’s a plain fact that this country with ‘the largest middle class in the world’ yearns for a cleansing epidemic that would kill off three or four hundred million to clear some breathing space for the survivors. Even if you do not regard the human being as the worst disaster thrown up by evolution, it’s impossible to view the fetus worship of the various religionists as anything other than a virulent psychosis, confronted as you are, every day, with the spectacle of thousands whose lives, all hypocrisy aside, are completely worthless. I mean worthless in the sense of having no chance of development, and no value in the eyes of the society they inhabit. You quickly forget all the liberal pieties and improving schemes suggested by the sight of a single homeless beggar when you multiply the beggar by a hundred million and add the concept of bad karma…

“To return to my own case, which in light of the above strikes me as extremely trivial, I wish my real intentions could be interpreted in the untragic way that I myself see them. Let’s say that a failure of will that I almost surely could have overcome had I been a slightly different person, plus several small but alarming changes in my physiology, have persuaded me that it is not necessary to go on. Suicide is not a repudiation of life but a refusal of specific conditions in which a particular life is lived: to substitute some set of abstract principles for the concrete facts I can lay out in front of me strikes me as an excessive evil, since this is the modus vivendi of Catholicism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and all the other fraudulent, poisonous systems of control our unfortunate species has concocted to oppress and ruin itself…”

Majestic Rooftop Gardens

“He’s out. What’s that?”

“Garlic chicken. Want some?

“He looks really bad, Alain.”

“What’s he got?”

“Well, there’s a camera. Passport, I think a folder of traveler’s checks, he must have put a lot of things in the safe.”

“That’s no problem. He got in yesterday around 3, so the night staff doesn’t know what he looks like.”

“I think he’s dead, actually.”

“That isn’t likely.”

“He’s not breathing.”

“Don’t give it another thought. You and Chan go back to the Sheraton. Leave me the key, I’ll come round in a half an hour. Here, try this chicken. It’s scrumptious.”

Room 66

…Such questions were repeatedly asked to the girl who had been allegedly raped for about four months by eight persons, including five policemen, two years ago… Hamida (not her real name) can speak only Bengali.

“David, I want to go home.”

Her interpreter Roma Debadrata, reader, Modern Indian Languages, Miranda House, Delhi University, was interrupted many a time by the family members and relatives of the accused. 

“Don’t be silly, Moira. We’ve practically only just got here.”

The court proceedings were disrupted for about ten minutes when a woman charged Mrs. Debadrata of doing wrong interpretation. “Yeh aurat galat bol rahi hai” (This woman is telling lies). “Hamida ne Mehtab ka naam nahi liya” (Hamida did not name Mehtab)...

“I can’t bear it, David. The noise. The people. They’re speaking English but you can’t understand a word they say.”

“Rashid used to do galat kaam (wrong things) with me during the night in his jhuggi cluster,” she said. Asked what does she mean by “galat kaam,” Hamid said, “izat lutna” (rape).

“And the way they look at us. Everyone staring all the time.” 

…On 10 August, between 300 and 350 gm of weapons-grade Plutonium-239, professionally packaged, was discovered in the luggage of two Spaniards and a Colombian arriving in Munich from Moscow aboard a Lufthansa airliner.

“We’re white, Moira, to them we look like gods. Dreadful but there it is. At least they don’t want to kill us the way they would in some Muslim country. You’ve been under so much stress darling. If we go back now we’ll have to deal with reporters and lawsuits and everything that was driving us both mad.”

It takes, of course, much more to build a bomb: 22 pounds of highly enriched Plutonium-239 or 26 pounds of highly enriched Uranium-235. But the point about the smuggling is that it enables an illegal bomb-assembler like Pakistan to receive small amounts over time.

…Among the cuts suggested by the CBFC is the famous nude scene, in which Phoolan Devi is stripped naked and dragged across the village square and a reduction in the duration of two of the many rape scenes in the film.

“But this awful religion of theirs. Leaving the dead out for vultures.”

“That isn’t Hinduism, Moira, it’s the Zoroastrians, and they’re dying out. Hardly any left.”

“Even so. Those vicious monkeys we saw this afternoon. Hateful, evil things. It’s things like…that man today. Crawling through traffic on all fours. I can’t bear it, I really can’t. Don’t look at me like that.”

The CBFC also said that the claim at the beginning of the movie that it was a “real story” of Phoolan Devi’s life should be replaced with “based on research.” 

…The nine LTTE men who vanished had been arrested under the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act (TADA). Six of them were part of the crew of the LTTE vessel Tongnova, which was intercepted by Navy and Coast Guard vessels of the Karaikal coast in Tamil Nadu on November 8th, 1991. 

“But darling the chap had a broken spine, what did you expect him to do?”

The vessel was ferrying ingredients for making explosives, wireless transmitter sets, empty jerry cans, and so on…the “Q” branch of the Tamil Nadu police…is “convinced” that they scaled the 24-foot (7.2-metre) wall, using bed-sheets as ropes.

“But those stumps, David, the man had leprosy as well.”

The nine had walked out around 10:30 pm out of two adjoining cells, whose locks were missing, revealing the complicity of the jail officials. 

“You can’t catch leprosy from looking at someone, whatever put that idea in your head?

Corridor

Something is not right. He fears the telling, overlooked detail, closing the door with the Do Not Disturb face outward, down in the elevator to reception, waving the key, he says he’s Richard Johnson from Detroit, America, the desk clerk eyes him with a wary look and asks for his passport, fortunately he’s used his little kit to lift out Dickie’s photograph and glue in his own. The metal box is a disappointment, one Rolex watch and about eight hundred in U.S., an air ticket he probably can’t peddle and certainly can’t use, then back to the ninth floor, in the room he regrets that he’s only filled a small shampoo bottle with gasoline, he starts gathering flammables into a rough mound extending from the balcony to the door, at least this will create a wall of fire, the trick is getting it to spread to the other rooms, causing as much confusion as possible. The towels can act as a fuse, giving him time to slip out of the hotel before all hell breaks loose. Another thought occurs to him. He could, perhaps, pitch Dickie’s body over the balcony after setting the drapes going, and simply climb over the ledge to the balcony next door, and then it would look as if Dickie jumped in panic. He changes his mind again. The other way they’ll suppose he fell asleep with a lighted cigarette. Maybe not. What to do? He lies down beside the corpse on the bed, pondering the best technique. He finds the inert lump of Dickie irritating, he wants to shake him and say, You’re no help, are you. Gone to your great reward after fifty years of meaninglessness. Dickie doesn’t have to think about burning down the hotel or anything else. Alain always ends by envying people he’s done away with, for exactly this reason, that they no longer have to think of anything, having passed over to a state of perfected indifference, whereas he—and now pours himself a glass of water from the pitcher and swallows a few of his yellow energizers—can never stop calculating, never come to rest, and it’s usually now, after tabulating his resentments and adding up the take, that the bad feelings come, and the urge to fuck death in the ass overwhelms him. As he tugs Dickie’s belt loose and yanks Dickie’s trousers down he hates this big dead Yank and the cosmic secret that’s crawled up and disappeared inside him, and hates himself for what he’s about to do. ♦