“In the beginning,” Suchitra said, sitting by my bedside while I groaned that my head hurt, “in the beginning there was the official Communist Party of India—CPI. But India has a population problem and its left parties also ignore birth control. So after the CPI there was the CPI(M), the Communist Party of India (Marxist), and the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) a.k.a. CPI(M-L). Enough parties? Babe, the party’s only just getting started. Try to keep up. Now there is the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation, plus the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Naxalbari, and also the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Janashakti, and in addition the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Red Star, and let us not forget the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Central Team, or neglect to mention the Revolutionary Communist Center of India (Marxist-Leninist-Maoist), to say nothing of the Communist Party of United States of India or the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Red Flag, or the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) New Democracy, or the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) New Initiative, or the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Somnath, or the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Second Central Committee, or the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Bolshevik. Kindly continue to pay strict attention. There is proliferation among other groupuscules as well. There was the Maoist Communist Center which merged with the People’s War Group to form the Maoist Communist Center of India. Or possibly it was that the Maoist Communist Center of India merged with the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) People’s War and founded the Communist Party of India (Maoist). These distinctions can be hard to make. I tell you all this to explain the decision of my Bengali mother and father, two intrepid capitalistically inclined entrepreneur types trapped in Calcutta among the many-headed Ravanas of the Communist Party of India (Uranium-Plutonium), the nuclear-fission warheads of the left, to run away and settle in the Atlanta suburb of Alpharetta, Georgia, which is where I was born. This would perhaps have been a good idea, and in fact economically speaking it was a good idea because they succeeded in a wide range of enterprises, beauty salons, clothing stores, a real estate agency, psychic-healing services, so you see they also proliferated. But unfortunately around them the political institutions of the Hindu right were also being fruitful and multiplying on fertile American soil, expatriate branches of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh sprouted up, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad flowered, the Bharatiya Janata Party thrived, as did fund-raising organizations funneling dollars toward the same. My parents escaped from one whirlpool only to be sucked into another and when they started going to RSS gala dinners and speaking admiringly of the barrel-chested person they called NaMo, I had to love them and leave them and make my escape. So I hightailed it to NYC where I am now working my ass off trying to make you laugh and it would be kind of you at this point at least to crack a smile.”
“And this is your idea,” I said, “of a hangover cure.”
Regarding working her ass off: Suchitra did that every day, every minute of every day. I never knew anyone who worked half as hard and still had time for pleasure, in which category I was fortunate enough to be included. She woke early, went spinning, ran to her office, gave the workday everything she had, went running by the Hudson or across the Brooklyn Bridge and back, and still turned up fresh as a daisy and twice as stylish at whatever the evening had to offer, a gallery opening, a screening, a birthday party, a karaoke night, a dinner date with me, and had enough energy left for lovemaking after it all. As a lover she was equally energetic, if unoriginal, but I wasn’t complaining. I was scarcely a sex god myself and at that moment the love of a good woman was saving me from the black pit. Nero Golden’s tough affection and his heavy-drinking vodka nights, together with Suchitra Roy’s kindly, super-speed love, brought me through those days. I thought of the story of the paramedics in the ambulance playing good cop, bad cop after Mrs. Golden’s suicide attempt and realized that this time I was the one being put on suicide watch.
THERE WAS SILENCE IN HEAVEN, OR, THE DOG IN THE BARDO