Narcopolis

by Jeet Thayil

  *

  That night she was sick, throwing up quickly and repeatedly, so quickly it was almost pleasure. She had many dreams, separate dreams that seemed to pass through her simultaneously, or was it a single dream that stretched in all directions for most of the night? She dreamed of a house she had never lived in and of a family she did not know. The neighbourhood was unfamiliar, but she knew it was somewhere in Bombay, Malabar Hill maybe, or Breach Candy, or Marine Drive, or Cuffe Parade, some neighbourhood where the rich lived, because everybody in her dream was rich. She had friends with names like Queenie, Devika and Perizaad. She was popular with her teachers because she did well in class and for the same reason she was not popular with her classmates. She was often happy. Even in her dream she knew she was happy because she was a student and reading was her proper occupation. Her favourite book was a slim collection of prophecies by a nun who wrote in Konkani, who wrote every day, who filled up exercise books with her tiny handwriting and threw away most of what she wrote. Only three of the slim books survived her severe self-editing. The nun’s name was Sister Remedios and after her death her writings were published in Konkani by the convent where she had lived and died. Dimple’s edition was an English translation that appeared two decades later. The book was terrifying, not because it contained endless descriptions of civil butchery and mass suicide, but because of the serene accompanying sketches of trees, streams and sunbirds. The drawings were scattered throughout, small drawings the nun had made that were sometimes related, though only cryptically, to the catastrophic visions she described; more often they had no connection to anything at all. In eighty or so pages Sister Remedios described a ruined world shaped by landslides and floods, a world in which ‘fissured cities rose and fell in a cement tide, and trees upended their roots into the air, and birds fell to the ground like stones, and the moon fell into a crack that had appeared on the earth, the old earth that was breaking itself into pieces’. She wrote in the past tense, as if the terrible scenes she described had already happened and had been witnessed by thousands, by hundreds of thousands of doomed souls and only she, Sister Remedios, had returned alive to tell the world of its death. The nun did not record the cause of the cataclysm, she did not say whether it was war or some unnatural planetary upheaval that had caused it; but the scenes of suicide were faithfully rendered. The book ended with two pages about a great pit filled with black blood, its surface pocked with toxic gas bubbles, and the army of ghosts that fought to drink at the pit: whenever one succeeded in clawing his way through, a hooded swordsman decapitated the weeping creature with a single broad stroke. In this way the ghosts were left headless though not extinguished. Only one among them managed to reach the pit and drink its fill. When the ghost lifted its oily black mouth to the moon and howled with joy, Dimple recognized her own blind face and then she saw the face of the hooded swordsman and recognized him too. And though she knew she was dreaming, that Sister Remedios’s book was her own invention and the world was as intact as it had ever been, she whimpered in her sleep at the ferocity of her own visions.

  Towards dawn she fell into a deeper sleep and woke up late, unrested, with a taste in her mouth, a sweet-and-sour residue like pani-puri water. She bathed and the tai gave her money for new clothes but a customer arrived as she was leaving, a regular, with two boxes of mithai. He was the seth of a sari shop on the main road and it was what everyone called him, Seth. Lakshmi said even his own family called him Seth. She said he’d answered to it for so long he must have forgotten his real name. The seth wanted to drink a few bottles of beer and toss handfuls of salted cashews in his mouth and brag about how much money he would spend on his daughter’s wedding. It had just been arranged, he said, and he wanted to celebrate. He wanted French, no handshake, and then he wanted to lie back and sip his beer while she danced for him, lip-syncing to the radio. When she sponged him, he cleaned his hands and groin carefully so no trace of her remained. It was the ritual shared by all her married customers. After he left, she slept some more, very deeply, and woke up late in the evening and the next day the pain was back and it was as if she’d never been free of it and would never again be free. She was on outcall. An Arab customer had telephoned the tai. Send Dimple, he said. He wanted her to stay the night at his hotel in Colaba, a new building in one of the alleys behind the Taj. The Arab came to Bombay every year during the monsoon to see the rains that didn’t come to his country. He expected very little by way of service: he wanted her to lie face down on the bed while he rubbed himself against her, both of them fully dressed. He was a big tipper and she couldn’t afford to be unwell. She went back to Mr Lee’s. She began to visit him a few times a week. She kept an emergency hoard of eating opium for the times she couldn’t make it to the khana and it was as easy as that to acquire the habit of opium, for that’s what it was, a habit, like bathing twice a day or eating vegetables.

  *

  She was learning to live with the pain. It was always there, in her shoulders and her back. The opium reduced it to something manageable, but she woke with pain. And then, taking the pipe one morning from Mr Lee, she realized that her arms were getting longer. She was sure of it, her arms were out of proportion to the rest of her. She went to a real doctor in Colaba. She took a train to Churchgate and a taxi from the station to his office. He was an English-speaking man with a degree from London and a second office in Worli. His room was full of books on glass-fronted shelves. He picked up a heavy black volume with indentations on the pages and after a few minutes of reading he told her that the lengthening of her arms was a biological change brought about by her gelding. He said You were castrated so young there have been hormonal spikes in your physiology. In a way, the growth of your arms is a compensation for the profound change you’ve undergone, perhaps the most profound change a human system can experience short of dying. She thought, I don’t care. As long as my knuckles don’t drag on the floor I don’t care. What does it mean if my arms are longer? It will be easier to make pipes. She thought: This is nothing, just one more of the body changes I have to live with, like the way my Adam’s apple disappeared and my moustache and the veins on my arms. Where did they go? When she asked the doctor, he made no reply. He nodded politely and wrote out a bill. The doctor wore glasses with gold frames and he didn’t actually examine her. He didn’t touch her at all, not even to shake hands, as if he knew her, knew where she lived and what she did for a living and the exact amount of opium she took on a daily basis, and even if he made no moral judgment about her life, he had made a medical or personal judgment, which he had every right to. He didn’t touch her but he washed his hands with soap at a sink near his desk. He was like a bhai on Shuklaji Street: he did not handle money or maal. He didn’t get his hands dirty until he had to. He gave her a note and asked her to take it to the front desk. She paid the elderly woman in the outer room, paid in cash, paid more for fifteen minutes of the man’s time than she earned in an entire night. She thought: All he did was look in a book. I wonder how much he would charge to touch me.

  *

  Mr Lee’s khana existed outside the street’s usual lines of supply and demand. It was Mistah Lee’s, or Mister Ree’s, a place of fable, the Chinese den with the antique pipes where customers were unwelcome. Wooden cots were stacked like bunk beds, each cot with a pipe, each pipe on a tray. Smokers tended to their own pyalis. The door was always closed and because there were few customers the police didn’t bother asking for chai-paani bribe money. Two or three middle-aged Chinese men arrived around noon, smoked their quotas and left without saying much. Mr Lee wasn’t interested in more custom. There was enough money to keep himself in opium and food – plenty of one and just enough of the other – and that was as much business as he wanted. When he and Dimple were alone, he liked to open up his battered tin trunks and show her relics from his old life. There was an English identity card in an envelope of documents. The image was creased and faded but the lettering was still legible. She read his name slowly; she wa
s teaching herself to read English.

  ‘Lee ka see.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Lee Ka Tsay.’

  She read aloud his birth year, 1929, and province, Canton. He’d been an officer in the army.

  ‘Wrong army,’ he told her. ‘I on wrong side in war. You know why? Because we lose. If you lose, you wrong.’

  *

  She wanted to know what it was like to lose a war and a homeland at one stroke and to travel for a long time and arrive in a place where no one knew you. He told her it was like dying or being paralysed, a catastrophic occurrence that no one was equipped to deal with, however strong or well trained they were. She said she liked the city because it was big and there were many strangers who became friends. She said he was lucky to start again somewhere new. He made a gesture with his shoulders, a tiny gesture that told her the precise extent of his unluckiness. And she understood that while his memories of home had softened with time, everything he told her of India was sharp with dislike. He said, Here everything too fast, too loud, too crazy. Indians don’t care for past, only care for now. They too busy thinking of food to think of tomorrow. So? You do what you want do. Dare to dream. Dare to dream. You have to turning round like snowball otherwise you don’t become big. He had to explain to her what a snowball was.

  There was a uniform in the trunk and she asked him to put it on. It had high collars and narrow epaulettes and insignia on the breast; it suited him, and the peaked cap transformed him. He filled out, as if he’d grown younger and taller. She saw the markings on the uniform and she understood that he’d been an important man. Go out in that and the girls will pay you, she said. His smile was shy, a small shy flicker, like the ghost of a smile that had occurred a long time ago.

  *

  It took him a while to work up to it, to ask the questions she’d been asked many times: How did they do it? And: how much did it hurt? Her reply was casually made, as if she were talking about a haircut or a school outing. It affected Lee more than if she’d wept or cursed. When you’re cut young you become a woman quicker, she told him, and since she had not yet been ten, they did both at one go. With older boys, they removed only the testicles. Gelding. They used the English word. In her case: gelding and docking.

  ‘I was nine or I might have been eight,’ Dimple said. ‘It was about a year after I came to Bombay, to the hijra’s brothel. A woman was called, a famous daima, Shantibai. There was singing and dancing and whisky. The daima told me to chant the goddess’s name and she gave me a red sari. She made me drink whisky. I hated the taste but I drank it. They gave me opium. Then four of them held me down. They used a piece of split bamboo on my penis and testicles and held me down. The bamboo was so tight I felt nothing, until afterwards, when they poured hot oil on my wound. That was when I felt the pain, and more, something strange, I was sure the pain would set me free. It burned when they poured the oil, but it was a good thing, it meant the bleeding would stop.’

  ‘They not take you to doctor?’

  ‘I could have asked for a doctor, but nobody respects the doctor nirvan. You get anaesthesia and medicine. You’re not risking your life.’

  Lee asked more questions.

  ‘My mother brought me here to 007 and gave me to the tai. I was seven or eight. I don’t remember much about her or my life before I came. I don’t want to remember.’

  ‘Best. Forget is best.’

  ‘Why remember and make yourself sad?’

  ‘Why remember when anyway you memory wrong, ALL WRONG.’

  ‘Yes, yes, best to forget.’

  ‘What I said.’

  *

  He took her to Chowpatty for milkshakes at Rajasthan Lassi or a pista kulfi at Cream Center and a sandwich on the beach. It was December, the time of year he liked best. He said, This Bombay? Only nice two month of year, December and January, rest of time it no place for human being. To clinch the argument he nodded at the scene around them. It was a weekday but the beach was crowded: men ambled aimlessly and stray dogs lay curled under the trees. Here and there lamps burned where vendors sold peanuts, sugared tamarind and coconut-oil head massages. A small boy lay buried in the sand. Only his hands and head were visible. Beside him was a handkerchief with a pitiful collection of coins. The boy’s eyes were closed and he was muttering. Mr Lee planted his walking stick in the sand and watched the lights on the near horizon, a wavy line smudged silver and blue, strung with spray. There was a yellow moon in the sky, like the half-shut eye of a giant bird of prey, and there were no stars to be seen, not a single one, not anywhere. Where have the stars gone, he thought. How will the ships navigate without stars? And then he remembered that the stars were dead, long dead, and the light they shed was not to be trusted, was false, if not an outright lie, and in any case was inadequate, unequal to its task, which was to illuminate the evil that men did. He thought he saw a junk that was at least a hundred yards long, with nine masts and immense sails and attended by a flotilla of smaller boats – supply ships, water tankers, transports for cavalry horses, and fast-moving patrol boats. He knew the junk and its master. In the dusk the big ship’s lights on the water were violet on violet and he thought if he waited long enough one of the small boats would come to fetch him. The ship was a long way from home but seemed in good shape, sitting solidly in the water, so close he could see the rigging. It is the eunuch admiral Zheng He, he told Dimple, the great Chinese Muslim navigator, and he’s come to take me home. Then he heard drums, jungle drums, and he thought of witch doctors and the image of the great junk faded to violet mist. He heard the sound of surf and he heard someone speaking or cursing in Hindi. Your mother’s cunt, the voice said. Or the voice was saying someone’s name, Marky Chu. Lee told Dimple he was sick. He had a grating in his throat and he didn’t want to go to a hospital because there was no point, he knew what it was. He said he needed opium for its pain-killing properties, just as she did. He had a list of aches and pains. It was a bond between them, the itemizing of pain. In pain, he said, as if it were a country. As if he were saying, I am in Spain.

  *

  He said he’d teach her the important things, starting with the most important thing of all, the correct way to make tea and rice, so the tea wasn’t overbrewed and the rice wasn’t overcooked. He said: You want make food forget Indian way. Indian’s system is like American system, everything overdone. They have no subtle. He sent her to buy octopus. She brought the tentacles home in a bag of ice and cut them into thin slices, at a sharp angle. She put the sliced octopus in a saucepan with ginger and green onions and added a black bean paste. He told her to touch the octopus to the flame and serve. But she let the dish cook for a good five minutes until the flesh was tough and rubbery. You overdid, he told her. Old Chinese saying, you don’t need take off your pant to fart. This is how he talks, she thought. He makes pronouncements, as if each thing he says is the final word on the subject. He talks in proverbs. There’s nothing I can say in reply.

  Lee taught her how to make pipes because he was finding it difficult to do even this. Soon he would become a feeble old man and he’d need help to eat and shit. He would end up in a hospital, he said, at the mercy of Indians. He wanted to pass on his expertise, such as it was, while he was still able. He told her the most important thing was to take your time; that the making of the pipe should take longer than the smoking of it; that hurry went against the meaning of opium. ‘Patience,’ he said. ‘Be patient. You not patient, you no good.’ He taught her posture, how to recline so her head was at the same height as her right shoulder. He told her to close her eyes for a few minutes before she picked up the pipe and to bow to the lamp when she lit it first thing in the morning. She thought: Only, this is a chandu khana and we are smoking opium. We’re not praying, we’re getting high. But she followed his instructions and began the day with a few minutes of silence, the pipe resting across her lap.

  He taught her some Chinese. Ho leng ah, and ha tho, so she could haggle with the vendors at the Chinese shop where she
went to buy vegetables and fish. She told him that the Hindi for how much, kitna, sounded a little like the Cantonese, kay dow cheen ah, especially if you said it fast. It made him angry. There was no similarity between the two languages, he said, none at all. She was being stupid.

  He taught her how to curse, comprehensive terms of abuse that wished disaster on descendants and forefathers alike, phrases as thorough and devastating as Chinese martial arts. ‘Repeat after me,’ he said, enunciating the words very slowly and much too loud. ‘Dew lay low mow chow hai siu fun hum ka chaan.’ He taught her the intonation, the staccato monosyllables, the plosives that detonated in the mouth. He taught her the proper pronunciation of dew, the Cantonese for fuck, telling her to stretch the vowel. He encouraged her to employ variations.

  ‘Enjoy sound of word. Is only way to say correctly.’

  And he repeated the phrase, chanted it, because he was having such a good time with this.

  ‘One question,’ Dimple said.

  Mr Lee took a cigarette out of a pack and considered it. He was rationing himself, taking his time instead of lighting up right away. They heard muffled explosions, four in a row, and he froze, then half a dozen louder bangs went off.

  He lit up and said, ‘Nothing, only firecracker for their festival. Indian are crazy.’

  They were in the courtyard, sitting in the sunshine, Dimple wearing Mr Lee’s straw gardening hat. She was protecting her complexion, a phrase she’d learned from Stardust magazine. Mr Lee put his cigarette out to cough. He spoke around his hack: ‘Wha-a-at question?’

  ‘Why am I learning to swear in Cantonese? Who will I swear at in Bombay? Nobody will understand.’