Narcopolis

by Jeet Thayil

  ‘He’s a chooth, look at him, flopping around like a faggot.’

  His favourite song was ‘Dum Maro Dum’, in which a bunch of home-grown hippies smoked endless chillums and the lead actress lip-synced to Asha Bhosle’s voice, Asha sounding like she’d been up three nights straight, smoking too much opium and drinking dirty whisky. Dimple liked it too, the stoned lilt of it.

  Duniya ne hum ko diya kya?

  Duniya se hum ne liya kya?

  Hum sub ki parva kare kyun?

  Sub ne humara kiya kya?

  The song stayed in her head for days, but the message meant nothing to her. All she saw was a group of rich kids smoking charas in the mountains. She saw their beauty and she heard their laughter. They didn’t work and yet they had plenty of money and friends and fashionable clothes and families who worried about them. Why were they so full of self-pity? What were they rebelling against? Why didn’t they just admit it, that they liked to get high?

  *

  She didn’t get it, but she knew why Hare Krishna, Hare Ram was Rashid’s favourite movie: Zeenat Aman, the bronze-skinned mini-skirted actress he’d named her after. She was everywhere, on movie posters, on billboards two storeys high. She was on the cover of Stardust magazine, smiling like she knew a secret no one else did: she knew why you were standing there with the magazine in your hands, gazing at her image with awe, maybe, or desire mixed with dazzlement. The magazine had its own name for her, Zeenie Baby. There were gossipy items about Zeenie’s boyfriends in London, New York and Bombay, about the grasping mother who managed her career and love life. The magazine had names for its articles: tear-jerkers, exclusive scoops, bombshell exposés. She read – fast, very fast; though sometimes she said a sentence aloud to get the sense of it – about Zeenie’s love for her father, a writer who died young, and she looked at pictures of the modest homes Zeenie grew up in and glamorous stills from the movies that had made her famous. She’s pure romance, thought Dimple, like Meena Kumari and Madhubala and Begum Akhtar, the female legends beloved of eunuchs, prostitutes and poets.

  Rashid took her to a beauty parlour in Colaba, where he asked the hairdresser to straighten her hair. Make it fall like a curtain, like Zeenat’s, see here, he said, pointing to Stardust. It took hours of work with a hot iron, sitting in a chair reading a magazine, music on the radio, Lata, who else, singing ‘Yeh Mausam’. But afterwards she had a taste of what it was to be Zeenie, beautiful, famous, desired by everyone, the thing that happened when she took a walk on the street on some routine chore, and the men turned to stare, or they followed her, or attempted to start a conversation, any conversation, as if she were emitting some kind of bio-radar, some hormone ray that magnetized male animals. A Spaniard at the khana called the actress Zeenat A Man – he had to explain the joke – because he said there was something drag-queen glamorous about her. She was making his second pipe when the man said: You look like her.

  ‘You’re the fourth person who said that.’

  ‘The fourth person today?’ He was smiling.

  She said, ‘No, not today. But I’m prettier.’

  He said, ‘Much, much.’

  It wasn’t true, not at all, but she could pretend.

  *

  Dimple, sitting in the movie theatre with Rashid, looked up at Zeenie’s moon-like face, her round milk-white face that had absorbed every injustice in the world, and Dimple wished for a sister, an older sister she could talk to. The theatre was very cold: cold air was blowing in from the sides, and she wished she’d brought a shawl. It was the AC, Rashid said. What is AC? she asked. He said something in reply, something she forgot instantly, because she was watching the screen so carefully. Zeenie was playing a woman who runs away from a broken home and renames herself Janice. When she and her brother meet as adults she cannot remember him.

  JANICE’S BROTHER (trying to jog her memory): Look at this flower. You used to like flowers.

  (Janice accepts the flower and smiles a smile of such sweetness you know, if you’re at all knowledgeable about such things, that she will die very soon.)

  JANICE: Beauty is in the mind, in the eyes.

  (They are among a crowd of flower children. Someone passes Janice a chillum and she takes an impossible, elegant puff and hands it to her brother, though she doesn’t know him yet.)

  JANICE’S BROTHER: No, I have a cough.

  JANICE (scolding): If you want to sit with us, be like us. Joy, intoxication, peace, these are the things we believe in. Do you believe in joy?

  JANICE’S BROTHER: Is it only by smoking that you can believe in joy?

  (Rashid knew the line and didn’t think much of it. He shouted it out anyway, only slightly out of sync with Dev Anand, laughing thickly as he mimicked the actor. A man sitting ahead of them turned to say something, took a look at Rashid and changed his mind.)

  JANICE’S BROTHER: Are you happy? Janice, are you happy?

  (Janice is quiet for a time, a light in her eyes, an ancient light like the light from a long dead moon, and when she speaks it is in a whisper, and everybody in the theatre leans forward to hear.)

  JANICE: Yes, I’ve never been so happy. It’s good to run away from home when nobody needs you and you have so much love to share with the world.

  *

  Dimple imagined Janice was talking only to her, ignoring the others in the theatre and tilting her moon face so her beautiful dying eyes were looking into Dimple’s. She wished Rashid had named her Janice instead of Zeenat, Janice, who didn’t remember her mother or father, who was strumming a guitar, saying: Oh I know this song, it’s on the tip of my tongue, make me another chillum and I’ll remember. What is this song? So high she was like an alien from a glorious superior species. And later, lying on the grass, lost, mountains around her, this lovely girl looks at the audience and says: Parents, why do they have us? A moment of pleasure and they’re saddled for life. They don’t really want us.

  Dimple understood the exact nature of Janice’s suffering. To know you were unloved by your parents, it was a wound that would never heal. Nothing Dimple did to forget her early life could change this fundamental fact. She was always under the sway of it. It never went away. She’d think she was okay, but she wasn’t. If she wasn’t sleeping enough or if she was anxious, it would catch up with her, as fresh and wet and red as it had ever been. In the scene when brother and sister are finally reunited in a village in Kathmandu, Dimple made no effort to hide her tears. Others were crying too, men and women, entire families weeping together as they munched their popcorn and sucked noisily at bottles of Thums Up and Fanta.

  *

  The movie had a tremendous effect on Rashid, though he’d seen it many times. He didn’t speak until they were in a cab heading back to Shuklaji Street. Number eight, he told her, holding up seven fingers. And I’ll see it again. This is the movie that got me into drugs. This is why I opened my first adda and became a hippie. The only thing I can’t stand is that Dev Anand. He wouldn’t last three minutes on Shuklaji Street. Then he sang the song so forcefully that the melody lost its haunting quality and became an anthem. He lingered on the chorus, on its famous first couplet,

  Dum maro dum,

  Mit jaaye hum.

  Bolo subah sham.

  But there he stopped. He would not sing the final line, ‘Hare Krishna, Hare Ram’. It was too Hindu for him. Instead, thinking about dinner, he sang the verse again, changing the words.

  Dum aloo dum,

  Mit jaaye hum.

  Bolo subah sham,

  Dum aloo dum.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Stinking Asafoetida

  When he started the car again he was feeling better, a miracle actually, the way his mood lifted, Rumi told Dimple. He drove towards Khar with ‘Machine Gun’ turned up loud, the smack kicking in like Buddy Miles’s big bass drum, never mind the shitty car’s shitty speakers; and the feedback and weird radio interference, some kind of helicopter noise, GIs in Vietnam maybe, then Jimi again, doing his voodoo shit, the
spaces between notes liquefied into scratchy slow-mo sound grabs, the guitar loud, beyond loud, like a car crash in slow motion, metal and flesh fused: gave him the shivers every time, made him want to crash the car, or drink till he died, or tattoo a motto on his chest with a rusty nail and industrial dye, Kill You Quick. And that, said Rumi, was when he saw the woman. She was standing at the turn from Khar Dhanda to the main Juhu Road. She turned into the headlights when she heard the car slow. Her dark skin was scarred with old smallpox and her hair was held in place with pins and she carried one of those striped shopping bags, like a housewife. She was looking right at him. He stopped the car and she put her head at the window. He saw a bunch of keys on an ornate silver ring hooked to the waist of her sari. Maybe she really was a housewife, doing some quick freelance on the side to supplement the family income. Should I get in? she said. He fixed the price and drove until he found a street that was dark enough and then he parked between two cars, backed into the space and turned the engine off. He told her to move to the back seat and climbed in beside her, already conscious of her stink, what was it, garlic? Asafoetida? She’d been cooking recently and she had a powerful body odour, which excited him. She smelled of food and sweat and faintly of cologne and she was rubbing two fingers against her thumb. He dug into his jeans and gave her a hundred-rupee note, telling her to use her mouth on him. She gave him a look, like she didn’t do that, like she was out on the street selling sex but only on her terms. No water in my mouth, okay? she said, and her voice was pure business: she could have been a hooker on Shuklaji Street. And when she’d been at it for a while, head bouncing like a toy, a spray of bobby pins holding the hair in place above her ears, and he maybe nodded off a little, a tiny teeny little bit, she goes, You slept off or what? Then she muttered something in Bambayya Hindi that he didn’t catch and she started to gather her things. Finish, he told her, his voice loud in the small car. She put her shopping bag down and shot him a look and went back to work. He was half erect, when all of a sudden she stopped. Her jaws hurt, she said. She asked him to fuck her, which he did, reluctantly, because this was not part of the deal: fucking was work. He slapped her lightly and she moaned. She liked it; she fucked him back. Then he hit her again. She grabbed his hand and he punched her on the head, fucking her hard, and when he came, for the first time in weeks, he did what he always did, he screamed words he didn’t know and by now she was screaming too, in fear, and so, to shut her up, he hit her in the mouth, drawing blood, and the sight of it pushed him over and he came again. He pulled out, still dripping, and opened the door. She was moaning but unconscious. He put her on the ground by an abandoned handcart, small piles of shit nearby, human, by the smell of it, and as an afterthought, he put his hand into her blouse, realizing that he hadn’t touched her breasts until then, a pity, because they were swollen and wet at the nipples. He fondled her briefly and took the wad of notes folded into the whore’s bra and drove away as slowly as he could.

  And this was when Dimple tried not to show her surprise. She said You should have asked me. I have a friend who would have given you much better service.

  *

  Rumi told her he drove home after his adventure with the housewife hooker, and walked in the door to a full-scale family celebration, his wife’s relatives, wandering around the house half naked. First thing they do, these people, walk in the door and take off their clothes because of the heat, which wasn’t any worse than usual. There were five of them, a man in shorts and no shirt, his wife, fully dressed, unfortunately, two small half-naked children, and an older woman, stopping by on their way home to Ahmedabad. Rumi sat on a couch in the front room, flipping through a magazine while the travellers repacked their bags and made phone calls. The older woman was bragging about her son’s new car. He caught the word Maruti, as he was meant to. And in case he didn’t, she repeated it for him in English. Darshan bought a new car, she said, Maruti, such a nice car. His partner bought a new model Ambassador, but Maruti’s mileage is better. At least Darshan had the sense to be embarrassed by his mother’s propaganda: he looked shamefaced. Just then the older child came in from the kitchen. He wore only underwear and he made a low whooo sound as he ran across the room. At the last moment, just as he was about to crash into the couch, he made a sharp turn into a new flight path parallel with the wall; his whoop became higher pitched. The other child staggered around the room like an old drunk, bumping into furniture and babbling with happiness. An instant later her face crumpled and there was a long exhalation. She stopped breathing. Her arms hung by her side and only her feet moved, in rhythm, walking in place. There was silence for a long excruciating moment, everyone waiting for the child to breathe. Then: a telescoping wail so loud it shook Rumi out of his half nod. Here, Rumi digressed for a moment. He told Dimple that childhood was a kind of affliction, certainly physical and possibly mental. Children were at a hopeless disadvantage; they were unsuited for the world. They were short and ungainly and stupid, half-people, dwarf bundles of ectoplasm and shit, stunted organisms incapable of finding food or keeping their asses clean. They needed constant attention and they couldn’t communicate their needs. All they could do was wait for it to pass, years of waiting until the blight was gone. It would make anybody bawl for no reason, he said. Soon, he heard his wife ask her cousin about his business. Her cousin and his partner had set up the company eight years earlier to provide technical support for office computer networks. It hadn’t begun well, had begun so badly in fact that they thought of packing it in. Then the economy opened up and they started to get orders from all over the place, and now there was so much business he’d bought his mother an apartment. Everybody, it seemed to Rumi, was making money except for him. After her relatives left, his wife went to sleep. Rumi thought of the time immediately after his return from LA, when he had a job in advertising and was earning better, and his wife was the one who had initiated sex. She’d been insatiable; it was all they did. He’d come home from work and she would pull him into the bedroom first thing. It was hard to believe this was the same woman. If he were bringing more money home, would it make a difference? Of course it would, he was sure of it. Her manner had changed almost to the month and day that he’d lost the job at the agency and taken up employment at her father’s brokerage. In that case, if money was the lubricant that made her agree to sex, what was the difference between her and the woman he’d paid earlier in the evening? If there was a difference, it was the prostitute who came out of it in a better light. At least she was true to her profession and her station in life. His wife was true to neither. If she were, she would understand that her duty was to serve him and make him happy. He was her pati, her husband and lord, and his happiness was her need. This is what he thought about as he lay beside his sleeping wife, Rumi told Dimple, and it gave him pleasure to remember the adventure with the prostitute, to relive it while his wife lay beside him and to smell again the street woman’s kitchen sweat. He sniffed his hands and smiled in the dark.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Business Practices among the Criminal Class: C & E

  There was a Godrej padlock on the door. People came up the stairs and it was the first thing they saw. Then they saw the Customs and Excise notice tacked to the wall and understood that Rashid’s was shut indefinitely. They went elsewhere. That morning Rashid, Dimple and Bengali were in Gilass Palass, a teashop and falooda parlour near Grant Road Station. Only Bengali noticed the mirrors on the walls and ceiling, and, on smoked-glass shelving that ran the length of the premises, a collection of figurines in the likeness of swans and androgynous, possibly female angels. Rashid drank masala chai, and he held an unlit Triple Five in his hand.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ he said, ‘temporary, tell everybody we’ll be back very soon.’

  ‘How soon?’

  ‘Very soon.’

  ‘You already said that.’

  ‘Eat your khari biscuit.’

  ‘I told you something was wrong. The use.’

  ‘You didn�
�t.’

  ‘Noticing things, telling you. And then you forget. What’s the use?’

  ‘You didn’t tell me.’

  ‘Bilkul, I did, bhai, told you there was something wrong when that Customs and Excise came round asking for five lakhs instead of fifty thousand. He’s been taking money from you for years, same amount every time, like tax, and suddenly he adds a zero. Something was wrong.’

  ‘When did you tell me? You think I’d forget?’

  ‘Why not? You forget everything else.’

  She was using the formal aap though her words were not formal at all. Bengali’s thoughts were in his face: look at this woman, until yesterday she was a prostitute in a hijra’s brothel and listen to her now, talking as if she’s Rashid’s equal. He was dismayed by her manner around his boss and by the way she said whatever came to her mind, whether respectful or not. She talks as if she is his wife and Rashid listens like a husband, he thought. But she’s more than a wife, more than both his wives put together: she’s his business partner and she’s better at it than he is. If she was in charge, we’d be rich and the competition would be mincemeat.