by Jeet Thayil
‘Nice chair, yaar, you must be doing well.’
‘Doing okay, bhai. I work hard, I make money. I stop working, I’m on the street.’
Rashid knew this was the truth. There wasn’t much of a margin in Salim’s line of work, selling cocaine and black-market whisky for the Lala. He did some pocket-maar business on the side, risky work with questionable results, and he spent the day at his boss’s watch shop taking care of non-existent customers. He’d been with the Lala for less than a year and already it was showing on his face, the shadows scored like leather under his eyes. The Lala picked his boys young and put them to work when they got too old for his tastes. The old gangster liked to quote the Baburnama: ‘Women for procreation, boys for pleasure, melons for delight.’
Salim handed two bottles of Johnnie Walker to Rashid, who checked that the seals hadn’t been tampered with and there were no punctures in the caps. He held the bottles up to the light to examine the colour and Salim asked if he’d seen the new Amitabh Bachchan movie, Polyester Khadi, in which Bachchan played a policeman’s son who becomes a criminal because he sees how hard his father’s life is. Rashid said no, he hadn’t seen it and he wasn’t planning to, he had better things to do than watch Amitabh fucking Bachchan. Salim said the best scene in the film was the showdown between policeman father and gangster son.
‘You know what he tells his father, played by the veteran, Sanjeev Kumar?’
In response, Rashid spilled a small mountain of powder on the mirror and looked up, the hundred-rupee note aloft in his hand. Salim stood up to say the line, delivering it in a bored baritone very much like the tall actor’s. ‘Are you a man or a pyjama?’
Rashid said, ‘And what is Sanjeev fucking Kumar’s reply?’
Salim got up again.
‘If I am a pyjama at least I am cent per cent Indian khadi, not American polyester.’
*
Rashid bent to the mirror and he was startled by the sight of his face up close, blue veins swollen at the temple, skin the colour of clotted milk, a sickly sap of green stubble on the jaw. His hair was too long, almost as long as Salim’s, he needed a cut and shampoo. Paan had stained his mouth a permanent red. Worst were his eyes, bloody and clouded at the same time. Then he felt the back of his throat go numb. There was a close thump in his ears. He rubbed a bit of powder into his gums and a wave of nausea hit him and he looked away from his degraded image. But there was half a line still left on the mirror. He snorted it up. His heart beat so erratically and so fast he was sure it would leap right out of his chest and land on the glass-topped desk.
‘Bhai, that chanduli at your khana, Dimple, who makes pipes.’
‘What?’
‘Dimple.’
‘What about her?’
‘She makes pipes in your khana.’
‘I know what she does, she works for me.’
‘She’s a hijra, right? She was a man once?’
‘Long ago. Her dick was probably bigger than yours.’
‘So what I was wondering, bhai, is why she looks so feminine. I mean, if you didn’t know she was a hijra you’d think she was fully a woman.’
‘Listen, Salim, you’re so interested, you should ask her yourself, take her out to a movie, introduce her to your family. She likes boys like you.’
*
Rashid walked back to the khana with the bundle of vials and the bottles of Johnnie Walker in his hands. He was calmer now. Even the heat seemed milder, the sun directly overhead but not uncomfortable; and the noise in his head had settled into a hum, steady and controlled, like paper burning in a tray. His white shirt lay open to the sternum and his pants were hitched low on his belly. He wore only white. He spotted the colour on the mannequins in store windows and people on the street and to him the figures in white were as distinctive as angels among the earthbound.
He was thinking of Salim’s line, Are you a man or a pyjama? He wanted more options than just the two. His father said they were descended from the Mughals, from a Beg who’d ridden with Humayun. There was a branch of the family in Delhi that had owned sixteenth-century buildings and gardens. It was a family legend that he mistrusted, but every now and then he would catch himself thinking of the Mughals and the majoun they liked to eat, swallowed with a glass of milk like medicine, and he’d see himself as a new Mughal, mixing it up, juggling the booze with the coke and charas and chandu. This morning he was planning to take it easy. He’d keep the whisky down to manageable quantities, a half bottle, no more, and then the rest of it would be manageable too: line of White first thing to get his eyes open, pyali of Black at regular intervals to keep his nerves easy and his ideas oiled, and, around the time the muezzin sent out the evening call, a bit of Brown chased on foil or smoked in a cigarette, the powder caked so heavy the joint would have to be lit and relit. This is the new thing, brown powder, garad heroin with the compliments of the Pakistani government, something sweet for the mouth from our Muslim brothers; the question being, what kind of government would see anything in heroin but poison? Which god would welcome such a drug? Not the Hindu gods and not even the god of the Christians. So what did it mean that the Pakistanis, who worshipped the same God as he, were sending garad to India? It meant that politics, or economics, overrode every other thing in the world. They shared the same faith, but in other ways they were enemies. Above all, the Pakistanis were sworn enemies.
Guide thou us, thou, who are round about the infidels.
He had been a believer for most of his life, had observed the five prayer times and followed the dietary strictures. Then he’d exchanged one habit for another, he’d given up God and accepted O. With heroin he’d opened himself to the ungodly and for this he would pay, he knew. He would be seized by the feet and flung into the fire. Because the powder was a new thing, the devil’s own nasha. Rashid knew it the first time he saw street junkies bent over strips of tin foil, the way they sucked at the smoke, the instantaneous effect of it, how it closed their eyes and shut them off from their own bodies and the world. He saw them and thought: This is it, the future, coming too fast to duck. And now he was doing the same. And he was helpless against God’s great wrath.
*
He rounded the alley to the khana and there was his son at the beedi shop buying cigarettes. Jamal saw the speed at which his father approached and he looked wildly around the alley. Rashid grabbed the boy by the wrist and squeezed until he dropped the cigarettes. The cigarette wallah said, Bhai, he didn’t have money so I gave him on credit, I thought it was for you. Rashid looked at his son’s face, the stupidity and stubbornness of it, and rage filled his chest with carbon.
‘Six years old and you’re on the street, fucking smoking.’
He crushed the cigarettes in his hands and let the debris fall to the ground. He caught his son by the neck and propelled him into the building. When the boy stumbled, he wanted him to fall and break something. He wanted to hear something break inside his son. Jamal was terrified but his fright only made Rashid angrier.
‘Get up those stairs. Go on or I’ll kill you.’
He looked at his hands and was surprised to see he was still carrying the bottles of whisky and the cocaine. He put the bottles on the ground, carefully, giving his entire attention to the action, but he was unable to clear his head. He heard his son make small sounds that seemed to come from far away, or from a tunnel, a narrow tunnel that smelled of fresh mutton. Then Rashid heard crows, sudden caws from directly above him though there were no birds in the building or even in the sky outside. He made a fist around the vials in his hand and hit the boy on the head and Jamal sat in the dust of the stairwell, his sobs audible in the street. Rashid stood over him, shoulders heaving, and hit him again. Then he saw the beediwallah and his customers staring at him from the doorway. What? he said to them, his rage now mixed with shame, and when the men disappeared, he put the cocaine in his pocket, picked up the whisky and used his free hand to drag the boy up the stairs.
CHAPTER TWO
Bengali
It was too early for customers. When Rashid arrived, agitated and muttering to himself, only Dimple and Bengali were in the khana. The old man kept his accounts and looked after the shop, and had been with him since the early days, when Rashid was a tapori selling charas near Grant Road Station. Bengali spent most of his time locking and unlocking a tin box that served as the register, putting in money, paying it out. He’d been working for Rashid for many years, and no one knew anything about his life before he came to Shuklaji Street, except that he’d once been a clerk in a government office in Calcutta. He was between fifty and seventy, wrinkled skin on bone, and he spoke English with an affected British accent.
‘Syzygy,’ he said one afternoon, and he repeated the word in case the student had not heard him. ‘That is the reason the world has gone mad.’
‘What?’
‘Syzygy. It has never happened before and it won’t happen again.’
‘No, probably not. It’s a once in a lifetime occurrence.’
‘How can it not affect everything? Nine planets, lined up on the same side of the sun. Does it mean the end of the world as some people think?’
‘It’s tempting to see it that way, I suppose, kind of like a unified theory of apocalypse.’
‘You understand, all the planets in a row, like sitting ducks. I say it’s an important question, the question of syzygy. Maybe the most important question of all.’
Bengali was in his usual position, sitting on his haunches with his head between his bony knees. He seemed to be smiling but it was difficult to tell, because his face was so thin and his skin shone with a papery yellow light. He told the student not to worry. Chandulis and charasis were like cockroaches, he said, they would survive anything, including the end of the world. He quoted a Punjabi proverb or poem or limerick:
Charasi, khadi na marsi.
Gar marsi, tho chaalis admi agay karsi.
And he talked about the historical tradition of the apocalypse myth and other matters, for ten minutes, very slowly, like a scholar, and the student listened open-mouthed. What Bengali was doing, Rashid thought, was making up big what-ifs, making them up out of thin air. Bengali was a what-if. He talked about mythological, religious and political figures as if he knew them well, knew their numerous personal failings and feet of clay. He was on first-name terms with Jesus, Nehru and Gandhi, Cassius Clay, Winston Churchill, Gina Lollobrigida and Jean-Paul Sartre. Would Orpheus’s story have been different if he’d chosen another, slightly more cheerful song? Bengali asked the student. Perhaps, in his distraction, he made a mistake, an error of judgment, and he chose the wrong tune. If you’re singing for the Furies, I personally would choose something to please them. What if he had chosen wisely? What would have happened? Would he have kept his wife and his head? And purely as an aside, mind you, I’ll point out that the real interest of the tale is the psychological portrait of a person in grief. Because, if you know anything about grief, you know that its main outward manifestation is a deep distraction, like absent-mindedness without the insouciance.
From Orpheus or Icarus or Stephen Dedalus he turned to Bengali cultural heroes, Tagore and Satyajit Ray and the Dutts, Guru, Toru and Michael Madhusudhan. He shared the regional affliction that Bengalis were prone to, the conviction that they were the most artistic and talented people in the world. But Bengali was a maverick Bengali and some of his views were a kind of blasphemy. What if Tagore had not won the Nobel when he did? Bengali asked. How would it have affected his work? I suspect it would have made him more open to experimentation and more interesting in every way, especially in his poetry, which, I have to say, is not very good. And why shouldn’t I say so? The point about Tagore is that the whole was far greater than the sum of the parts. It is the composite figure that matters. But Tagore the mystic and poet? Tagore the painter? Tagore the composer? Not one of those Tagores is worth very much.
*
The old man was sitting by the cookpot, imbibing fumes by a system of osmosis. When he saw Rashid he got up to prepare his boss’s pyali. Outside, the day was bright with noonday sun and Rashid could see the balcony of Khalid’s place next door, the ancient iron railing and the flaking green paint on the walls. They were meeting today, Khalid and he, after lunch, which could mean anytime before the evening prayer. Rashid picked up the newspaper and put his glasses on, but he couldn’t focus on the words. He was still rattled by the anger that had swept him up. He put the paper aside and prepared a hit of coke. The room got busy all of a sudden, two lamps lit, the pot bubbling in the tiled washing area near the entrance, and Dimple fixing his pipe while Bengali placed his pyalis on a tray.
Rashid said, Chal, chal, hurry up, don’t be doing your randi baazi when my pipe’s waiting to be made. Dimple didn’t seem to hear him; she dipped a knitting needle into a pyali and cooked the opium into a soft black bubble. Then she tapped the stem and Rashid ducked to the pipe. He smoked cross-legged, never mind the popular version, on your back with your knees bent and your legs triangulated. He was a businessman, a father. He wasn’t going to lie there with his legs open to the world. He took a long pull of the pipe and a stream of smoke ascended from his nostrils and veiled his face. He took another pull and this time there was no smoke: he ate it down. It was just short of noon and already the khana was dark, in a kind of permanent half-shade. The room made people talk in whispers, as if they were in a place of worship, which, the way he saw it, they were. Already now there were times he could feel it slipping away, a way of life vanishing as he watched, the pipes, the oil lamps layered with years of black residue, the conversations that a man would begin and lose interest in, all the rituals that he revered and obeyed, all of it disappearing.
CHAPTER THREE
Business Practices among the Criminal Class: An Offer
When Khalid arrived, Rashid was having lunch, scooping it up from stainless-steel dabbas spread on the floor. The food, sent hot from upstairs, was backed up with a fish delivery from Delhi Darbar and a stack of tandoori rotis and bheja fry and lassi, thick, no froth, a slab of hard cream on top. He had had a craving for bheja and fish, the bheja with its texture like scrambled eggs and that odd resistance when it burst in the mouth. His older wife, Dariya, had tried to make it at home but she couldn’t manage the flavour that Delhi Darbar’s cook seemed to get every time, without effort. She’d sent biryani, the mutton cooked with the rice, not layered separately, and plates of fresh onion and cucumber, and daal fry with garlic, a film of oil floating on top. He ate no biryani but mutton, bought the meat himself three times a week. Because he could afford it, he ate meat every day, sometimes twice a day, sometimes mutton and chicken. He was sitting cross-legged, hands smeared with rice and masala, working on his second plate of biryani, and he invited his neighbour to join him but Khalid declined, as he always did, declined even to taste the meal. Which was an unMuslim thing to do, never mind that it was rude. Rashid thought: This is what we do: we eat together from the same dish. This is how we remember we’re brothers. He motioned to Khalid to sit. He wasn’t eager to share his lunch in any case and he wanted to take his time with the lassi, which he would have last, like dessert. But Khalid’s presence in the khana had lessened his pleasure in the meal. It took some effort to ignore the man, who was leaning over, putting his mouth near Rashid’s ear, saying he wanted to talk in private, as if Bengali and Dimple were not to be trusted. Rashid continued to eat, methodically working his way through the food. We are in private, he said, when he was washing his hands at the tap. Then they went through the formalities. Salaam alikum. Alikum as salaam. How are you? How’s business? Your family? Your health? And they went through the ordering and serving of tea, paani kum from the restaurant downstairs, brought up double fast by a freelance pipeman. The khana was filling with customers and still Khalid wouldn’t talk, so Rashid suggested they stand on the balcony for a moment, sip from their glasses of milky chai, and only then did he get to it.
‘Much better, Rashidbhai, some pri
vacy in your balcony where I can tell you my news.’
‘Tell me. One minute,’ and Rashid said a few words to Bengali, something about getting the cookpot started for the day’s second batch of chandu, which was an unnecessary order: Bengali had never forgotten to do it.
‘Okay.’
‘I’ve been approached by Sam Biryani. You’ve heard of him, he’s always in the papers.’
‘He’s too much in the papers.’
‘He made an offer, very good terms to open a garad pipeline from Tardeo to Nagpada.’
‘If it’s a good offer, take it up.’
‘That’s why I’m here. I’ve brought this up with you before but you never give me a proper reply. My suggestion is we do it together. Garad is the future of the business.’
‘Your topi is fur, isn’t it? Doesn’t it get warm in this weather?’
‘It’s insulation, bhai, in winter and summer, that’s why we Kashmiris wear them.’
‘That’s why you Kashmiris are so hot-headed. Take it off once in a while, miya, it might lighten your outlook. Meanwhile, listen to me: I won’t sell powder here.’
‘You use it but you won’t sell it.’
‘I use it carefully.’
‘Everybody says that. What about the Pathan, Kader Khan? I’m trying to remember how soon he was finished. Six months? Or less? Such a dada and look at him now, khatarnak junkie.’
‘This is what you want to talk about? Give me a lecture about the evils of drugs?’
‘You’re an educated man. You have your way of seeing things.’
‘You mean I’m not seeing something.’
‘I mean you should be thinking of diversifying, expanding your business.’
‘Garad separates the strong from the weak; it brings out the worst in a man and the best. That’s why the Pathan gave up so quickly; inside he was nothing.’