Narcopolis

by Jeet Thayil

  ‘There are no Muslims here,’ Jamal told her, ‘which means there’s nothing wrong in selling them drugs.’

  Farheen laughed.

  ‘In fact,’ she said, ‘it’s your duty.’

  *

  He didn’t like to dance: it made him feel foolish. Come on, soldier, Farheen said, I’ll show you how. If he refused, she would have danced alone. So he let her lead him to the floor. The dance was crazy and beautiful, people of all races and classes, all moving to one beat. Some swayed as if they were too high to stand, others hardly moved, or they moved only their hips. The metallic light fell around him in washes. It was like being on a stage with nobody looking. He felt a woman’s breasts against his back, and other bodies against his hips and thighs. Then Farheen kissed him. She put her tongue in his mouth and her lips were cold and wet from the cocktail. They stood absolutely still for a moment, but she pulled away to shout in his ear. Dance, she said, dance or we die.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Enfolding

  I went back the next day and found Rashid in his room, sitting in his chair by the window with the prayer beads in his hands. I asked if he was feeling better.

  ‘I’ll never be good or better, I’m past the age for it. Now there’s only bad and worse.’

  I said I had come to pay my respects.

  Rashid said, ‘I’m an old man. I don’t want to talk about the old days.’ But he brought it up himself.

  ‘Garad wrecked everything. If we’d stayed with opium my place would still be open. I’d be making money every day instead of sitting on a chair saying, if, if, if. So many people would be alive: Dimple, even your friend, the crazy one with the hammer. No, maybe not that sisterfucker.’

  Instead of saying behenchodh like everyone else, Rashid’s variation was behen ko chodhu, and the way he said it made the words sound Arabic, a guttural clearing of the throat.

  I said, ‘Rumi.’

  ‘Yes, him. Came here with a set of teeth, old dentures in a jam bottle. He said they were Mahatma Gandhi’s and tried to sell them to me for ten thousand rupees. I told him, chief, you’re a crazy man and this is a chandu khana not a pagal khana. He liked that. He said the dentures were Gandhi’s, totally genuine, money back guarantee. He said he got them from a man who got them from a man who stole them from Gandhi’s son, the drunk, who was neglected by the father. He said the government would give me a cash reward, saying all this loudly, and people laughing at him. I imagined the newspaper headlines: MUSLIM DRUG TRAFFICKER BUYS GHANDI’S TEETH. I told him to get them out of the khana before there was another riot. So this pagal smokes some garad and goes away. The jam bottle with the teeth, he leaves behind.’

  The girl came in with a tray of tea and biscuits.

  He said, ‘Years later I went for a talk at Bhavan’s College by one of Gandhi’s grandsons, a scholar of some kind. Afterwards I asked him if it was true, what Rumi said, that the old man had neglected his family. You know what he told me?’

  ‘I can’t even guess.’

  ‘He said the children may have suffered slightly from inattention, but the next generation made up for it. Of course he was bragging. He said the sins of the fathers may be visited on the children but the good is visited on the grandchildren. He was a tall corpse-like man with glasses that were too big for his face. He seemed annoyed. He told me I didn’t understand a thing about Gandhi, nobody did, no one understood that for him the most important thing in the world, more important than ideas and politics, were the simple facts of living. Life lived in quest of itself was the greatest art form. But the way he was saying these things, it was as if he didn’t believe his own words.’

  ‘How did Rumi die?’

  ‘Someone smashed his head with a piece of concrete pipe. They say it was the Pathar Maar, but I don’t think so. I think the Pathar Maar died a long time ago, or moved to some other city. Maybe Rumi met a copycat. Case is still unsolved.’

  Rashid got up slowly. He took a set of keys from his pocket and gave them to the girl. He told her to take me to the flat on the half landing. He said, Zeenat’s old place. There’s a trunk under the bed. She’ll help you bring it up.

  *

  It was an old Bombay apartment with high ceilings and tiled floors. The front door opened into the living room, which had a marble-topped Irani table and some chairs. The rest of the space was crowded with computer equipment and obsolete or broken keyboards and terminals. The girl went through into the back and nodded at a tin trunk that lay wedged under the single bed. I pulled it out and between us we carried it up to Rashid. He unhooked a clasp and threw back the top and a handful of newspaper cuttings and documents fell on the floor. They were in Chinese and there was a photograph of a young officer in uniform. Rashid pulled out a striped shopping bag, the kind Bombay housewives stuff to the brim with coriander, onions and tomatoes. Inside was a pipe, the only one that had survived. He handed it to me. I sniffed the bowl for its long-gone scent and I thought I smelled it, like molasses and sleep and sickness.

  ‘You can have it,’ Rashid said. ‘I don’t want it.’

  I saw a jar, with the dentures Rumi had tried to sell Rashid, and I asked if I could have them.

  ‘What will you do with it? Sell it to the government for millions of rupees? Take whatever you want. Jamal wants to throw it all away.’

  I picked my way through the things in the trunk, making two small piles. The opium pipe and dentures I put in one pile. I added a newspaper cutting from the Indian Express, a copy of a school textbook, some notebooks, and an issue of Sex Detective.

  Rashid said, ‘What will you do with all of this?’

  ‘Who knows? Make a museum exhibit, maybe.’

  ‘Yes, why not? Put our shame on display, so people understand the lowest of the low, prostitutes and criminals and drug addicts, people with no faith in God or man, no faith in anything except the truth of their own senses. This is a worthwhile thing to you?’

  His voice was very weak, as if it had to travel a great distance to be heard. The light in the room began to fade and there were shapes in the air outside, small whip-like shapes moving between the mango trees. We sat together as the room got dark. The girl put on the lights when she left, but the table lamps only made everything dimmer, bathing each object in a weak yellow gleam. Rashid was immobile, but when I got up to leave he got up too, and in the twilight, with the old ghosts swimming in the air between us, I saw the confusion in his eyes.

  *

  I want to tell you something, he said. I know what you did. You put her in the centre and that was a good thing. But she came back. Did you know that? When she was sick, she came back to her old room to die. I knew she was sick because she spent most of the day sitting in a chair, just sitting, like an old man. And then, the week after Id, she got worse and Dr Belani came to see her, our old Sindhi family doctor. He whispered to me that she was very ill, but with her he joked, told her she had the constitution of a bullock, and Zeenat, also joking, said it was not a flattering comparison. Later she told me, I know what he said to you, there’s nothing wrong with my hearing. She told me not to worry, that she wasn’t planning to die just yet. But almost from that day there was a change in her. No, no, not then, it was after she came back from the hospital. We had to take her to hospital for the treatment, the terrible treatment, which made her hair fall out and gave her more pain than the sickness. And when she came back she was changed. She told me there was a window in the back of the ambulance that carried her to the hospital, and as she lay there she looked out and caught a glimpse of the sky and some trees, and she could see the attendant and the driver, and these ordinary sights filled her with joy and gratitude. Why joy? I asked her. Why gratitude, of all things? Because, she said, I knew what a lucky life I was given and I understood everything: the exact meaning of the sun in the infinite sky and the trees trembling around us and the people hungry for affection, and I understood how foolish it was to be proud or angry, and, most of all, how wrong it was to wit
hhold affection from those who need it most, which is to say, everyone. That’s all. I understood how lucky I was to know this at last, maybe a little too late, but at least I knew. I thought it was her sickness that made her say those things, but still, Nasrani, it brought tears to my eyes to see her so radiant, and the way she spoke, as if she was in some kind of ecstasy. I am beloved, she said. And you, dear friend, you’re beloved too. This is what she said. After she died, I gave up the business. I learned to pray, not five times, but six, eight times a day. I prayed all the time, but the worm could not be killed by prayer. It was still inside me. You see, I realized I wasn’t praying to praise God, I was praying for my own selfish reasons, but such is God’s mercy that he listened to my entreaties. This is the meaning of mercy, wouldn’t you say, when it is offered to the undeserving? So I sat in my chair and I prayed and eventually I was rewarded. One evening I heard a door closing downstairs, in Zeenat’s apartment. I heard a toilet flush and a chair scrape against the floor. This is a quiet building, sound carries in the night. I didn’t do anything at first. I continued to pray, but I knew where the sounds were coming from. Some nights later, I heard a door bang and I went down. The room was as she left it, it still is, you saw. I sat on the bed and waited. The door was open and I thought it was only a matter of time until she appeared. But she didn’t, she didn’t appear. I went back to my routine, I prayed, I slept, and again one night I heard something downstairs. This time I decided I would wait all night if I had to, but I fell asleep. When I woke, I realized she wouldn’t come. I went to use the toilet and that’s where I found her, sitting on the seat. Her eyes were full of fear. I asked, What took you so long? I told her about my life, about how I had given up nasha and filled my mind with prayer. I talked about my family, about my loneliness, about her. I told her how much I missed her. I asked her again, What took you so long to come? I said I’d been hoping she would return to haunt me. And that was the only moment when she seemed her old self. She said, Haunt? Listen to me: I’m not a ghost. I’m still here. I’ve been here all this time but I kept out of your way. Dead do not always become ghosts. We are like dreams that travel from one person to the other. We return, but only if you love us. I told her she didn’t have to explain anything to me. I said I would be happy if she were only to sit with me for a little while. You see, Nasrani, I’ve become a foolish old man. I still talk to her, more and more as the days go by.

  *

  When I got back to the apartment in Bandra, I looked at the papers I’d salvaged from Dimple’s house, the magazine advertisements for Duckback rubber sheeting and semi-automatic washing machines and Sri Balaji’s instant bumper lottery, first prize Rs. 10 lakhs; the photographs of congressmen and criminals; the opinion pieces on sex and money and the city’s crumbling infrastructure, and it struck me that the pieces could, with minor changes, be reprinted in that day’s newspaper and no one would be any wiser. In a notebook I found unfinished lists: the names of night watches; a comparison of smells, for instance, the smell of cordite against that of sulphur; several definitions of the word remorse; and handwritten pages, a story or dream, titled ‘The Enfolding’, in which a small child falls asleep in a house from which the adults have vanished. The child runs around the house in panic. Then he learns. He waits in the empty rooms and maze-like gardens. He tends the flowers. He grows into young adulthood. He keeps himself fit and alert and he waits. He lives in ‘a world’, wrote Dimple, ‘in which only pain was real’. Most of the story was taken up by the closing paragraph in which the boy waits by a parapet near the ocean. Behind him, the old house and the sky reeling with birds. He looks out to sea, waiting for the lights of a ship. He imagines he can see tiny yellow or blue pinpoints that grow larger in the night but vanish with first light. Who is he waiting for? How long must he endure the rigors of his vigil? What are the bearable consequences of loneliness? These questions are raised in the course of the story, though they are nowhere answered. I fell asleep reading and late at night I heard footsteps on the ceiling, things dropping, coughs and whispers. I woke up saying, Who is it? I thought I heard voices outside my door. My neighbours on the left were a family of four in a space as small as mine. I never saw the father, a labouring man who came home only to sleep. They kept their doors and windows open all day, there was no other way to live in the tiny space. The younger child, a girl of about six, read her homework aloud. I sat on the couch in my room and listened to her real voice. ‘When the sun rises we say good morning.’ When I opened my door at noon, she and her mother looked at me with curiosity, or pity. If I could hear them, they could surely hear me, talking with my invisible guests. I introduced myself. I said: Ullis is my name. These are my friends. This is what we did. These are the things we said and dreamed. Mother and daughter looked at me and then they looked behind me, as if they too could see the shapes that filled the air. Late that night, after my neighbours had gone to bed, I cleared a space in the small room and set up an oil lamp and the pipe. This is the story the pipe told me. All I did was write it down, one word after the other, beginning and ending with the same one, Bombay.

  About the Author

  Jeet Thayil was born in Kerala, India in 1959 and educated in Hong Kong, New York and Mumbai. He is a performance poet, songwriter and guitarist as well as a writer, and has published four collections of poetry. He is the editor of The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets (2008). He currently lives in New Delhi.

  by the same author

  The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets