by Jeet Thayil
*
To match the quality of Mr Lee’s pipes he put less water in the cooking mix. Soon the place was packed with regulars and tourists and all kinds of unlikely people who came just to visit. He raised the price of a pyali to three rupees from two but the opium was so much better than anywhere else that no one complained; if anything, business improved. A tall Australian turned up. He smoked all day and drew pictures in a small notebook and spent a lot of money. He was generous: he bought pyalis for everyone. He came back the next day and the next and for a week he was a regular at the khana. He communicated mostly with his hands, because no one could understand him though he was speaking English. Months after he left, after he’d taken off for Sydney or Melbourne or wherever, someone said he was a famous musician whose tunes were played on the radio in the West, and that he’d written a song about his experience at Rashid’s, that there was something in it about ‘lying in a den in Bombay,’ though it might have been a coincidence. Then the son of a well-known director came around. He was making his first movie and he wanted to get the atmosphere right for a scene set in an opium den. He sat at the entrance near the washing area and he didn’t try a pipe. He dropped the names of actors and directors, all of whom were close family friends, or so he said. It wasn’t his patter that irritated Rashid, but his laughter, high-pitched and smelling of insanity. He wore a straw hat that he held in his lap. He took notes. He took a photograph of Dimple that would appear many years later in a book about Bombay’s opium dens (in the picture, a young woman holds a pipe to a lamp, her face intent, and in a corner of the frame is a book, the title partly obscured, ii). After much deliberation he decided to try a pyali, smoked half and ran down the stairs to vomit. But it was his smoking technique that was most remarked on. He wiped the mouthpiece with a handkerchief soaked in Dettol, wiped it each time he took a drag and the pipe smelled for days of antiseptic. When he returned from the toilet he asked if he could take more pictures and Rashid said yes, of course he could, but then he would have to break the director’s son’s legs and cut off his hands to ensure he never left the khana, which riposte Rashid delivered with a smile, as if he were sharing a joke.
*
The brothel-keeper, Dimple’s tai, paid Rashid a formal visit. She was full of complaints. She said Dimple was spending too much time at the khana, she’d become a full-time professional drug addict, she was no longer earning her keep. The other girls brought in more money, said the tai, addressing only Rashid. Not once during the visit did the tai and Dimple speak or look at each other. Dimple made Rashid’s pipe the way she always did, calm and silent, her hands steady, while the tai drank her tea, made her speech and left. That afternoon, Rashid took Dimple to a room on a half landing between the khana and the first floor where his family lived. There was a wooden cot, a chair and washstand, a window with a soiled curtain. She knew what he wanted. She took off her salvaar and folded it on the back of the chair. She lay on the cot and pulled her kameez up to her shoulders to show him her breasts. Her legs were open, the ridged skin stretched like a ghost vagina.
He said, You’re like a woman. She said: I am a woman, see for yourself. She didn’t want him on top of her because he was too heavy for her back. She told him to sit on the cot while she faced him, her arms around his neck and her ankles locked on his hips. It took a long time, the drugs working in opposition to his blood; but she didn’t stop until he was finished, shuddering with effort, his hands angled on the bed, his eyes looking into hers.
He said, ‘What about you, what do you feel?’
‘Fine.’
‘No. What I want to know, do you feel pleasure or not?’
‘Not like you do and not the way a woman does.’
‘You don’t feel anything.’
‘Oh, bilkul, I do. I feel pleasure but not, what’s the word, relief.’
He studied her face as she arranged her kameez and tidied her hair. He said: I want you to move here, into this room. I’ll send someone with you to collect your things.
*
Her life at the brothel was coming to an end, she knew. She was treated better than some of the others but she worked three or four giraks a day. She was in her late twenties and already she felt middle-aged. She’d lived and worked at Number 007 for more than fifteen years. The work was fast. The giraks didn’t take off their clothes. They unzipped, they finished in minutes and they were gone. Their desire for her, for sex, was theoretical. It had no reality. It was the idea of a eunuch in a filthy brothel in Shuklaji Street, this was what they paid for. Dimple thought: They like the dirtiness of it. Nothing else gets their dicks so hard. They don’t think of themselves as homosexuals. They have wives and children and they’re always making jokes about gandus and chakkas. It’s all about money: they think eunuchs give better value than women. Eunuchs know what men want in a way other randis don’t, they know men like it dirty.
Lakshmi’s way of putting it: what dogs we are when we are men. Lakshmi worked the street, getting shop owners and pedestrians to part with money, doing this with nothing more than a clap of her man’s hands. She did it now, a gunshot clap designed to cut through heavy Bombay traffic. A customer in the main room turned around in alarm. He was trying to persuade the tai to give him a discount rate for two prostitutes. Lakshmi said, Men are dogs. We know and they know. Only women don’t know. Isn’t that right, darling? she told the customer. Aren’t you a dog sniffing around my ass for a free fuck?
*
After the customer left in search of a brothel with better rates, Dimple stood on the balcony of 007 and looked down into the street at the cook fires and crowds of pedestrians. Then she put on her sandals and went out. The paanwallah was listening to AIR and he smiled at her when she stepped into his cubicle. She ordered a Calcutta meetha and watched as he assembled it. He was listening to cricket commentary, a match between India and the West Indies. They talked for a while about Indian versus West Indian batsmen. The Indians were skilled but they were no match for the blacks, said the paanwallah. Dimple asked him what he thought about Gavaskar. The paanwallah said Gavaskar was okay but he lacked something. No killer instinct, and that was the problem with Indians. Dimple asked if killer instinct was all you needed to play a good game and the paanwallah laughed and said he knew what Dimple was leading up to but he’d been in the game for a while himself and he knew a couple of things. Dimple said she was only passing the time of day and then she asked if he put enough supari in the Calcutta. The paanwallah said there was enough supari to make a horse kick and he told her to come back if she wasn’t satisfied and he would give her a free one. He said Gavaskar was a good man and a technically sound player, but he was not accustomed to the taste of blood. It didn’t excite him. Indians were too mild, said the paanwallah, and it was Gandhi’s fault. The old man had taken a race of bloodthirsty warriors, taught them non-violence and made them into saints and grass eaters. Dimple laughed. She told the paanwallah to take a look around. Indians were as violent and bloodthirsty as ever, and they would always be looking for an excuse to hack or burn or gouge each other. The paanwallah laughed too. Back in her room, she chewed the paan and watched herself in the hand mirror hanging on a nail above the sink. She watched the shape her mouth made and she looked at her eyes and skin and hair and made a critical assessment: not bad. As she got older it took more work to look good. The more difficult it became, the more she smoked. The more she smoked, the more difficult it became. She thought: If I lose my looks I don’t want to live. I don’t want to be like the tai whose only joy in life is money. Dimple was the tai’s chela, the tai-in-waiting. When she was old and no longer able to work, she’d take care of the business and oversee the other randis. She’d handle money all day long. She would know no other life. It was an inevitability that needed correction and she was correcting her life. So she asked Rashid to wait while she moved her things in small consignments, relocating herself a piece at a time. There was no question of taking her earnings with her. The tai would sa
y that Dimple owed her for food and board, and besides, it was probably a fair exchange: she was trading money (her earnings) for pleasure (her freedom). Variations of this transaction occurred on the street a thousand times a day.
*
She told only one girak that she was leaving, a pocket-maar who always smoked at her station. He’d smoke and talk, softly, so the other customers wouldn’t hear him. Rashid made jokes, calling him her new boyfriend. Then the pocket-maar came to see her at the brothel. He sold cocaine and whisky for one of the Lalas. He was tall and skinny, his thin legs and bony knees out of proportion to his big belly and chest, and he wore his hair long, down to his collar like a hippie. He gave her different amounts each time, two or three or four hundred rupees in small bills, but it was double the amount he was expected to pay and she was always happy to see him. He ordered strong beer, Cannon or Khajuraho, and he sprawled on the bed, drinking from the bottle. He gossiped about the private lives of Raj Kapoor and Nargis, Shashi Kapoor and Shabana Azmi, and his favourite topic, Amitabh Bachchan and Rekha. He kissed Dimple on the lips. She’d wipe her mouth and he’d kiss her again. He took his time, locking the door and staying so long the tai pounded on the partition, shouting, Salim. Finished. Time finished. Dimple, open up, did he die inside you or what?
One night he asked if she would look after a bag for him, a nylon Air India shoulder bag that was zipped but unlocked. He handed it over and disappeared. Inside she found bundles of hundred-rupee notes, and, rolled in a T-shirt, two pistols, large six-guns like the firearms brandished by Clint Eastwood in English movies. She put the bag into a steel Godrej almirah and carried the key on a chain she attached to the waistband of her salvaar. Salim was gone for three weeks. He came back shrunken, with new bruises on the soles of his feet and on his back. He said: Chit-chat with the police, friendly gup-shup, yaar, with the brown crows. She opened a bottle of White Flower Oil from a box that Mr Lee had given her and rubbed it into the discolorations on his skin. The oil’s cold burn helped him heal. After this Salim brought her little gifts: plastic hair clips, a key chain, a tiny handbag, a black leather diary with the phone codes of all the world’s cities and special pockets for business cards and photos. Sometimes he expected not sex but conversation. He wanted her to tell him what was in the book she was reading, and she would try to encapsulate it for him, encapsulate in a few sentences a three-hundred-page novel by a Latin American or European author. He would ask about her health, about her day, and it would irritate her. What was there to say? Her day was always the same. She worked at 007 and she worked at Rashid’s and when she was not working she taught herself to read, there was nothing more to it. His questions were useless but comforting. She wondered if this was what it meant to be married, to be a wife. You were bored and irritated and comforted, all at the same time.
‘Why are you leaving?’
‘Because I have a chance to.’
‘What if I offered you a chance?’
‘I’d think about it, but you haven’t made an offer yet.’
‘I will, you can put money on it. I’ll do it very soon.’
But he didn’t, and one morning she put her things into a taxi: Mr Lee’s tin trunks, four or five cloth-wrapped parcels, and a many-tiered make-up kit, the kind carried by Air India stewardesses. It was a little after eight in the morning on Christmas Day. Nobody was awake. Nobody saw her go except Lakshmi, who said, Bitch, whatever you do, don’t come back.
Book Three
The Intoxicated
CHAPTER ONE
A Walk on Shuklaji Street
His older son, Jamal, was waiting by the door. How long had he been there? The boy had a way of appearing without making a sound, materializing from nowhere with his eyes wide and his hand extended. He was six years old and already a businessman, all he wanted from his father was cash. Depending on his mood, Rashid handed over some small amount or he didn’t. Today he was opium sick and fearful and God’s words were bubbling in his head. No, he told his son. Out, out. Jamal retreated, eyes sullen, and Rashid banged down the wooden stairs, struggling to put on his shirt, his arms and stomach so meaty that it took some mindfulness, some extra push and twist of effort. He thought: I am a fat businessman. When did this happen? Not so long ago I was a skinny criminal trying to make a name and now here I am, an entrepreneur, with cash in my pocket and the shortest commute in the world – out the door and down a flight of stairs – and none of it gives me a moment of peace in my head. How did this happen?
Shuklaji Street was a fever grid of rooms, boom-boom rooms, family rooms, god rooms, secret rooms that contracted in the daytime and expanded at night. It wasn’t much of a street. It was narrow and congested, and there was an endless stream of cars and trucks and handcarts and bicycles. But it stretched roughly from Grant Road to Bombay Central and to walk along it was to tour the city’s fleshiest parts, the long rooms of sex and nasha. In the midst of it, Rashid’s opium room was becoming a local landmark. Trained staff. Genuine Chinese opium pipes. Credit if you’re good for it. Best quality O. He was getting opium tourists who had heard about the khana from a friend on a beach somewhere in Spain, or a café in Rome, and they’d come all the way to Shuklaji Street to see for themselves. They’d smoke a pipe or two, because that was the point, and then they’d sit around for hours, drinking tea and taking pictures, collecting souvenirs to show off back home. Like the couple from Amsterdam who asked to visit his living quarters. He took them upstairs where his family lived in rooms that ran the length of the building, where his wives made big meals and his children skulked about and he was a mostly absent father and husband. The Dutch couple wanted to see everything, examine each room as if they were on a guided tour, a bonus to their opium adventure. They shook hands with his family and asked endless questions. How many children did he have? How many wives? Had he always lived in Bombay? Why was his English so good? Did his children go to school?
Then the woman asked what a typical morning was like. And he had no answer. How to tell her that he got up late and went straight down to the khana, his system stunned from six or seven hours without drugs, his head reeling with visions of hellfire and the annihilation of the godless world; that it took an hour with the pipe before things turned the right way up? And then, sometime in the late afternoon, after a bath and a meal, he’d step out on the street and say a few words to the punters. Okay? Good? Yes. One-word greetings, or not even that, a nod maybe, a smile if he felt up to it. Just to be there, taking a constitutional among the horse cabs, the black and yellow taxis, men and women yelling to be heard above the honk and bustle of Shuklaji Street: he’d watch the heads bob on their way to some cash-and-carry transaction, criminal apostles to the great god Enterprise, and it gave him a veiny jolt of pleasure to dawdle, to slow down and take it in.
*
He had the shortest commute on the street but not today. He stepped out of the building and walked quickly to the corner, ducking from the sudden glare. It was a holiday of some kind, a Hindu holiday, because the temple was full of people and he could see the priest, threaded, shirtless, his orange dhoti a flash in the sun. On the street, the punters were out in numbers, the respectable fathers and grandfathers and uncles, the solid citizens on furlough from their lives. He heard snatches of Gujarati, Malayalam, even English as they headed to the numbered rooms above the street. Uncontrollable prayer phrases rose to his lips as he walked past the temple. When he was high it was never like this, but when he was opium sick and sober – yes, then, then God was always close. He whispered, Guide thou us on the straight path, thou who are round about the infidels. Thy lightning snatches their eyes. He stepped around a small group on the sidewalk, a trio of cripples in white pyjamas and skullcaps, arguing about money, their crutches propped against the wall. They worked together every day, begging arm in arm, and now they were throwing accusations at each other. He thought: The idea of Muslims fighting each other over a few rupees, it goes against the grain of the Prophet’s word. Or it proves t
he truth of it. When a storm-cloud cometh out of the heaven, big with darkness and black thunder, they thrust their fingers into their ears for fear of death.
*
He turned into Foras Road and entered Timely Watch Showroom, ringing the bell on his way in, the shop empty, as it usually was. Salim was in the office in the back and he got up when he saw Rashid, came around the desk with the city’s newest fashion accessory clipped to his belt, the headphones pumping a tinny beat into his skull, some disco beat, Saturday Night Fever, what else? Salim’s models were John Travolta and Amitabh Bachchan, and he picked up most of his style and language from the two tough-guy actors, or so said Rashid’s wife. Today he was wearing light blue bell-bottoms and platform shoes, his shirt the same shade of blue as his trousers. His hair, parted on the side, fell to his shoulders in untidy bunches. Rashid went to Salim’s side of the desk, to the leather executive chair with the fancy headrest, and he pulled an envelope from his pocket and slammed it down for the pleasure of hearing that cash-money bang. And for the pleasure of seeing Salim jump to attention and take a mirror out of the desk drawer and, tenderly, a bundle of vials. Rashid had a hundred-rupee note already rolled. He spilled the contents of a vial on the mirror and snorted it before Salim had a chair pulled up to the other side of the desk. Salim was being respectful, properly so: he didn’t touch the envelope.
‘Did you get the whisky?’
‘Of course, Rashidbhai.’
‘“Of course, Rashidbhai,” so polite, like I’m your uncle. Did you get Red or Black?’
‘Black Label, your choice. Not so easy to find these days.’
He made himself comfortable in Salim’s chair, the seat tilting backwards in tiny clicks, some special mechanism that made minute adjustments for his weight and let him lean all the way back without any danger of tipping over.
