Narcopolis

by Jeet Thayil

  ‘And you?’

  *

  Rashid was looking at the street. A beggar woman squatted over a puddle by the garbage pit on the intersection of Shuklaji Street and Arab Gully. She was dark and plump and she wore a fitted kameez that she held up around her waist. Emptying. The correct word for what she was doing. He noticed that her hair had been very stylishly cut, cropped short over the ears, with pointed sideburns and a little tail in the back. The puddle under her expanded and the people on the street stepped over it without comment. Then the woman’s head came up and her eyes met Rashid’s and there was no embarrassment in her face, only intelligence. From the balcony, he could see into Khalid’s khana next door. It was a smaller room, with a single pipe and no customers, no one there at all except for the pipe maker. Rashid’s was already busy, a group of Spanish-speaking hippies around one pipe and students from Wilson College around the other. Waiting their turn were Dawood Chikna, an up-and-coming businessman and gangster, and Bachpan, a pimp, with his friend and associate, the pocket-maar Pasina. Last in line was a fellow called Spiderman for the way he crawled on all fours. Salim was there too, in a new shirt, a starched yellow number with flap pockets and large collars. He was at Dimple’s station, deep in conversation with the kaamvali. Rashid wanted to know what they were talking about but all he could hear was Khalid, who was saying that a businessman should never sample his own merchandise, particularly if his business was drugs, and that a Mussulman did not put his habits before his duty to God, that only kafirs did such a thing. Rashid watched the beggar woman who was tidying up the garbage on the sidewalk and he thought about his system. A man’s reputation depended on never seeming intoxicated. So, in the afternoons, he read Inquilab, squinting at the editorials, some article on the Muslim Brotherhood’s travails in Syria or the Jews’ latest incursions into Lebanon, and he stole a few quick nods. Then he’d give an order to Bengali, whatever order it didn’t matter, a shout for a pipe or for lunch, a summons for the malishwallah, for whisky or cocaine, an audible order to an employee to re-establish the chain of command. In the evening if he’d been drinking a lot he went upstairs for an hour or two to nap. He was always mindful of his reputation, but here was this Khalid, this Kashmiri, casting aspersions. Just then, Rashid noticed something odd. All sound and activity had frozen, as if a giant wave was about to hit the street, and this was the split second of calm before the chaos. The beggar woman was completely still, a black marble statue listening intently to the decades as they passed through her; the salt march to freedom; the years of upheaval and bloodletting and so-called Independence; the years of the Pakistan wars when headlights were painted black to keep automobiles safe from enemy jets; the years of regulation and control and planned socialism; the years of failure. Everything was frozen, even the traffic and the sunlight and the slight still breeze, and then the woman went back to her work and the street too resumed its normal pace and Rashid realized he’d been holding his breath.

  *

  ‘What is she doing, the beggar woman, what is she doing?’ he asked Khalid.

  ‘It’s already a thing of the past, chandu,’ Khalid said, ‘like these pipes.’

  ‘Like everything, like us.’

  ‘That is the nasha talking, not you. Listen, very soon all the khanas will be closed, ours included. Last month, they closed six. In one month. Padlocks and chains courtesy Customs Excise.’

  ‘There are too many on this street. Let them close.’

  ‘And then? What will you do for business?’

  ‘This, that.’

  ‘You’re a BA pass, educated man, but you’re talking like you don’t know how to read-write.’

  Rashid brushed the hair off his face with his hands, letting the thought take shape in his head before he spoke. He said, It’s a funny thing, only the uneducated set so much stock by education. When you go to school you realize how little it means, because the street belongs to whoever takes it. Today it’s ours; tomorrow someone else will take our place. My problem, I don’t like garad heroin. Garadulis put their foot on the accelerator and push all the way to the floor. The car was going five miles an hour and suddenly it’s up to fifty-five. Super fast, then crash. A chanduli can smoke for years and be healthy; garadulis are impatient, they want to die quickly. You say we’re businessmen and we should provide what people want. What kind of a businessman would I be if I supplied heroin to chandu customers? I would be a chooth businessman. I’d be shooting myself in the foot. Why I’m telling you this, it’s my way of saying don’t ask me again to join you in business.

  Salim, Pasina and Dimple were not looking in his direction, but some of the others were. Even Bengali, unflappable as the old man was, had forgotten himself and was staring. Khalid lit a cigarette and regarded Rashid as he smoked. His shirt was tucked into pleated trousers and the Kashmiri topi was tilted at an angle on his head. He was a drug dealer but he looked like a shopkeeper.

  Finally he said, ‘The crazy woman? She’s mending a salvaar, she’s stitching, that’s why she’s half dressed. She’s crazy but she keeps quiet. Your kaamvali, the hijda Dimple, why do you let her talk so much?’

  ‘The customers like to hear her talk.’

  ‘Our scripture says women must be silent in the assemblies of men. It isn’t permitted for them to speak. This is a chandu khana but it is also an assembly of men. Tell her that.’

  ‘Tell her yourself, there she is.’

  But Khalid would not look in her direction.

  ‘Kaam,’ said Bengali, as if to himself, ‘is work in Hindi, but desire or lust in Sanskrit. So kaamvali has a double meaning, which this gentleman is doubtless aware of.’

  *

  Rashid asked for tea and Marie biscuits to be sent to the beggar woman with the haircut who was still stitching, seated on the sidewalk on the junction of Shuklaji Street and Arab Gully. She was not, at the moment, reclining on the garbage. It occurred to him that she used the garbage dump as a toilet and the sidewalk as a living area. He heard Khalid say something about tapping new sources of income and the need to expand one’s consumer base if one wished to stay on top of the business. He was talking to save face. Rashid watched a boy from the teashop downstairs hand the woman a glass of milky tea and a plate of biscuits. She sat on a metal awning from Delite Restaurant, the restaurant out of business, the awning lying on the street for months now, its tin warped. She sipped at the tea, her little finger raised in the air. She ate the biscuits one by one, daintily, dipping each one in the tea before putting it in her mouth. She was smiling.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Sari and the Burkha

  She moved into the room halfway up the landing from Rashid’s khana. She never went to the floor above, where his family lived. But from time to time she met them on the staircase or on the street and she understood that Rashid’s eldest, Jamal, was her enemy. Rashid’s wives were friendlier, even if they didn’t speak. Only Rashid seemed unaffected. To mark her new situation, he gave her a new name, Zeenat, and he brought her a burkha. He sat in the only chair, sipping his morning whisky and peering at her through the smoke from his cigarette. No good, he said. See how lumpy it is? Take off the kameez and leave the salvaar. She took off the printed top and slipped back into the burkha. He watched her, his arm propped on the back of the chair. Then he nodded and took her to the mirror. She saw how the shiny black fabric clung to her. How revealing it is, she thought, and looked at herself and whispered, Zeenat. After a while Rashid asked her to take off the salvaar too and now the burkha was silk against her skin. He liked it so much he wanted to take her for a ride in a taxi, to sit in the back and watch the sights, and only they would know she was naked under the burkha. No, she said, no, never. But she was enjoying herself.

  *

  She didn’t stop wearing saris, which covered the legs and exposed the belly, exposed the intimate part that should be seen only by a lover or husband. She’d learned how to wear the petticoat low on the hips, how to lean forward accidentally on
purpose and let the pallu slip just a little. She admired the uses to which women put the sari, how they wore it without underwear, slept in it, bathed in it, used it as a towel and comforter, and the convenience, to simply lift it up if you wanted to pee or if there was a customer. But she looked at herself in the burkha and understood that this was something very different. The tools were fewer. Only the face was visible, only the feet and hands, and because everything else was covered, a glimpse of eye or mouth became tremendous and powerful. And the blackness of it, the gradation, the way the fall of the fabric was different on her breasts and hips. She wondered at the men who designed such a garment. How much they must have feared their own desire. To want a woman to wear this thing you had to know the danger that lay in looking. You knew it and you knew your powerlessness and you dreamed up a costume to conceal the cause of your shame. But the costume only served to punish you further. It made you want to pluck out your eye, pluck it out and hold it, pulsing and sinewy in your hand, and offer it as some inadequate token.

  She went out in the burkha and she saw the way the men looked at the lipstick on her mouth and the kaajal around her eyes. The men looked at her, Hindus, Muslims, Christians, they all looked. She stopped outside Grant Road Bazaar where the handbags were stacked in piles on the sidewalk. The vendor was a young guy in bell-bottoms, whose eyes lingered on her feet. She bought a clutch purse and paid him in small notes, grubby one- and two- and five-rupee notes that she dug out of her bra. The vendor took the notes with a smile, making sure their fingers touched. She walked on and now the vendors all seemed to be speaking at once, speaking only to her, offering special deals – Hello, madam, low price for you – not because they wanted her to buy something but because they wanted her to stop so they could get a look at her.

  *

  She didn’t give up saris. She varied her costume depending on who she wanted to be, Dimple or Zeenat, Hindu or Muslim. Each name had its own set of adornments. Then Bengali told her about a shop in Tardeo that sold saris from the entire subcontinent. She went there one afternoon in the mango season to buy the Begum Bahar. It was fine see-through gauze. Bengali told her that women painted their buttocks and their feet when they wore the Begum Bahar, so she tried it too, painted herself with red shellac dye and then took a look in the mirror. She wore no skirt under the sari and the effect was subtle. You could see the shape of the ass and thighs, but the work on the sheer fabric obscured her figure just enough. She knew some of her giraks would pay a lot to see her in the Begum Bahar. Bengali said, Now you look like a lady of the merchant class, an indolent Bania woman with many admirers. No, she said, looking at the semi-circles under her eyes, so dark they were like bruises. No, I’m like a woman whose only admirer hanged himself so long ago that she can’t remember his name or why he killed himself or whether she misses him; all she’s sure of is her own solitude and regret and, above all, her anger. Bengali said, You’re wrong, your admirers are numerous and I’m proud to count myself among them. And he left the room so quickly that she knew he’d embarrassed himself. She changed out of the sari and put on a salvaar. She never wore burkhas while working; Rashid said it was out of the question. His customers were pimps and chandulis, yes, but they were conservative about some things and they would not take kindly to a woman in a burkha making the pipe. In any case, said Rashid, salvaars were more convenient. She changed and took up her spot at the main pipe and after she made Rashid’s first pyalis of the day she served those who waited, Rumi usually among them. He came to talk as much as to smoke. He lent her his headphones and played music she had never heard, in particular, jazz, for which he had developed not a liking exactly but a taste, he said, like a taste for anchovies or bitter chocolate, an unexpected appreciation that comes upon a man late in his life. He told her about his work or his domestic situation, and he talked about his life, which, it seemed to her, was nothing if not a disaster.

  *

  The night before, he said, he’d come home from work at the usual time, around ten, because the commute by train and bus took an hour and a half. He walked in the door and the television was blaring in the bedroom. His wife wouldn’t get up and say hello. She was always tired, so tired she woke up exhausted, which wasn’t surprising, since she spent most of her time watching Doordarshan. He was the one who worked all day and she was tired, Rumi told Dimple, his voice thick with smoke and anguish. He put his briefcase down, he said, and he went into the bathroom to wash the grime off his hands and face. Then he pulled on a pair of jeans and a Pink Floyd T-shirt and immediately he felt a little less like an office clerk. In the kitchen he looked at the mess of plates in the sink and checked for roaches. None so far but they’d be out in force when the lights went out. His dinner was on the stove, still warm. She’d already eaten, his wife, whose main pleasure in life was food. She’d eat lunch, really pig out, and right away be talking about dinner. Like there was nothing else worth staying awake for. No, what was he saying? Of course there was: television. Food and television, in that order but preferably together. He heated yellow daal and a dish of dry green peppers and put the bowls on a plate and took some rotlis and carried the food into the bedroom where he sat on a chair in front of the television with the plate balanced on his knees. His wife wore the same nightie she’d been wearing when he left that morning. She was on the phone to her aunt in Delhi. Right through his meal she talked in Gujarati and stared at the television. The conversation was an ever-expanding menu of rotlis and rotlas, bakhris, theplas, undhyu and chaas. Every topic eventually came back to food. By now, he understood enough of the language to get a sense of the conversation. His wife was telling her aunt how much she missed the mango ras her aunt used to make and there was a shine in her eyes when she said the word ‘ras’. She might have been talking about sex or god. After a while she covered the receiver with her hand and whispered that there was ice cream in the fridge. His wife was a Jain: there were many foods her family didn’t eat, a tremendous array of perfectly harmless items. Ice cream was out of the question because it was made with eggs. If her parents were visiting, she scoured the kitchen to find and hide potatoes, garlic and onions. As far as her family was concerned non-Jains were polluted, contaminated, damned, and there was only a difference of degree between such a person and an Untouchable. He and his wife had met as students at Elphinstone College and when they decided to get married, on his return to Bombay after a year in the States, there had been tears and threats from her parents, their opposition based on the single unalterable fact that he was not of their community. There was no point telling them he was a Brahmin, no point mentioning that he was descended from the Rishis, which he was, he was pure Aryan, one of the elect. What more could a wife want? he asked Dimple. After dinner, he put his dishes in the sink and said he was going out for a walk. And he got out of there before he got into a slanging match with his wife, told her to bathe once in a while and change her clothes and act like a human being. But then she’d get into it too, tell him she’d act more like a wife if he acted more like a husband and took her out sometimes, if he brought money home instead of spending hers. In the car, to clear his head, he punched in Band of Gypsies and turned the volume up and drove badly, which fact he admitted with pride, it seemed to Dimple, because he grinned and pretended to change gears. He opened a window when he saw the sea and made the turn at Otter’s Club and took the Carter Road promenade where the model citizens had their evening constitutional. He parked at an angle so no cop would spot him and emptied two pudis into a cigarette. Then he took a moment to digress, telling Dimple that he knew the one thousand and one names of god and he knew the one thousand and one names of heroin and if sometimes he mixed them up, at an arti, say, if for example he said Satyam, Sharam, Sundaram – Truth is Heroin is Beauty – he knew it was allowed, because no one was listening anyway, not to him. What he wanted to know was this, who put the words in his head? How did they arrive, these sentences, so fully formed they seemed to be uttered by a divine voice? Why did he
say, as he did one evening at a Mahim NA meeting, the room brightly lit, a red neon cross glowing over the decayed beachfront: Our Father who art in Scag, hallowed be thy Scag, thy Scag is clean, thy Scag is good, thy Scag will be done now and at the hour of our deaths. Ah men. Ah women too. And to say it so solemnly that nobody took offence, not even the Catlicks, because he folded his hands and let a pious smarmy lilt enter his voice. And of course: he’d smoked before the meeting. And of course: it was the heroin that filled him with warmth and fellow feeling for the collection of self-serving egomaniacs that made up the ranks of the narcotically fucking anonymous. And finally, of course: It was the heroin, said Rumi, looking unblinkingly into Dimple’s eyes, looking at her so steadily that she had to look back. She noted the unusual length of his lashes, like a girl’s, though she could not say what colour his eyes were because smoke was seeping from his ears and collecting in pools around his skin. It was heavy smoke that fell from his pores to the floor of the room and filled the corners and pushed inwards. When the smoke level touched her mouth with the taste of sewage, she got up and went to the door and rushed blindly downstairs, but it was thicker there, so she reversed her flight, went up past her own door, past Rashid’s and up to the roof, from where she saw that the street and the city and possibly the world in its unimaginable entirety was submerged, and though she shouted to the dim shapes discernible below, shouted until she was hoarse, no one was able to hear her, because the smoke was in her own mouth now, in her own nostrils, filling her with its white living vapour.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ‘Dum Maro Dum’

  Rashid took her out one day. He said he wanted to do what poor people do, eat the air on Chowpatty, eat the air and drink the breeze and enjoy. She thought to herself, such a filmi dialogue. But she liked the mood-setting tone of the words and she put on a black-and-white chiffon polka-dot that was the happiest thing she owned. They took a taxi to the beach and kept it waiting while they strolled on the sand. Rashid lit a cigarette from a pack of Triple Fives and from the butt he lit another. He smoked the entire time they were on the beach, not more than twenty minutes, and then he wanted to stop somewhere for a drink, he said, get some Scotch or Honeydew brandy, good for you, no, a drop of brandy? She suggested a lassi instead. They went to Rajasthan Lassi but chikkus were out of season. The lassi was so thick it was like ice cream, only better, and served in a glass, with a spoon that stood upright in the thick cream. They sat in the back of the cab and had two each, one after the other, and the taxi driver had one too. Then they went to Opera House to watch Rashid’s all-time number-one favourite movie, Hare Krishna, Hare Ram. It was at least ten years old, no need to wait in line and buy tickets in black. He’d seen it many times and knew the words of all the songs and long exchanges of dialogue that he said aloud, usually Dev Anand’s bits, though he disliked the actor.