What is it about Mumbai that makes it such fertile ground for writers looking for inspiration? Suketu Mehta comes readily to mind but think of all the other writers before and since in whose imaginative landscape the western Indian megalopolis is integral — Rohinton Mistry, Anita Desai, Salman Rushdie, Vikram Chandra, Kiran Nagarkar, Gregory Shantaram Roberts, Manu Joseph, Kalpish Ratna, Aravind Adiga (his latest novel) … the list is long and growing by the year. A stereotype emerges in all this telling that focuses on the dark underbelly of the “city of dreams”, on a city of extremes where fantastic wealth lies cheek by jowl with grinding poverty, where high-rises punctuate a sea of slums, a city bursting at the seams with people from all manner of countries, communities and religions who’ve thronged to it knowing that their identity will not get in the way of getting ahead in this city of opportunity, of hope which nevertheless is also an unforgiving city, a city of random violence, and so on.
Jeet Thayil’s Narcopolis, the first work of fiction by the poet and musician, not just partakes of this stereotype, it apotheosises it. His is the Bombay of the 1970s (the story continues into the 2000s), a time Thayil lightly brushes in with references to the patthar maar murders and the movie Hare Rama Hare Krishna. The period details are extraneous, however, because the essential urbanscape of the city, those “Victorian ruins piled one of top of the other, once grand facades behind which squalor lived”, “cobbled alleys lined with cots”, and “roads mined with garbage, with human and animal debris, and the poor, everywhere the poor”, haven’t really changed over the years. Remarkably, and in a way reminiscent of Dickens, the city emerges as the real protagonist – “the hero or heroin of the story” – as Thayil’s fevered imagination captures the spirit of Bombay, the narcopolis, through the depraved lives of its back alleys.
The plot is centred on Shuklaji Street, the central vein of the city’s flesh trade in the infamous Kamathipura red-light district, with its “fever grid of rooms, boom-boom rooms, family rooms, god rooms, secret rooms that contracted in the daytime and expanded at night”. At its core is Rashid’s chandu khana, an old-style opium den with pallets, sleeping mats and pillows laid out on the floor, pipes next to them and a stove nearby to cook the opium. A ragtag bunch of pimps, gangsters, drug pushers, foreigners, artists, film people and ne’er-do-wells who wash up at the khana comprise Thayil’s cast. But it is the eunuch Dimple, a prostitute by day and deft tender of the pipe at the opium den by night, who is the novel’s prime mover. Given away very young by her mother to a tai (leader of a eunuch group) who castrates her in the traditional hijra ceremony and later introduces her to opium to alleviate the pain of the crude operation, Dimple is the only one with a valid reason to turn to an opiate. She is a poignant character, who moves all the more because she is no victim, she is an active agent who shapes her own destiny when she takes the prized opium pipes to Rashid after the death of her Chinese foster father; she uses her sexuality, becoming Rashid’s lover for the power it gives her, she teaches herself English from books bought at the local raddiwala, giving free play to a life of the mind that enables her to escape the limitations of her daily life.
Narcopolis is a study of intoxication, of the way addiction works on the mind, taking away volition until all that remains is the craving, or death. Take this description of Rashid’s daily roster of drug intake: “…line of White first thing to get his eyes open, pyali of Black at regular intervals to keep his nerves easy and his ideas oiled, and, around the time the muezzin sent out the evening call, a bit of Brown chased on foil or smoked in a cigarette.”
This is prose that aspires to poetry, replicating in the rush of words the fervid workings of psychotropic drugs and blurring the distinction between the real and the imagined, the dream-like and the nightmarish, the profane and the lyrical, the life-affirming and the nihilistic.
NARCOPOLIS
Jeet Thayil
Faber&Faber
291 pages; Rs 499
