Narcopolis

by Jeet Thayil

  *

  It was her first dream in weeks, her first sleep since arriving at Safer. She dreamed of a poster that had been on the wall of Rashid’s for more years than she could remember, a poster of a blonde girl in a sun hat. In the dream she got up from the turkey mattress and went to the window, which gave out on a lawn that was lush and green, the kind of green that hurt the eyes, it was so bright. She watched the blonde girl take off her large, her overlarge hat and place it on the lawn (and here the dream took on a cinematic quality, because she was no longer looking at the scene from a window: the frame became a kind of lens that zoomed in and out with dizzying speed), and she saw that the girl wasn’t alone, that she was in fact surrounded by an army of shadows that moved on the lawn’s periphery, moved as if their claim on the lawn and the colour green, on the sky and the colour blue, on the earth and its thousand unknowable colours, was older than hers, was so old that it could be ignored only at her peril. The girl, who was not more than thirteen or fourteen, removed her hat and placed it carefully on the ground. Then she lifted her dress or shift, a light cottony garment with a flowery pattern, and squatted above the hat and filled it with blood or shit, something, at any rate, that was black and crusted on the hat’s upturned brim. And then the words began to flicker across the bottom of the screen like subtitles and the shadowy figures who crowded around the edge of the frame moved into the centre, towards the girl, whose skin was white and rose. The camera focused on her face, on her petal-like lips that mouthed, very clearly, the word What? But the subtitles that appeared at the bottom of the window or screen said something very different: ‘You were nameless and pagan. I gave you context. For two hundred years I gave you context and how did you reward me?’ Then the girl’s eyebrows took the shape of an inverted V and she mouthed the word No. As soon as the word left her lips she was overrun by the shadows, who, as they came into the light, revealed themselves as ethnic ecclesiastical figures in robes of white or saffron, and others in skullcaps, and still others in conical hats and tattered purple. In minutes, one of the figures in purple lifted his cassock to display a great brown belly and black penis surrounded by grey fuzz. He dipped his hand into the hat and smeared himself and soon the other figures were doing the same. The camera fell to the ground as if the person holding it had been attacked or was taking part in the activities he or she had until then been recording, and when the camera was picked up again there was a close-up of a penis penetrating, very slowly, the girl's anus, and then two words began to slide across the screen, words that were repeated with each stroke, the penis now sliding to half its length in the girl’s small orifice, and there was a close-up of her face, which looked stupid more than pained, and again the words appeared, in quotes, ‘Tradition’ and ‘Values’, and the camera cut to the priest, whose face was glazed with spit and sweat and the words he spoke needed no subtitles because they were synced and perfectly audible, ‘This is India,’ and Dimple woke, her heart beating so fast she thought she might die and the thought of dying was a sudden comfort.

  *

  On the third day, or it might have been the second, they took him downstairs and put him in a room with a lawyer, a Muslim, who told him his bail had been arranged and they were going to try something new, they were giving him a choice between rehab and jail. Well, now, Mr Advocate, what a wonderful deal you’re offering me, said Rumi, thank you. He took a matchbox from his pocket, opened it and shook out half a beedi. He lit it and took a deep drag and when he exhaled the Muslim flinched because the smell was so strong. Thank you, thank you, thank you, for nothing, Rumi said. Jail or freedom, that’s a choice, rehab or garad, that’s a choice, but rehab or jail? That’s like choosing between death and dying. No, I take it back, it’s like choosing between syphilis and gonorrhoea. I know what I would choose, said the Muslim. I know what you’d choose too, said Rumi, but it’s the wrong choice. You want to know something? When they put me in here I thought it was all over. I thought I’d be fucked up right away, stabbed or strangled, something, for being Hindu. I thought jail would be full of Muslims and I’d be at the bottom of the undertrial hierarchy. Well, I am at the bottom, but not because I’m Hindu. Can you believe it? The Muslim said nothing. I asked myself, what does it mean that a garaduli is lowest on the ladder, lower than a ragpicker or a thief? How can it be? I asked a shooter who was in for the contract killing of a movie producer. Tell me, I said, I want to know. Why would a Hindu trust a Muslim over a garaduli? You’re a Hindu, you tell me. The shooter looked me over, as if he was measuring me for a suit or a coffin, and then he said: Garadulis will do anything. I said: Why single out garadulis? Anybody will do anything. The shooter said: Garadulis turn on their own kind – not even a pocket-maar will do that. Rumi was silent for a while and then he said, What did you bring me? News, said the Muslim, the best news you can hope for. I mean, did you bring me food and cigarettes and money? No, said the Muslim, I brought you something better, we’re getting you out: we’ve worked out a bargain with the court. Rumi said, Just leave me some cash, whatever you have. You can get it back from my father. Look, Ramesh, the Muslim said, you’re getting out, it’s all been arranged and the money’s arranged too, take it cool, don’t take so much tension.

  Of course it didn’t go as easily as the Muslim, whose name was Majid, said it would. It took another week of watery daal and uncleaned rice and watching his back, and then, a trip to court, where Majid the Muslim did most of the talking. Afterwards, a constable put him in a jeep and escorted him to a place recommended by the judge, who said it was the first facility of its kind in India, that it was a programme run by former users, that it used both physical and spiritual exercises to help bring about a speedy recovery (which phrase made Rumi smile, because it sounded like the judge was making a paid advertisement, and because if you knew anything at all you knew there was no such thing as a speedy recovery when it came to heroin), and that it was talked about mainly for the sessions, part psychotherapy, part literary criticism, conducted by a former monk and heroin addict named Soporo Onar, who had taken over the running of the centre some months earlier. The judge said the doors of the facility were locked, though only at night and therefore escape was not impossible, but he was of the opinion that it would be wiser for Rumi to stick out the six months of his sentence than dodge the court for the rest of his life.

  *

  With the dreams came memories, or perhaps they weren’t memories at all but fantasies she imagined were memories. It was as if, by lifting the cloud of garad and chandu that had been her companion for so many years, she had also liberated her recollections of infancy, if they were true recollections at all. It surprised her that she remembered the church her mother had made on the bottom shelf of a steel cupboard, something no one knew about except her mother and she. She remembered the marigolds her mother placed on the shrine, and the framed image of Swayambunath’s painted eye, and a figurine of a woman in a blue veil. She knew now that the woman in blue was Mother Mary and that her mother had worshipped both Hindu and Christian gods. But how could she possibly remember such things when she’d been separated from her parents at the age of seven and at eight had already come to live with the tai, who had named her Dimple, not because she had any, but because there was an actress of that name who had, for the briefest of moments, captured the nation’s excitable imagination? But she did, she remembered with absolute clarity her mother placing her in the hands of the priest. And she remembered too her mother’s fits, when she screamed for no reason and tore her hair, and the fights with her father, whom she didn’t remember at all because he died young, and she remembered the noose her mother was rescued from, a noose made from a dupatta that had been fastened to a nail on the kitchen wall. Or was it Mr Lee’s mother who was rescued from a noose? Had she stolen the memory? Perhaps she had no memories at all; perhaps she was stealing other people’s because she had none of her own.

  *

  In his first days at the centre, Rumi met only the two inmates who h
ad been told to stay up with him during his withdrawals. The Parsi gave his name as Bull and was the tougher of the two. The Catholic’s name was Charlie and he claimed to be an electrician and knife-fighter. They took turns sleeping so one of them could keep an eye on Rumi at all times. On his second night, when the drugs they gave him seemed to have little or no effect and he began to pound the wall, first with his fist and then with his head, the Parsi and the Catholic moved his bed to the centre of the room and tied him down with nylon rope and cotton wool. He kept asking for stronger drugs but the best they could do was Diazepam in useless five-milligram capsules. Bad timing, man, said the Catholic. Since Soporo took over things have changed, otherwise they would have given you the best medication, full-on hallucinations. Soporo thinks cold turkey is the best turkey. Fuck Soporo, said Rumi. The Parsi laughed and hit him in the stomach and the pain was such a relief from the withdrawals that Rumi said it again, Fuck Soporo. This time the Parsi only laughed and said, If you had a razor you’d be cutting yourself, wouldn’t you? Rumi said, Fuck you too, and vomited in his direction. Bull the Parsi danced easily out of the way. He said, At least you have the right attitude.

  *

  He felt like he’d joined a cult, because all they talked about all day long was Soporo this and Soporo that, stories he didn’t want to hear, much less hear again and again: how Soporo exposed the guy who’d been in charge of the centre, a cross addict (sex, alcohol and heroin), who’d been using right under their noses, nodding off during Sharing Sessions and nobody the wiser because after all this was the session leader; how Soporo went after him at an NA meeting and made him admit it; how, three months after taking over, he persuaded the trustees to put up more funding and leased another floor from the church to build a gym and meeting rooms; how all kinds of people turned up at his talks, including those who’d never done drugs in their lives; and how, if Rumi made a good recovery, he’d be able to attend the talk on Wednesday night, which was titled ‘The End of Time’. I heard a rumour, said Jean-Luc, a French junkie who’d been living in India since the seventies and had graduated from opium to heroin to Tidigesic, a synthetic opiate. You want to hear? The rumour is he will talk about how heroin annihilates the idée of time as a logical or chronological imperative, and he will talk about the Miles Davis album Kind of Blue, which he says is an example of heroin time, not musical time, and he’s going to prove it by playing some of the tracks. Where’s the talk going to be held? Rumi asked. Down the road at the Church Annexe, said Jean-Luc. We need a bigger room than this one because a crowd will turn up, I don’t know why. How do we get there? asked Rumi. We walk, what else? Hey, turkey, said Bull the Parsi from across the room, you want to be carried? Is that it? It was Rumi’s first time at the lunch table, sitting with everybody, trying to eat. His hands shook so much he couldn’t hold a glass and he felt weak and nauseous; the sight of food, in particular, the tongue served for lunch on Sunday, only made him sicker. The tongue had the exact shape and rough texture of a human tongue, except it was four or five times the size, and pinker and thicker and difficult to chew or swallow. He watched the others gobble it down and it seemed to him that they were attempting to swallow their own tongues, to commit suicide in this most ferocious of ways, and he was carried by a wave of white nausea mixed with disgust. He thought: You don’t deserve to eat, not with so much appetite, and you don’t deserve your good teeth and excellent digestion. You don’t deserve to live, he thought, touching his neck surreptitiously to feel for the fever steaming under the skin. Down the road suddenly seemed like an impossible distance and he barely made it from the table to the turkey mattress without assistance.

  He got better, or he pretended to get better, and on Wednesday when he saw them showering and shaving he did the same, and when they put on their best clothes, he did too, put on the only clothes he owned, a check shirt and jeans that he’d hand-washed once in prison and once at the centre, and when a dozen turkeys and non-turkeys went out, chaperoned by the Parsi and the Catholic, he was among them, walking with a convalescent’s hesitant step, a misfit in a company of misfits, stumbling or walking placidly among the normals, while Jean-Luc combed his dirty blond hair with his hands and Walter the obese chain-smoker talked to himself in Oriya and all of them eyed the women on the street. They stopped for tea and cakes, then made another stop for beedis and cigarettes, and between the cigarette shop and the Annexe where Soporo Onar’s talk was to be held, a distance of twenty metres or less, Rumi walked backwards into a crowd of pedestrians and vanished.

  *

  Bull didn’t realize the new guy was missing until they were seated and he had a chance to do a head count. He did a second count but the result was the same, ten turkeys, where was number eleven? He looked around at the congregation, the usual collection of users and losers and old people, aunties in house dresses, sickly parishioners, and at the very back a group of boys in camos and basketball shoes, looking severely out of place. He asked Charlie, We lost the new turkey, what’s his name, Ramesh? Charlie also did a head count. He’ll be back, he said. Where’s he going to go? Bull shook his head because the room was filling up and they couldn’t talk without being overheard. But the front row was made up entirely of Safer inmates, all of whom seemed to know that the newest turkey had flown, was out there right now getting wasted, and though no one said anything, some looked to the exit and wished they were on the street, free to do what they pleased, including fuck themselves up, because that was the real meaning of freedom, wasn’t it, choice, the perfect adult liberation of being able to decide for yourself as to right and wrong and to choose wrong if that was what you wanted? Bull experienced it himself when he imagined throwing it away, all the months of odd sobriety, for one last stab at craziness, and he knew Charlie felt it too: a rush of blood that felt like happiness. Is there time for a quick smoke? Jean-Luc asked, and Bull would normally have said yes, but they’d just had a runner and who knew what kind of impulses that had set off in the Frenchman? He hesitated and the hesitation was enough for Jean-Luc to know exactly what was passing through the bulldog’s head. Just then Father Fo cleared his throat.

  *

  He walked with a group of people who were headed to a coffee shop on the corner. It was part of a new chain, with big windows and a burned-orange colour scheme designed to make patrons feel warm and fuzzy, and filled him instead with rage. He crossed the street to Nikita Ladies & Gents Beauty Salon, and went in quickly and shut the door behind him and bolted it before the girl had a chance to protest. There was no one else in the shop. He drew the curtains and told her to take off her blouse and she didn’t argue. She was young and dark and her breasts were heavy and she lifted them inexpertly from the cups. He pulled down her slacks and let them fall around her ankles and he told her to stay where she was and look at her reflection in the mirror and to touch her nipples and cunt and do nothing else. Don’t move, he said. Don’t move anything except your fingers. Then he went around the small room, opening drawers and taking out herbal massage oils and towels and hair dye and waxing utensils, and dropping them on the floor. A jar of henna shattered, though the bottles of massage oil did not, and Rumi continued his rampage, opening and shutting, throwing shit around. There was a sudden smell, sharp body odour mixed with the unmistakable stink of fear. Ooh, he thought, when he saw that the girl’s eyes had filled with tears and a fingernail-sized scar on her forehead had turned dark. She was not pretty: when teary-eyed she was ugly. Tell me where it is, he said. But the girl’s eyes rolled up in her head and her hands fell to her sides. Don’t stop touching yourself, he told her, and hit her on the ass with his open hand. She was too frightened to speak but she was trying to tell him something, the rolling of the eyes was a message, not a prelude to a fainting fit. He looked to the side and found a shrine. Behind a portrait of Ganesh and a stick of incense was a box with three thousand six hundred rupees. Is this all? There’s nothing more, said the girl in Hindi. What about in your pockets? She shook her head. He found a hund
red and ninety rupees in the back pocket of her slacks, which he transferred to his wallet. Maybe I’ll give you a good-luck tip, he said, but first I want a full-body massage. Put a fresh towel on the cot for me. The order cleared her head because it put his presence in the parlour on a professional footing: he was a client and she the masseuse. She felt she knew what was expected of her, though the knowledge did nothing to lessen her fear. She asked him to change and averted her head as he stripped to his underwear.