Narcopolis

by Jeet Thayil

  ‘On, off, off, on. I have a friend who says you never really quit, all you do is take breaks.’

  He nodded politely and took another sip. Then, as if he were asking about my job or the weather, he said, So, what are you on? I debated it. I did, for about half a minute, and then I thought how laughable it was that I was bashful about confessing my drug use to an alcoholic. I told him, and of course he wanted to see Rashid’s. He’d tried opium in Thailand, had in fact spent a month in Chiang Mai smoking too much for his own good, but that had been many years earlier. He’d heard about Bombay’s drug dens and he would be in my debt if I took him to the khana. If there was anything he could do for me in return, I should consider it done. And there was nothing to worry about; he would not talk about it. In fact, he had more to lose than I did if word got out that he’d been carousing in Bombay’s red light district. He could keep a secret. The question was, could I?

  It was late, but I knew Rashid’s would be open and it was a simple thing to redirect the cab and keep the driver waiting with the promise of a tip. On the way, the painter continued to sip at his whisky without offering me a taste, and soon we were falling up the wooden steps to the khana, where Bengali sat bent over a newspaper and Dimple was making herself a pipe. For a moment I saw the room from a stranger’s eyes; I saw a wavering image, unreal, something out of the sixteenth century. I stood there in my bell-bottoms and I felt like an interloper from the future come to gawk at the poor and unfortunate who lived in a time before antibiotics and television and aeroplanes.

  *

  I ordered two pyalis and let Xavier go first. Who’s the old man? Dimple asked, having assumed from Xavier’s subdued manner and tone of voice that he was from Elsewhere (a place where Hindi wasn’t spoken or understood). But he replied in the same colloquial Bambayya she had used.

  ‘My dear, I’m not that much older than you. My hair’s white and my bones are rickety but that’s because I drink. I look older than I am. Whereas you look your age.’

  I told Dimple she’d seen his work in a magazine some weeks earlier. She didn’t remember, but Bengali did. He spoke from deep inside a nod. Christ, Bengali said, from the Sanskrit ghrei, to rub, which in Greek became Christos, the anointed, which may mean that Christ is an Indo-European concept, much as your paintings suggest. And that was when Xavier realized that though Bengali’s eyes were closed he was looking directly at him. I reminded Dimple that she’d been disturbed by Xavier’s pictures, which was a pure reaction, maybe the most gratifying response an artist could expect. I was addressing Dimple, but I was speaking for Xavier’s benefit. I was showing him off to her, it’s true, but I was also showing her off to him. Addicts are alike in that way, we’re always eager to show civilians our subterranean relationships and outlaw skills. At the time, I still thought of Xavier as a civilian.

  ‘And now here he is in person,’ I said. ‘Isn’t it incredible?’

  It was at this moment that Bengali whimpered in his dream and uttered a sentence nobody understood. We heard only the last word: kaun?

  Dimple shook her head once. There was nothing incredible about it, she said. I thought it was so because I spoke English, because I read books, and because my parents paid for my education and my upkeep. For me everything was surprising, the world was full of wonder, the most random idiotic occurrence was incredible because my luck made it so. For people like her, for the poor, the only incredible thing in the whole world was money and the mysterious ways in which it worked.

  *

  She’s right, Xavier said. Only the rich can afford surprise and or irony. The rich crave meaning. The first thing they ask when faced with eternity, and in fact the last thing, is: excuse me, what does this mean? The poor don’t ask questions, or they don’t ask irrelevant questions. They can’t afford to. All they can afford is laughter and ghosts. Then there are the addicts, the hunger addicts and rage addicts and poverty addicts and power addicts, and the pure addicts who are addicted not to substances but to the oblivion and tenderness that substances engender. An addict, if you don’t mind me saying so, is like a saint. What is a saint but someone who has cut himself off, voluntarily, voluntarily, from the world’s traffic and currency? The saint talks to flowers, a daffodil, say, and he sees the yellow of it. He receives its scent through his eyes. Yes, he thinks, you are my muse, I take heart from your stubbornness, a drop of water, a dab of sunshine, and there you are with your gorgeous blooms. He enjoys flowers but he worships trees. He wants to be the banyan’s slave. He wants to think of time the way a tree does, a decade as nothing more than some slight addition to his girth. He connives with birds, and gets his daily news from the sound the wind makes in the leaves. When he’s hungry he stands in the forest waiting for the fall of a mango. His ambition is the opposite of ambition. Most of all, like all addicts, he wants to obliterate time. He wants to die, or, at the very least, to not live.

  Dimple said, ‘I need a translator to understand you.’

  ‘I think I do too,’ said Xavier, ‘I think maybe I’m going off my head again.’

  I said, ‘Saints and addicts, I like that.’

  And that was when Dimple asked the question I couldn’t answer for many years. She asked why it was that I, who could read and write and had a family that cared enough about me to finance my education, who could do anything I wanted, go anywhere and be anyone, why was I an addict? She didn’t understand it.

  At the time, I couldn’t either. I didn’t know my own compulsions well enough to reply. Instead, I broke out the pharmaceutical morphine I’d stolen from the office stores and made myself a small shot. Xavier had one too.

  *

  When she tapped the stem he took the pipe and held it comfortably, the way a man holds a telescope, with two or three fingers. She said later that she felt his eyes travel the length of her body and settle on her cunt and all the while he pulled at the pipe, the sound loud in the room, and she felt that he was sucking at her amputated penis, sucking in a way that would end her life if she didn’t resist him. Some time later, she heard the sound of water, running water, as if a tap were open somewhere, or not the sound of water exactly, but a voice imitating the sound of water, a voice that was low and uninterested and busy and she realized it was his voice and he was speaking to her. Eunuchs used to carry quills in their turbans, he said, like a portable penis that could be attached when they wished to urinate. I’m sure you could get something custom made, bone or hard plastic, a funnel of some sort, something you could carry with you. Imagine how much easier it would be. You wouldn’t have to sit, you could stand and pee like a man. She noticed that his eyes protruded like the eyes of a snake or a lizard, pop eyes that didn’t blink or waver. She understood that it was very important to close her own eyes and breathe calmly. But when she shut her eyes she felt him in her anal cavity, a dry grating pressure that threw words into her head she could not dislodge: Satan. Shaitan. Shat On. She opened her eyes in panic and just then he exhaled a great cloud of smoke, too great for a single pair of lungs, and she saw only his torso clad in white kurta and churidars: where the head should have been there was thick vapour, as if a burning sword had decapitated him, as if inside he was all smoke, a man-shaped river of smoke that was leaking into the room. Later she said it was at this moment that she began to pray and the prayer that rose to her lips was not Muslim or Hindu but Christian, and she said it to herself in English: Hell mary midriff god pray fussiness now and at thee owruff ower death.

  *

  I got up at midnight. There was a twelve-thirty curfew at my hostel and in any case it was time we were on our way. But Xavier wanted biryani and kababs, which he hoped Bengali would be kind enough to bring from Delhi Durbar’s late-night window. He wanted more whisky and maybe another pipe. When I got up, Dimple did too. Xavier asked why she was leaving. Was she afraid of being alone with an old man? She told me to go ahead. She would stay and shut up shop.

  The cab was still waiting and I took it home to Colaba. In my room, whi
ch faced the street, there was a smell of camphor from the evening’s anti-mosquito effort. I opened the window and the moonlight lit up the bed and desk and mirror (the only furnishings) as if I’d turned on an electric lamp. I arranged myself in the usual way, on my back with my hands folded across my chest. I slept and woke suddenly and found that the sheets were wet and there was a gash between my legs. I tried to stop the blood with my hands but it soaked into my trousers and filled my shoes. I fell asleep with my shoes on, I thought stupidly, touching the crusted blood that had formed on my thighs. I looked on the floor but there was nothing there except moonlight and dust. I was reaching blindly for the telephone when I woke up. It was noon and I was in the same position in which I’d fallen asleep. Though I’d slept for ten hours I was exhausted and sweaty. I had a shower and ate lunch in the mess. I did the laundry and went back to my room where I arranged and rearranged the objects on my desk. By four in the afternoon I could think of nothing else and I was on my way out the door when the hostel manager said there was someone waiting to see me. In the lounge, a grand name for what was in reality nothing more than a corridor without light or air, was Akash Iskai reading a newspaper. He wore a blue T-shirt that had been washed many times and he looked slightly less like a Hindustani musician than he had at Xavier’s event. The poet had gotten my address from the PEN watchman, who said Xavier and I had gone off together in a taxi. Iskai had assumed his friend would be fine, but he knew now his friend was not fine at all. Xavier had disappeared. He wasn’t at his hotel and he hadn’t turned up for a press conference at the gallery where the new show was about to open. Where was he? Did I know? Iskai said he felt responsible for the latest disaster that had overtaken the poor man. He would be blamed if something had happened because the PEN event had been his idea and he had organized the funds to bring Xavier to Bombay. I thought about what Xavier had said the night before, that he didn’t want it to get around that he’d been smoking opium. And, I thought, Xavier is a man of the world. It would be wrong not to offer him the minimum respect one gave an adult, which was the option to let himself down, with a crash perhaps, if that was what he wished to do. I told Iskai that Xavier had dropped me off first and gone in the direction of his Colaba hotel, that he seemed fine at the time. And of course I hadn’t noted the taxi’s registration number, why would I? Iskai went off, still upset, and I went to Rashid’s.

  *

  The khana was full, but Dimple wasn’t there and neither was Xavier. I ordered a pyali and smoked it slowly, at Dimple’s station, where Pagal Kutta was tending the pipe. He was the most incompetent pipeman in the khana. His pipes burned too fast and too strong. Worse, he was in a rush for you to finish so he could smoke the dregs. But it was the way he sucked at the pipe that had earned him his nickname, because he huffed and snorted like a mad dog. I endured the smoke he made me and I endured Rashid’s stories while I waited for Dimple. Rashid was talking about the Pathar Maar’s latest killing. He had struck late the night before and the newspapers hadn’t gotten around to reporting it. He’d picked off a mother and baby who were sleeping under the Grant Road Bridge. He’d crushed the woman’s head with a stone from the pavement and taken the baby by his ankles and smashed him against a wall. Others had been sleeping nearby but nobody heard a cry. It wasn’t until someone woke to use the toilet that the murders were discovered.

  ‘The Pathar Maar is a Congress stooge,’ said Rashid. ‘This is the culmination of the Garibi Hatao campaign. What do you say, Bengali?’

  When he laughed, the others joined in, pipemen, customers, even Bengali laughed, though it was clear not everybody understood the joke: some among that group of career criminals and addicts didn’t know if it was 1978 or 1975, much less the minutiae of government policy. Dimple came in an hour or so later and Rashid said something that made her duck her head and go straight to work. And when I asked Bengali about the man in the kurta who’d come to the khana the previous night, he looked at me blankly, as if he had no idea who I was, much less what I was talking about.

  *

  The following day I resolved to stay home, but that evening I was back at the khana; I arrived to find, on the floor, smoking a pipe with Pagal Kutta, the painter Xavier. His white kurta had turned the colour of sawdust but his beard was trimmed and he’d had a haircut. In fact, he was looking fresher than he had any right to. Dimple was nowhere to be seen. I told him that Iskai had been to see me, that people were worried about him. Where had he been?

  ‘Sampling the wares of Shuklaji Street. No reason for Akash to upset himself. My show opens tomorrow. I’ll be there in a suit, charming the press. Tell him to stay calm.’

  I asked again where he’d disappeared to. He said, May I buy you a pyali of Mr Rashid’s excellent product? If Baudelaire had extended his survey of paradise to opium, and this opium in particular, I think it would have won hands down. And I am making no idle speculation. As you may have gathered, I am a wino, and it is as a wino that I aver, this opium is superior, uniformly consistently superior. Xavier was drunk, but not so drunk he needed a wheelchair. He thanked me for my help, paid for my pyalis and left the khana in a respectable fashion.

  A day or so later I asked Dimple if she knew where Xavier had been. She said he’d been with her at the hijra’s brothel. But she didn’t want to talk about him. In our language the word for evil and chaos is the same, she said. To speak of evil is to invite it into your life. She never mentioned Xavier again, not even to me.

  *

  Dimple kept her word when she said she would not speak of what happened. But she did not forget the man with the pop eyes whose bloody gums and whisky sweat gave her the superstitious feeling that a devil had entered the room. After I left and Bengali went out to buy food, they were alone in the khana for about half an hour. She busied herself setting out a pyali, but he prepared the opium himself. He did it expertly, tapping the pipe when it was ready, offering her the first smoke. She felt as if she were the customer and he the pipewallah. She would have enjoyed it, too, if she hadn’t felt so controlled by him. While she was still smoking, he took the pipe from her and put the mouthpiece, still wet from her lips, to his, his eyes locked on her belly. Then, looking her in the eyes, he sucked slowly at the pipe and she felt as if he was penetrating her through her clothes, or as if she had fallen asleep in an unfamiliar town and had been slapped awake by a stranger, a man whose face she could not see, who fucked her without mercy and paid no heed to her pleas for lubrication. She had never felt so naked, not even in the brothel.

  As soon as Bengali returned, she went home. She walked quickly to the corner and turned into Hijde ki Gully where she walked past 007 and stopped as if to buy paan and checked to see if she was being followed. Only then did she go into the building. She ate dinner and washed herself. She exchanged her salvaar for a sari and was touching up her lipstick and face powder when Xavier entered. He chose the most uncomfortable chair in the house, a pink plastic armchair built for a child. Lakshmi brought him a beer and before he’d taken a sip he ordered another. He asked the tai how much it would cost to spend the night in one of the cubicles. With or without a girl? the tai asked. Without, he said, and the tai gave him the first figure that came into her head: three hundred for the night. How much with a girl? he asked. The tai said six hundred. So a room costs the same as a girl? The tai laughed at him. He pointed at Dimple and said, I’ll take that one. But ask her to put on a burkha for me. You should make them all wear burkhas, you’ll make more money. The tai laughed again. Xavier told her, Put half the girls in burkhas and half in saris and see what the customers prefer. Not once in his exchange with the tai did he look at Dimple.

  The tai told her to get a cubicle ready. Dimple chose the least private one, the one nearest the entrance, next to the tai’s own room. She put a fresh sheet on the cot and cleared the bucket of used condoms and cigarette butts. Then she changed while Xavier and the tai continued to talk business in the hall, a strange conversation that filled her with dismay because
of the way he said the English word ‘eunuch’, as if to disparage her and women like her: he never used the word ‘hijra’. Take a eunuch with a penis and no testicles, he said, which operation, as the tai knew, was accomplished at little cost, could in fact be accomplished with a minimum of expenditure; take him, and this was the important point, augment the basic armature of penis, no testicles, with a pair of good-quality breasts, the larger the better. He said the tai should invest in a new surgical procedure called silly cone, with which she could fashion a new breed of randi with big breasts and a show penis. For such a randi she could double the regular price, or even triple it. She would recoup her investment in the space of two months if not less and from then on it would be pure profit. The tai was no longer laughing, or she was laughing too softly to be heard. More likely, she was listening very carefully and would probably repeat the whole story to the seth, owner of the brothel and the randis. Dimple lay on the cot, taking as little space as possible and trying not to fall asleep, but it was late and she was tired.

  *

  She was in a corridor that stretched and curved like a road in the country. The only light came from the thin strips of blue glowing under the doors she passed. On her left was a wall and on the right were the doors, an endless succession of them, each with a strip of blue below it. Sometimes she heard voices, but mostly she heard the sound of splashing, or the hum of a large body of water, and she knew without being told that she had to keep walking, that it would be her error to stop and see what lay behind the doors, which were set at irregular intervals though they were all of the same size and shape. It doesn’t matter, she heard herself say, nothing worse can happen to me. All those who loved me have died and I too am dead. She felt such unbearable loneliness at the thought that she stopped and opened a door at random. The room was enormous, taken up in its entirety by a pool filled with blue water. She knew the water was very cold, because no condensation had formed on the tiles and the air was frigid. Around the pool was a ledge, but it was too narrow to walk on. The room had walls that went so high that the ceiling was invisible to her. On the far side of the room she made out a figure sitting with his legs in the water. She couldn’t see his face but she saw the lighted end of the cigarette he was smoking and she thought she smelled clove tobacco. She closed the door and walked on and her own footsteps sounded strange to her. She thought: I am losing myself one step at a time. And she opened the door to an identical room with a pool in which someone had recently been swimming. There was a thin mist on the surface of the water and bits of algae. It was cold and someone laughed. But when she looked into the darkness at the other end of the room there was no one. Then she noticed the shapes in the water and she went to take a closer look. Fat round shapes with long tails slept on the floor of the pool, and, as she watched, one detached itself from the mass of its brothers and torpedoed up towards her. She stepped back as an old man’s head broke the surface.