Narcopolis

by Jeet Thayil

  *

  Bull called Soporo at the rectory saying Ramesh was back and demanding to be let in, but this time they couldn’t do it. There were rules. A prison intake was only allowed the single slip; two, and they were within their rights to send him back to Arthur Road or Yerawada or Tihar or wherever it was he belonged, because one thing was certain, he had no place at Safer. Also, he’d been asking to see Soporo in person, not asking, demanding, as if he was in a restaurant and he wanted to complain to the manager. Bull hadn’t allowed him in and he’d gone to the abandoned yards across the street where he’d walked into one of those drainage pipes and no doubt was getting high at that very moment. Bull suggested they wait until morning, then call the authorities and let them take the guy away. We’ll see, Soporo replied, and he put down the phone. His back was acting up, had been acting up for days, and he felt like he was coming down with something, a cold maybe, and he put aside the book he was looking at and went into the kitchen to make a cup of tea. He put water on to boil and cut ginger into long strips and put half a lemon into the squeezer. He poured the hot water into a big cup, dunked and removed a bag of Ceylon tea, added the ginger and lemon and took the cup with him into the living room, where he measured a teaspoon of honey from a small bottle on the dining table. He sat in his chair by the window and looked for the moon above the rooftops and though he couldn’t see it he thought he saw its reflection in a building window. He looked around the room as he took a sip of the tea. It was small and unpretentious: on the floor were books stacked against the wall, because he had never gotten around to having shelves made, and there were postcards taped to the mirror and money plants in glass bottles and plenty of light (the apartment faced east) and some air. It was a quiet place; in Father Fo’s words, ‘serene and modest’. He took another sip and winced a little: there was too much lemon. He thought, I’ll be sorry to leave here.

  *

  He put on his shoes and took a stick with him, because at night the streets belonged to the dogs. As he left the church, walking quickly in the dark, he banged into someone, who fell to the road shouting: Aiee, aiee, my foot. Who is it? Devil, devil. Then he recognized Tara or Sitara, who swept and swabbed the church and helped Charlotte in the kitchen. She said: Forgive me, Father Onar, I didn’t know it was you. Please forgive me. Where are you going at this hour? As he helped her to her feet and assured her he was fine, he told her not to call him father, but he had said this to her many times before and he had no doubt she would forget the words as soon as she heard them. Soporo came out of the church grounds and walked away from the main road towards Bandra East. After a while he saw the drainage pipes, a dozen of them, giant pipes spread haphazardly around the periphery of the yard, and then he heard someone singing and followed the voice. He could make out only some of the words. A man with a beautiful house, a beautiful wife and a beautiful car wakes up one day and realizes that none of his prized possessions belongs to him. The song was disjointed and out of key until Rumi came to what sounded like the chorus, something about living in a big womb. He was sitting at the lip of the pipe with paraphernalia spread around him, a candle, a box of wax matches and a lighter, vials with caps of different colours, half a dozen loose cigarettes and silver foil. When he saw Soporo he got to his feet, though he continued singing for a minute. After a while, Rumi said, Mr Soporo, sir, how nice of you to grace my humble abode with your famous presence. Please sit if you can find somewhere that’s not too shabby. Oh, I almost forgot, you’re no stranger to shabbiness, are you? Then Rumi smiled, or tried to smile. He said, I knew you’d come. I know who you are. Soporo said, No, you don’t. I knew as soon as I saw you, said Rumi. And I knew you’d come. I even know what you’re going to do next. You’re going to let me come back to Safer and stay as long as I want. If I ask for money you’re going to give it to me. You’re going to let me do whatever in other words the fuck I feel like. You know why? Soporo found a concrete block in the yard’s debris. He sat down and sneezed. He said, Tell me why. Rumi said, Because you don’t judge, you never did. You accept everything without condemnation. Why do you think I told you those things? You were like a doctor or priest, never surprised by anything, least of all what people did. I knew you’d never tell, so I told you. I left out things, of course. Then Rumi told Soporo some of the things he’d left out. For instance, he said, he’d left out the story about the insane woman who lived under Grant Road Bridge, the lice-infested crazy woman with her lice-infested baby. So inadequate, he said. Everything. I mean, what can you say about such a baby? What can be said about the mother? Then he pretended to think. And who else? Yes, a beggar woman on Arab Gully. She wanted to die, begged me to kill her, and I wouldn’t, because I hadn’t appointed myself God’s executioner. And then I did, because it was my social service. So, the question is, what’s the worst that can be said about me – that I put two or three people out of their misery? By the way, I’d do the same for you, but what would be the point? You’re already dead. He sat down and soon he was nodding so low that his head touched the ground. Soporo got up at last and went to him. He saw a rapid pulse beating in Rumi’s throat. A crow squawked somewhere nearby; at that time of night it was an unexpected sound. There was a smell of burning, garbage or leaves, and a plane passed overhead, flying incredibly low. Soporo looked at Rumi and thought, How easy it would be.

  Book Four

  Some Uses of Reincarnation

  CHAPTER ONE

  A Large Accumulation of Small Defeats

  I returned to the city in stages. I flew into Delhi and, some days later, took a train to Bombay. I spent most of the final leg standing by the door of the Rajdhani Express and watching the countryside fall past. Late in the night, a shape staggered up to me. His face was wet with blood and pockmarked with smallpox scars and though his mouth was moving I heard no words. Then I realized that the stains were paan, long spatters on his chin and shirt. He wiped his mouth and fell backwards into the compartment. There was silence in the corridor but only for a minute. The door opened again and this time he made it all the way to the sink, where he gripped the sides and bent into the small space between the mirror and the drain to retch into the bowl. I went into the compartment and climbed into my bunk. I fell in and out of sleep. I met Rumi in a dead man’s bar; I imagined I heard gamblers whisper good-luck theorems, complex prayers for the winning of money; I thought I saw the painter Xavier, drinking Martinis and losing money to Dimple, who wore a gold tooth and eye-patch and had an opium pipe dangling between her legs, and to each of the painter’s questions she made the same reply, that the city was a large accumulation of small defeats, nothing more, and each new arrival to the city brought his own minuscule contribution to the inexhaustible pile. I could not understand a thing. Much later, when I went into the corridor, the pockmarked man was still there, still gripping the sink and examining himself in the mirror. Now I understood what he was saying. Sick, he said, I’m sick, which he was, unquestionably.

  *

  I dreamed it was twenty years earlier, in 1984, and I was in Colaba. There was a blackout in the city and I kept hearing the cries of small children. I went into a restaurant favoured by Bombay’s Nigerians and my friend was sitting in the back room drinking vodka shots and beer. Candles burned in a row on the bar. I took a stool and said it was good to see him. Where had he been for twenty years? Rumi laughed for a long time. This is the past, he said, not the present. Then he said, I died. Didn’t you hear? He laughed some more, softly, as if to himself. I said, I’m sorry I forgot. What happened to you when you died? He shook his head and smiled. I don’t know why you bother, he said. It’s not like you’ll do anything about it. You’ll just go on pretending. You should ask yourself why: is it because you have no imagination or because it’s the only way you can bear the thought of extinction? To be honest with you, I have no idea why you do it, but you do, all of you, pretend this life is for ever. His eyes were half closed and in the candlelight his face was red. He said: But that isn’t what I c
ame here to tell you. I waited while he tried to catch the bartender’s attention. I asked him to tell me whatever he wanted to tell me, because I’d come a long way to hear it. He banged on the bar top and asked for a frozen vodka shot and a beer back. He said When I was a high-caste Hindu I beat my wife once or twice a month, did you know that? Sometimes with my slipper and sometimes with my hand; I had to teach her the inevitability of obedience. I knew my duty even if she did not. And what was my duty, my difficult duty, which, to begin with, I performed reluctantly, though not without a certain excitement? To teach those who were born from the belly-button of the Lord, from the hip and thigh of the Lord, from lower down, from the Lord’s unmentionable parts, from his nether regions, his Africas and South Americas, from his unnameable parts that may not be spoken of without grave risk to the speaker. I tried to teach the low-born that there is more to the world, immeasurably more than the little they knew. I wanted to teach them radiance and humility, also endurance. I tried to teach my wife and the other women, the low-born women I favoured, the cunts into which I put my wheat-complexioned penis, because I wanted to teach them and also because I liked it. Do you know why I came to this bar? To tell you this, to tell you I beat my wife with my slipper and my open hand. I beat her till she liked it too. Do you hear me? And now that I’ve told you may I go? I said, Wait, why are you telling me this? I don’t have a wife. Rumi looked at me and laughed. He said, You don’t understand a thing. Then he pulled a stone out of his cowboy boot, a flat black stone that had been sharpened to a dull point. Pathar, he said. But that’s not it, or not exactly. Then he drank his shot and finished his beer and walked out of the bar and I sat where I was until I woke up on a train traversing the Indian plains.

  *

  Late in the night, I went to the door and manhandled it open. I watched my shadow in a yellow rectangle of light as it slid past the fields into the early dawn. When the train stopped at Kurla, it was raining and I was ragged with sleeplessness. I broke a rule and accepted the first ride to come my way. On the highway, the driver left the motor running to buy a mouthful of tobacco and white paste. He said, Okay, which way do you want to go, the highway or the inner road? It’s completely up to you. I understood that it was a way of testing my knowledge of the city. Depending on which route I chose he’d know if I was a first-timer (and he could cheat me a lot) or an old Bombay hand (and he could only cheat me a little). It was early but the streets were full of people. The walkers were out, in their ugly new shoes and branded tracksuits. Men in green overalls swept the street and there was a garbage truck nearby, and it occurred to me that in all the years I’d lived in Bombay this was the first time I’d seen a garbage truck or city workers in overalls. A trio of Jain nuns crossed a bridge on foot, single-file, in white robes and head-coverings. They carried staffs and small white bundles. With what belongings were the bundles filled? Their slippers and masks were made of thin white cotton and were no protection against the pollution, which was fierce. But it wasn’t for protection against the world that the nuns wore their masks; it was to protect the world from their own small mistakes. When I arrived at my address, the rickshahwallah’s meter was double and a half what it should have been. The meter was covered in black plastic that was hard to see through and impossible to remove. I paid and picked up my bags and stepped into the city. I was soaked through in minutes. Dom, I said, welcome, welcome to Bombay.

  *

  I suppose it was a homecoming. I found a place to rent and moved in a few weeks later, when the worst of the monsoons had passed, though it continued to rain every day. It was around the corner from the Bandra building in which I’d lived almost a decade earlier. The apartment was the smallest I’d ever seen. It came with a washing machine and no fridge, cooking spices and no dining table. The saucepan was extra small; it held two cups of water, no more. The stovetop had two burners. There was a collapsible couch, a bookcase, a steel Godrej almirah, an armchair, a kitchenette, a bathroom, all squeezed into three hundred square feet of space. In a week I was hooked up and settled and it was as if I had never left. The city had changed, but it was still a conglomeration of slums on which high-rises had been built. There were new highways but all they did was speed you from one jam to the next. Everything was noise and frenzy, a constant beat, like house music without the release. One night I took a rickshah home. Stuck in a jam on Hill Road, I watched a man work the traffic. He was splayed on all fours, his hunchback exaggerated for effect. The spot was a crossroads fronted by bars and restaurants, with shopping arcades on two sides and a hospital. It was incredibly busy, a long snarl of stop and go, and the hunchback worked it calmly, juggling simultaneous bits of information: make of vehicle, type of passenger, access route between scooter and rickshah, availability of traffic island. He crawled to the window of a new car and I saw his mouth move. Then he held out his hand and a child’s fingers appeared holding a note. He took the money and hump-walked away, but instead of trying one of the other cars he came to my rickshah. When I shook my head, the man smiled. Yaar, long time, he said in Hindi. Remember me from Rashid’s? I remembered: on the street they called him Spiderman.

  ‘Shankar, are you okay?’

  ‘Very okay, boss. I got married, bought a house.’ He looked surprised. Then he said, ‘I gave up garad.’

  The lights had changed but the driver made no move to start his rickshah, he seemed fascinated by the Spiderman. Around us, Bandra honked and stalled. From a rickshah, the city was all exhaust, face-level and toxic. Shankar asked if I was going to see Rashid. I hadn’t thought about it, but all of a sudden the question, so casually spoken, seemed very important. Say hello to him from me, Shankar said. I can’t do it in person. I go down there, I may not come back. You know how it is.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Citizen

  The driver had a cricket match going on the radio, India vs Pakistan turned up loud. On the way to Rashid’s, for an hour and a half in the lunchtime traffic, I listened to the old Hindu–Muslim sibling anxieties recycled in the guise of expert commentary. I got off at the junction of Shuklaji Street and Arab Gully and caught a quick savour of change. New blocks loomed at the Bombay Central end of the street, short glass-and-steel buildings that seemed to have come up overnight. The brothels and drug dens were gone. In their place were hundreds of tiny cubicles or storefronts, each indistinguishable from the next. The street itself was as cramped and ramshackle as ever, but there was a McDonald’s on the corner and a mini mall and supermarkets, and I knew it was only a matter of time before the rest of the neighbourhood followed. I walked around the street for many dazed minutes. Then I realized I was standing in front of it. The entryway had been bricked up. You had to go around the side and there it was, Rashid’s old khana, now become an office space. There were plywood partitions and desks under tube lighting and young men and women sat at terminals and spoke into headsets. A television in the corner was tuned to a news channel and a boy in a blue uniform went around with tea. The old washing area, with its tin barrels and open drain, had been converted into a kitchenette with two tiny sinks and a miniature fridge. A man sat in a cubicle to the left where the balcony had been. It was the only private space in the room and his was the only desk with a computer and printer. He clicked off his screen and stood up.