Narcopolis

by Jeet Thayil

  ‘You are?’

  ‘Looking for Rashid, he used to own this place. Do you know where I can find him?’

  ‘Not here. You can leave your number on that pad and I’ll ask him to call you.’

  A small group gathered around us.

  ‘Look, can you tell him an old friend is here to see him? I won’t take much of his time.’

  ‘You have to give me your name, old friend, some information, otherwise he won’t see you.’

  ‘Tell him I was a regular here in the old days and I’ve come a long way to pay my respects.’

  I saw something flicker, an involuntary something triggered by a word I’d said or a cadence. He motioned to a chair but I stayed where I was. The others dispersed and Jamal and I stood facing each other like cowboys in a chapatti western. He drew first. Yes, I’m Jamal, he said, and his hand was slack and gripless. I asked if his father still lived upstairs. He hesitated. Then he said: My father is no longer in the drug business. Are you sure you want to see him?

  *

  The office workers did several things at once, their accents full of the new intonations of cable TV and recognizable anywhere in the world, America via Friends and Seinfeld. Two women sat at adjoining desks and discussed a client. She has a longassed name, four syllables, said one. What, said the other, like Gonsalves? No, said the first, four sill-a-bells, like O-Doh-her-tee, and I’m like, shorten it, bitch. The second woman said, Call her Doh. Yeah-ah, said the first, I know what to call her. They laughed and looked at me and stopped laughing. I caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror tacked to one of the walls. I carried a red leather bag with a change of clothes. I had keys to a borrowed room in the suburbs. I had a notebook and cellphone and money and I had no reason to be there. When Jamal returned, he’d exchanged his white business shirt for a kurta and skullcap. On his feet were jutis I’d never seen in Bombay, dark camel skin, the tips curled in a huge arc.

  He said, ‘My father is busy, he isn’t meeting anyone.’

  ‘He’ll want to see me. I was a friend.’

  ‘You were a customer. He had many customers and they all thought they were his friends. It was business, but he wasn’t good at it.’

  ‘Jamal, you don’t like it, I know, but your father is my friend. Can I see him?’

  ‘Sit down and have tea. We’ll discuss, then we’ll see.’

  *

  He said, ‘You’re Dom Ullis. We used to call you Doom or Dum, for “Dum Maro Dum,”’ and he sang the line from the movie. ‘Sometimes I called you Damned Ullis because of the things you said. I’m older now. People my age don’t take our culture lightly. We’re not as tolerant as our fathers. But do you remember? You said religion wasn’t important.’ It surprised me that he remembered a conversation from so many years ago, remembered it as clearly as if it had just occurred. He recalled the exact words Rashid and I had exchanged and forgotten. It was as if he was still hearing them in his head. He said, ‘Do you know what my father told me when I was a child? He said we were descended from the Mughals. I should never forget it and I should carry myself with pride. I did some reading: I studied what the Mughals brought to India, their inventions, the ice and running water and planned gardens to soothe eye and spirit. But what do Indians remember? Only the pyramid of skulls. They say, "See how bloodthirsty the Muslims were: even then they liked to kill."’ I told Jamal there was a difference between him and the Mughals, because the Mughals loved life and poetry and beauty. I said, ‘What do you love except death?’ For some reason, my words pleased him. We moved to his desk, where he took his seat and stared at the computer. The room was full of moisture. I sat in the visitor’s chair and wiped my neck with my hands.

  ‘You see what they’re doing in Afghanistan?’

  ‘Who doesn’t? It’s on the news every day.’

  ‘But do you see? And Iraq? They take ancient Babylon and they fortify it, they make it a restricted area and all the time they are excavating, excavating. They find things that belong to history and they destroy them or steal them.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Think if someone did it in Washington DC or Chicago or New York, burned down the libraries, stole antiques, bombed cities and towns. What would happen?’

  ‘We’d never hear the end of it.’

  ‘In two years there would be twenty books and movies about it; that is what would happen.’

  *

  He was silent for a time. On a board near the computer was a picture of Jamal and a young woman in a burkha. Farheen, my fiancée, he said, when he saw me looking at the picture. Love marriage. She’s older than me by two years. Then he said, One minute, and shouted across the room to a man who was playing a game of bridge on his computer terminal. The man left the game and came over.

  ‘This is Kumar, Hindu Brahmin. Many of my friends are Brahmins. Kumar has never touched meat in his life.’

  Kumar said, ‘Oh don’t talk about meat. I always say animals have more right to exist on the planet than we do.’

  Jamal asked Kumar to order more tea for us, dismissing him. Now that he’d shown off his girlfriend, his Brahmin, his urbanity, he could return to his subject.

  ‘Anybody can become a suicide bomber if they are pushed far enough. Some of my radical friends say they could easily go in that direction. We, I mean, they,’ he paused to smile, to let me know he was joking, ‘they would do it only if they had no other option. You know what they say? There’s always something to look forward to if you become a CP.’ Again he smiled, and said, ‘Citizen of Paradise.’

  ‘What are the attractions of paradise for a man like you? You’re not powerless and angry.’

  *

  He said, I went to a Christian college and my friends are Hindu but I’m Muslim through and through. My father wanted me to get a good education. He chose the best college he could afford, he didn’t care which community ran it. I was one of only four Muslim students. The professors were Hindus and Catholics. One day the mathematics professor found me reading a magazine during his lecture. He slapped me in front of the whole class. He said, ‘Who do you people think you are? Why are you in India? You should be carrying out jihad in Afghanistan.’ Then, during the riots, a mob pulled me off my cycle. I wasn’t wearing a skullcap. I spoke in Marathi, but still they didn’t let me go. I was very young. I broke down. I saw the hijra woman, my father’s kaamvali. She was wearing a dress like a Christian. I pointed at her and called her ma.

  I said, Dimple.

  He said: How do you think these things made me feel? Powerful? My father made us read the holy book every night. Do you know that about him? Every night: one or two suras. He’d come home stoned out of his head and make me read some verses while his eyes were drooping and drool fell out of his mouth. Jamal stopped, as if he’d run out of words. There was silence for a time. Then he looked at his watch and stood up. He said, My father was an addict. He was addicted to everything. He’s become himself now. Go up. He’s on the first floor.

  *

  New beige paint coated the walls but the staircase and the banisters were scuffed wood. I went up, past a locked door on the half landing. The door on the first floor was open and a light was burning in the hall but otherwise the house was dim. Rashid sat in an armchair by an open window and the only noises in the room came from the courtyard below, where children were playing. Their voices echoed against the walls, high voices ringing with fury. He stared out the window but there was no sign that he saw or heard anything. There was a crocheted white skullcap on his head and he was counting prayer beads. I was surprised by his thinness, the expression of unreachability on his face, and by the clothes he was wearing, a blue shirt and new black trousers, Rashid, whose colour had always been white.

  Rashidbhai? I said. He flinched and looked wildly around the room. I introduced myself. I said I had been away for many years and had returned only recently. I said it was a pleasure to see him and introduced myself again and the stiffness left his posture.

  ‘All tha
t was a long time ago.’

  He had given up drugs and become a thin man. But he’d lost more than weight. There was nothing about him that was recognizable to me. He’d gotten thin and his charisma was gone.

  ‘How are you?’

  He nodded. Then, changing his mind, he shook his head to indicate he wasn’t well, or that he didn’t know how he was, or that he didn’t care. A girl came in with tea.

  ‘I often think of those days, when your khana was the best in the city. Some people said in the country.’

  ‘Useless. It was my mistake, that stupid business.’

  ‘Not such a big mistake. At least you’re still here.’

  ‘I’m not here.’

  ‘Dimple?’ I asked.

  ‘Dead.’

  ‘Bengali?’

  ‘Dead.’

  ‘Rumi?’

  ‘Dead.’

  ‘And yourself?’ I said. ‘Alive?’

  He was already drained by the conversation. He blinked at me, meeting my eyes for a moment. Then he shook his thin white-bearded cheeks.

  ‘Worse each day. And alive.’

  The girl came back with a plate of grapes, washed and peeled and set on a white plate. Too much, he said to her. But he reached out his fingers and took some and pushed the plate to me. I took some too. There was silence in the room.

  I said, ‘What happened to Dimple?’

  The girl offered more grapes.

  ‘No, no, no,’ he said.

  *

  He locked up the office. He picked up his phone and keys and went up. His father was sitting in his room with the fan off and the window open, doing, as far as he could see, absolutely nothing. The old man sat all day in the same position, staring out the window. Sometimes Jamal heard him talking to himself, very softly, as if he didn’t want to be overheard. His father left the room only occasionally, sometimes for a walk, sometimes to the apartment on the half landing where the kaamvali used to live. What he did in the apartment Jamal couldn’t imagine. The place was full of junk and mould and things that needed to be thrown away. Jamal went into his own room and washed his face and neck at the sink. He picked up a towel and thought of Farheen, of her tummy fat, which never failed to excite him. She wore burkhas that she designed herself, patterned burkhas cut like a lab coat, tight around the hips and belly. She reminded him of his father’s kaamvali. Once, in a guest house in Lonavla, he came so many times that he wanted to keep count. Number seven, he said, what do you think of that? I wish you also thought of pleasuring me a little, Farheen replied. Sometimes I wish you were older, or that you acted older. To this he said nothing, because he was the age he was, younger than her by two years, and there was nothing he could do to change it. When he thought about it, about her calm appraisal of him as they fucked, the way she kissed him, the way nothing he did surprised her, as if she’d been fucked many times by many men, and the fact that she never talked about marriage though she was a spinster of twenty-five, already older than his sisters when they’d been married, and when he brought it up all she would say was that he wasn’t ready – it maddened him, it made him want to own her. He ran his fingers through his hair and checked his shave and then he turned off the lights and went out.

  *

  Rashid was in his room, thinking about indifference. He and his son rarely spoke because conversation was Jamal’s weapon, a way to antagonize his father. He said whatever came into his head, or, more likely, things that had never entered his head before, strange turns of phrase with no relation to reality. The last time they spoke, Rashid had complained about household finances. He’d said that Jamal was not putting enough aside for unforeseen future occurrences. Jamal’s reply: Who gives a shit about all that? Tell the future to go fuck itself. At that point, the conversation had come to an end and Rashid had returned to his apartment, where he’d picked up his prayer beads and gone to his armchair and wondered if some types of communication were better achieved without words. Communication between animals, for example, was wordless and highly effective. Perhaps communication between father and son should be the same, mostly silent. He thought of the strange one-word text messages Jamal and his friends sent each other: ‘gr8’ and ‘rotflmfao’ and ‘ftds’. It was as if they didn’t care whether they were understood, or they took pleasure in being misunderstood, or they’d decided that the rewards of obscurity outweighed the rewards of clarity. They had distilled communication down to its essence: guttural exclamation, partial understanding, indifference. They did not worry about words and what words meant. They were unmoved by tradition. He thought of the burkha-clad teenage girls he saw on the street, openly smoking on their way to or from school. The sight always gave him a small shock. Now it was time to learn something from the young, in this case the usefulness of indifference. Or it was time to relearn it, for it was a lesson he had once known. He went back to his prayers, his thumb and index finger beginning the count. From the courtyard below he heard the sound of children. It was the sound he heard most days, the shouts and cries of small children, a vast army of them, and it seemed to him at those moments that the city was a pen for unchaperoned children, wild boys and girls who were bringing themselves up on their own, begging, stealing, selling, stoning, and that his son was among them, and there was nothing he could do about it because after all this was Bombay and how else could it be?

  *

  It was a Saturday night and there was a crowd at the door. The club was couples only, so he’d picked up Farheen and they’d ridden to Juhu, an hour in the traffic and more time waiting at the entrance. After twenty minutes he called a number he’d been given and told the woman who answered that he was there, waiting outside, and he didn’t mind leaving if they were full, but he wasn’t going to wait any longer. She came down personally, introduced herself as Natasha and escorted them upstairs. They rode up in a glass elevator fixed to the side of the building. She had an accent he’d never heard before, South American, maybe, and all the way up she was talking on a cellphone, a second phone gripped in her free hand. I’ll try, she said. I promise you, I’ll try. All the way, for three floors, she repeated the promise. Once they were inside, Natasha vanished. Jamal and Farheen wandered around looking for a table but there was no space anywhere, not in the lounge and not at the bar, and the crowd was thicker than Grant Road Station at rush hour.

  ‘Is it hell?’ Farheen whispered, buffeted against him by the crowd.

  ‘No,’ Jamal said, ‘it’s cocaine.’

  Which it surely was, a cocaine fantasy directed by a maker of Bollywood extravaganzas, because every surface, wherever he looked, was shiny, the bar tops, the low tables, the armchairs and stools. People brandished new cellphones and laptops, and these devices too were shiny: aluminium or steel or white plastic. The ceiling was hundreds of cylindrical light fixtures that changed colour with the beat. Even the toilet tanks had ridges on the side, to keep your drugs safe. He could see it on the faces and smell it in the air, cocaine and MDMA and Ecstasy, new drugs for the new Bombay.

  The Russian he was supposed to meet was sitting alone in a lounge area near the rest rooms, an area designed for men or women who were waiting for their partners. And what were their partners doing? The skinny women and buff men he saw around him looked like they wasted no time on ordinary activities such as pissing and shitting. They took their time in the toilets and returned with sniffles and frozen smiles. The smile on his own face was genuine enough. He knew what he was looking at, a vast opportunity made up of many separate smaller opportunities. He tried not to let his excitement show as he negotiated with the Russian, a big man in a coat who never smiled. They did the deal right there at the table, Jamal handing the Russian the coke and the Russian giving him cash. Then the man said he was going to try a little taste. Did Jamal want some too? Jamal replied that he didn’t do coke because it wired him and if he wanted to be wired he preferred coffee, which was cheaper and more reliable. The Russian looked at him in surprise and said Jamal was probably right but
it was a good idea to keep such opinions to himself, since he wouldn’t want the word to get out among his customers.

  ‘Are you Russian?’ Farheen asked the man.

  ‘Yes, Russian,’ he replied.

  ‘I never met a Russian before,’ Farheen told him.

  ‘I’m Boris,’ said the man, ‘like Boris Yeltsin, except I don’t drink so much.’

  Farheen said she didn’t know who Boris Yeltsin was.

  Boris said, ‘When I was growing up I watched Indian movies, Awara, Mera Naam Joker. I like Raj Kapoor.’

  Farheen didn’t know who Raj Kapoor was, and said so.

  Jamal smiled and said, ‘She’s never heard of those movies, she’s too young.’

  The Russian didn’t smile. He said, ‘Young or old, you should know Raj Kapoor. He is great Indian artist.’

  ‘We have great actors too, have you heard of Dilip Kumar? Great, great, better than Raj Kapoor. You know Dilip Kumar’s real name? Guess.’

  The Russian got up and gathered his cigarettes and cellphone and heavy silver lighter. He hesitated for a minute before he left the table.

  ‘Yusuf,’ Jamal shouted as the man shouldered his way through the crowd. ‘Yusuf Khan!’

  *

  Farheen was wearing jeans, because he’d asked her to, and her shoes were so high she was almost as tall as he. She said she wanted a drink, because that’s what people did when they went to a club, wasn’t it? She spoke as if she expected an argument. Get me a nice one, she said, pointing to a black woman in a dress, who held a pink cocktail in a long-stemmed glass. When he came back with Farheen’s drink, she took a sip and smiled her thanks. She looked at the lights on the ceiling, which turned from gold to blue, and she looked at the crowd of people around them, dancing, or moving where they stood. She asked if he felt bad about giving drugs to people who had never learned how to say no, who were paying for their own destruction. Jamal fixed her with a look. He said, Look around, these are my customers. Do you see any Muslims? She said, How do you know there are none here? Look at us, we don’t look Muslim but we are. This wasn’t strictly true. Jamal had started to grow his beard, though he still shaved his cheeks and upper lip. And though she wasn’t wearing a burkha, she was covered up, she was decent, which was more than could be said for the women around her, women of many colours and ages, who came alone and danced alone. They danced and watched themselves in the mirrors. Men bought them drinks and told them jokes. They spoke very little Hindi and some English, but they were fluent in unidentifiable other tongues.