Narcopolis

by Jeet Thayil

  *

  The Playhouse Lodge had once been a theatre, three storeys, peaked roof, gothic parapets and arches, and a grand colonial name. But English fell out of use and the Playhouse came to be known by a phonetic variation, Pilahouse, with a nonsensical bilingual meaning, yellowhouse. Now it was a lodge in name only, there were no rooms and nobody lived there who expected room service or clean sheets. It was where Rashid had set up shop after his opium room on Shuklaji Street finally closed. The staircase that led to the Pilahouse was made of rough wood, its planks warped, the lower steps lost in water. Half a dozen men stood huddled near the top. The air was heavy with flies and the smell from a public toilet next door. Rumi wanted to cut the line but the man at the top of the staircase wouldn’t give up his spot. He was huddled in a Mandrax stoop and he mumbled baby talk. He said, Hold on, wait his sheeting, understand? He said, You want, you wait, like. Rumi reached around him to bang on the door. There was a conversation, Rumi’s words rapid, monotone, the Mandrax man hoarse and slow.

  ‘So we’re waiting for the African to shit, that’s what you’re telling me?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the Mandrax man, and he laughed without making a sound. ‘He brought the garad in his ass and he’s been trying all day to shit.’

  ‘That’s completely fucking disgusting.’

  Rumi made a face but he made no move to leave.

  ‘The shit’s in his shit, that’s why we’re waiting?’

  ‘That’s how it gets here. Mules, like.’

  ‘African donkey, more like.’

  ‘You want government-controlled health warnings? Everything neat and organized, nutrition information on the side and best-before dates, stuff doesn’t get you off take it to the Consumer Protection Bureau, petition the dealer?’

  It was a long speech for the Mandrax man and it silenced Rumi, but only for a moment. He coughed into his fist and rubbed his hands together. He said, I saw a Negro once when I was a kid. In my school, he was an exchange student from Nigeria. He looked so dirty, like a monkey. The shock made me puke. Then, when I was living in LA, I saw lots of them and I learned not to puke. I learned to be a man of the world. But not even in LA, where, believe me, weird things happen on a daily basis, not even there did I wait in line for a Negro to shit.

  *

  This chooth country, cunt country, how the fuck are you supposed to live here without drugs? Look at the Gujaratis, chooths, we all know this, kem cho choothiyas. Human calculators, you can’t even talk to them without giving them cash, they’re such accomplished chooths. And the Kashmiris, complete chooths, offer them your hand, they’ll take your ass. It’s their nature; they can’t help it. And what about the Madrasis, all those Keralites and Kannadigas and so on? Chooths, undu gundu choothiyas, idli dosa choothiyas, nothing personal, but it’s true, you know it and I know it. And Punjabis, do I even have to mention Punjabis? Number one chooths, the Punjus. They’ll eat and drink with you and all the while they’re measuring you for a coffin. Bengalis? Bengalis are beyond your average category of choothiyadom, they’re chooths of the highest order, first-quality bhodrolok choothiyos, who invent new levels of choothiyaness daily. Followed closely, as in everything, by the Oriyas, who are more in the league of chooth wannabes. But none of them approach the level of choothiyahood perfected by the Sindhis, who are the world’s most sophisticated chooths, inventors and tweakers of the choothiya’s guidebook, in short, chooth perfectionists, true masters of the genre. As for the Christians, the Anglos and Goans, chooths, as you know, unquestionably chooths, though they’ll act as if the word has never left their lips or entered their brains. And the UPites and APites, they’re criminals to a man, born criminals, you can’t trust them with a pencil. Then there are the chooths in waiting and the chooths by association, such as the Parsis and the tribals. Now that may seem like an odd chooth combo, but it’s not. They are exactly alike in at least one way, they act like they aren’t chooths, but they are, deep inside they are utter chooths. The only non-chooths in the entire country are Maharashtrians. I grant you there’s been some degrading of the rule in recent times but at least with Maharashtrians what you see is what you get: islands of sanity in a sea of chooths. But even here, in the only non-choothiya place in the whole choothiya country, I challenge you to live here without turning to Grade A narcotics, said Rumi, leaning across the staircase to knock on the door in rapid frustrated bursts.

  *

  He was still knocking when the door opened and we were motioned inside by a hijra in a cotton sari stained with mud and water. The room was small, bare except for a few sleeping pallets and oil lamps and a poster, a picture of a yellow-haired girl in a wide-brimmed hat and the words ‘Gather ye rosebuds while ye may’. In a corner, Rashid was filling a cigarette with powder. When he lit up, the joint gave off a tang of derangement and for a moment I smelled the colour of it, acid green, like the barium of firework displays.

  ‘I get a commission, but I tell people to stay away from this shit.’

  He used the English word. Sheet.

  ‘Afeem’s different.’

  ‘Afeem.’

  ‘The old word for opium. You lie back, someone makes your pipe, you take your time, you enjoy.’

  ‘Until the world changes and everything goes to hell,’ I said, pointing. ‘A beautiful piece.’

  ‘At least five hundred years old and it will last another five hundred, longer than all of us. I bought it on Shuklaji Street from a Chini refugee who escaped to Bombay. He demanded a lot of money, as much as you’d pay for an antique in a shop on Colaba Causeway, but look at the carvings and the teak. I bought two for ten thousand rupees around twenty years ago. They must be worth lakhs today.’

  He was looking at the pipe but he had a heroin joint burning in his fingers. And I wasn’t interested in opium: I wanted to be kicked in the head.

  Rumi whispered, ‘Yaar, something get you?’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Everybody here’s a Muslim except you and me. You see this?’

  I didn’t respond: garad had a way of putting things in perspective and socio-theology went to the bottom of the pile. But we were overheard. I was waiting my turn to go inside when Rashid said, ‘Sit here. Tell me why you think Muslims cannot be trusted.’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  ‘You don’t have to say what’s written on your face.’

  ‘There’s nothing on my face except boredom, Rashidbhai. Boredom and more boredom. I came to your shop for so many years but what do you know about me?’

  ‘I know you’re a garaduli. Isn’t that the important thing?’ He laughed loudly at his own joke. Then he said, ‘You switched from chandu to garad when you moved to Bandra, you talk English when you’re high and you’re a Nasrani. Now tell me why you don’t trust Muslims. We are all smokers here, nashe ki aulad, there’s nothing to fear.’

  ‘It’s not that you’re not to be trusted.’

  ‘Then?’

  ‘Then why not talk about it, the thing we don’t talk about? Is that what you mean?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘My religion is no way of knowing me.’

  ‘Mine is a way of knowing me. When I pray I feel I’m doing something clean.’

  ‘But why pray so the whole neighbourhood hears your prayers? Why use microphones? And drums and music in the middle of the night.’

  Just then the Mandrax man said, ‘There’s a town in Kerala, like, the main road has a temple, a mosque and a church, all using loudspeakers, loudest street in the world.’

  Rashid said, ‘The city has changed, people wear their religion on their faces. As a Muslim I feel unwanted in many places, you should feel it too.’

  ‘I feel it. Who doesn’t?’

  ‘As a Nasrani, you should feel it as much as me. Okay, all Muslims cannot be trusted but what about the Hindus?’

  Rumi said, ‘What about the Hindus, Rashidbhai?’

  ‘Arre, you, with the hammer in your briefcase, you’re just waiting fo
r another war.’

  ‘Hammer?’

  ‘Choothiya, the whole street knows about your hammer.’

  ‘It’s a precaution.’

  ‘Must be, there are no nails here.’

  Some of the men sitting against the wall laughed, but Jamal, Rashid’s son, did not smile. He was in his teens then and he was serious and self-absorbed.

  ‘Tell me why you have the name of a great Muslim poet if you are a Hindu?’

  ‘It’s a nickname.’

  ‘Rumi is a mighty name for a mighty shai’ir.’

  ‘Rumi is a Muslim name?’

  ‘Jalal al-Din Rumi. Bhadwas who never read a book will recite a ghazal by him as if they wrote it themselves.’

  Right then, a pimp said, ‘“Everybody’s dying, even he, even she. / Knowing this, how can you not feel pity?”’

  Rashid rolled his eyes and took a pull of the pipe and a suck at the joint.

  ‘There used to be thirty-six chandu khanas on Shuklaji Street,’ he said, ‘now mine is the last one, perhaps the last one in the whole city. If you stand on the balcony and look out some nights, you’ll think it’s the last chandu khana on earth. And it too will soon be gone. What else will be gone? The words we said and the people we knew, and you and me, all of us will be sucked away like smoke in the wind. Do you know what will come in our place? New business, and if you want to do new business you’ll have to pray to the same god as your client.’ He licked his finger and wet the joint’s burning tip. ‘Nasrani,’ he said, ‘are you listening?’

  Before I could reply the hijra in the stained sari reappeared and it was our turn. Rumi and I jumped up and went inside.

  *

  The hijra led us behind a partition to a back room where the Nigerian sat at a desk. A plastic jug of water stood on a side table, with a saucer of used tea bags and a collection of small bottles. There were several brands of laxatives and a bottle of cough syrup. On a room-service tray were a dozen or so latex eggs, washed, but large enough that I wondered how he’d managed to put them in his ass. He wore a fresh skullcap and a striped business shirt and his shoes had a deep shine. There was a prayer bruise on his forehead and behind gold-rimmed spectacles his eyes were clear. He introduced himself as Pepsi and apologized for the delay. It was difficult to shit knowing a crowd of people was waiting, he said. Then he cut two uneven lines of dirty white powder on the cover of a movie magazine. He handed Rumi a hundred-rupee note rolled very tight. The twin lines ran diagonally across the famous mouth and vertiginous cleavage of the actress on the magazine’s cover. Rumi bent over the currency note and snorted up a line and closed his eyes and put his fingers in his ears. I broke my line in two, one for each nostril. The powder hit the back of my nose with a hard chemical burn, and, in an instant, my knees dissolved in the anhydride rush that disconnects neurons from nerve endings, obliterates bone and tissue, and removes anxiety by removing all possibility of pain. I thought: If pain is the thing shared by all living creatures, then I’m no longer human or animal or vegetal; I am unplugged from the tick of metabolism; I am mineral.

  *

  Rumi and Pepsi were on the couch, smoking a joint of heavy Bombay black, afloat on the smoke and conversation. The Mandrax man was there too, bent, his eyes wide with understanding or stupidity. The hijra, on the floor, smoked tiny bits of powder on a strip of tin foil. She cut an empty Gold Flake packet into long tapers that she lit from a candle and held to the foil, and when the powder melted and a coil of smoke appeared she sucked it through a foil-lined straw. She held the drag deep in her lungs until it disappeared into her cells where it mutated and multiplied. Her hair was cut very short and there was a wound on her chin, a deep excavation filled with mucus. I was watching her, I couldn’t look away, and when she caught me looking her eyes filled with water and that was when I realized it was Dimple and I was ashamed that it had taken me so long to recognize her. She pointed at the hole in her chin but she didn’t speak. I’d seen her last about ten years earlier, when she’d been Rashid’s personal pipe maker and known for her beauty. There was no trace of it now in the white stubble on her cheeks and the thin honey-coloured hair. We had once been friends, but I’d never thought of coming to see her or to ask after her. There was always some sort of crisis, a crisis every day, and heroin trumped friendship every time. Now, I did the easy thing: I took the money out of my pockets, kept some for a taxi home and what was left I put on the floor beside her. It amounted to a little over six hundred rupees. I wanted to do something more but the truth of it was I was too high to care. In a corner a television flickered: mute images of healthy men and women, white, running in slow motion on a beach. There was clean sand and sunshine, the water clear, the colour so vivid it seemed as unreal as the people running in their tight swimsuits. I said something, I don’t remember what, and Dimple tried to look up but she couldn’t, the nod was too heavy.

  *

  I thought: For every happiness there is an equal and opposite unhappiness. Then I took a drag of charas and the room filled with light. Everything was transparent. The skin on my arms was as thin as paper. I looked into my flesh and saw the moving bones wrapped in pink translucent sheets; and all the while the rain fell in great washes against the roof, sheets of water that streamed from the windows and gathered in the corners of the room. We smoked that dirty hash, Bombay black charas with the colour and texture of goat shit, and we chased heroin on strips of foil. We spoke those words, the beautiful ones without meaning or consequence. We laughed for no reason and interrupted our laughter with silence. Pepsi spread a prayer mat and prayed and we waited in the room where the television flickered like firelight and the rain gurgled and crashed. We smoked. People came and went. We spoke the beautiful words and we called heroin by its joyful name. I didn’t sleep but I was full of dreams and when I made my way outside it was dawn. The rain had thinned. Everything was lit with meaning. Water lapped against the city’s ruined buildings, dirty water strewn with petals and garbage and smelling of attar. People waded on the street, soaked to the skin, their faces ecstatic in the charcoal light. I knew them as my brothers as I stood in the rain. I spread my pitiful, deluded arms wide. I wanted to hold the city, each woman and child and animal and man. I wanted to save them. And then I saw Dimple on the balcony reading a book, squinting as if her life depended on the words. When she saw me she stood up. There was a piece of sticking plaster on her chin and she said something I didn’t understand, or maybe I did understand but I don’t remember. I went to say goodbye and she whispered something in my ear, repeated what she’d said earlier or said something else, though I still didn’t understand until I saw the Air India carry case in her hands. She had packed her belongings and she’d been waiting for me on the balcony. It was still raining and below us the floodwater suddenly seemed very deep, though I knew it wasn’t. Dimple watched a puddle form on the balcony. She said, Take me with you. I’ll die if I stay here.

  *

  What excuse could I have made, other than the fact that I was leaving and I had nowhere to take her? And then it occurred to me that it wasn’t true, there was a place she could go. We set off as if it was the most natural thing to do, set off together, I carrying her case, Dimple looking straight ahead, concentrated on the task of climbing down the flimsy wooden staircase, and only I looked behind to see if anyone had noticed that we were leaving, Rashid maybe, or one of his minions, lumbering after us, but no one was there. The water had receded a little and we found a taxi on the main road. Dimple was silent until we passed the waterfront near Worli and then she recalled something someone once told her, that the only beautiful thing about Bombay was the sea. She said it wasn’t true, there were other things that were beautiful, though at the moment she couldn’t think of a single one. After a while, she asked when we would be passing Chowpatty Beach and I told her that it was behind us, but she looked so stricken at this that I asked the cabbie to turn around and take us back. We parked on the road and walked a little way onto the beach, whi
ch was deserted at that time. The sea was swollen with waves and rain. There were no birds in the sky, or there were fluorescent birds that piped harsh melodies, birds that revealed themselves to be kites, and moments later revealed themselves to be not fluorescent at all but transparent, and not kites but crows, transparent albino crows barking dissonance, not melody, and Dimple crouched under the terrible sky wheeling with luminous birds and asked me if I could see the lights of a ship where the horizon was. I followed where her finger pointed but saw nothing, because the sea was full of chop and rain. I don’t remember what I said in reply, or whether I replied at all, but just then I experienced a moment of clairsentience, a feeling of longing and anxiety, Dimple’s, and for a moment I saw what she saw, a lost junk with tattered sails that seemed to have travelled a great distance of time, from the past into the future, with too few stops for refuelling and repairs. And I knew that she wanted the ship to send a boat to collect her and take her away, take her somewhere calm and clean, where she could rest and repair her own wounds, and just then, just as I felt her sadness settle in my chest, she got up and went back to the taxi.

  *

  I heard the phone ringing when we got out of the elevator at my apartment. It was the airline calling to say my flight had at last been rescheduled and I would be leaving that day. I hung up and looked around the apartment and suddenly it seemed I was leaving too soon. In a suitcase I found a pair of jeans and a shirt and Dimple changed out of her sari. We sat on the floor and she talked of many things. She said garad no longer got her high, she smoked just to be okay, to be not sick. She’d been to a doctor who said she had a problem with her stomach and she might need an operation. The thing that gave her pleasure, perhaps the only thing, was reading and more than anything she liked to read about the sea. At the moment, she said, she was reading a book that had a hundred words for the sea, words she had never seen before and other words, better words, words that were more helpful because they were common. She said she liked the book because the men in it were as obsessed and insane as the people she knew; and though it was a big book the chapters were short, like poems, short and mystifying, and there were songs – sea shanties and lullabies and drinking songs and strange chants to make men brave. She looked at the stained walls of the empty apartment and asked if she could have some tea, but the kitchen had been dismantled and in a while I picked up her case and we took a rickshah to a stall where the tea was strong and served with bread and butter. I heard bells and realized it was Sunday. The rain had stopped. There was even a hint of sun. I took Dimple to Safer, the rehab centre where I’d taken my most recent unsuccessful cure. The centre operated out of a church on Chapel Road and was usually open by six in the morning, when the inmates took yoga classes before breakfast. They were making morning tea when we got there and in an hour she was processed and settled. When it was time for me to leave we shook hands like a couple of guys.