Narcopolis (12 page)

‘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.

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 the 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.

‘Nice chair, yaar, you must be doing well.’

‘Doing okay, bhai. I work hard, I make money. I stop working, I’m on the street.’

Rashid knew this was the truth. There wasn’t much of a margin in Salim’s line of work, selling cocaine and black-market whisky for the Lala. He did some pocket-maar business on the side, risky work with questionable results, and he spent the day at his boss’s watch shop taking care of non-existent customers. He’d been with the Lala for less than a year and already it was showing on his face, the shadows scored like leather under his eyes. The Lala picked his boys young and put them to work when they got too old for his tastes. The old gangster liked to quote the Baburnama: ‘Women for procreation, boys for pleasure, melons for delight.’

Salim handed two bottles of Johnnie Walker to Rashid, who checked that the seals hadn’t been tampered with and there were no punctures in the caps. He held the bottles up to the light to examine the colour and Salim asked if he’d seen the new Amitabh Bachchan movie,
Polyester Khadi
, in which Bachchan played a policeman’s son who becomes a criminal because he sees how hard his father’s life is. Rashid said no, he hadn’t seen it and he wasn’t planning to, he had better things to do than watch Amitabh fucking Bachchan. Salim said the best scene in the film was the showdown between policeman father and gangster son.

‘You know what he tells his father, played by the veteran, Sanjeev Kumar?’

In response, Rashid spilled a small mountain of powder on the mirror and looked up, the hundred-rupee note aloft in his hand. Salim stood up to say the line, delivering it in a bored baritone very much like the tall actor’s. ‘
Are you a man or a pyjama
?’

Rashid said, ‘And what is Sanjeev fucking Kumar’s reply?’

Salim got up again.

‘
If I am a pyjama at least I am cent per cent Indian khadi, not American polyester
.’

Rashid bent to the mirror and he was startled by the sight of his face up close, blue veins swollen at the temple, skin the colour of clotted milk, a sickly sap of green stubble on the jaw. His hair was too long, almost as long as Salim’s, he needed a cut and shampoo. Paan had stained his mouth a permanent red. Worst were his eyes, bloody and clouded at the same time. Then he felt the back of his throat go numb. There was a close thump in his ears. He rubbed a bit of powder into his gums and a wave of nausea hit him and he looked away from his degraded image. But there was half a line still left on the mirror. He snorted it up. His heart beat so erratically and so fast he was sure it would leap right out of his chest and land on the glass-topped desk.

‘Bhai, that chanduli at your khana, Dimple, who makes pipes.’

‘What?’

‘Dimple.’

‘What about her?’

‘She makes pipes in your khana.’

‘I know what she does, she works for me.’

‘She’s a hijra, right? She was a man once?’

‘Long ago. Her dick was probably bigger than yours.’

‘So what I was wondering, bhai, is why she looks so feminine. I mean, if you didn’t know she was a hijra you’d think she was fully a woman.’

‘Listen, Salim, you’re so interested, you should ask her yourself, take her out to a movie, introduce her to your family. She likes boys like you.’

Rashid walked back to the khana with the bundle of vials and the bottles of Johnnie Walker in his hands. He was calmer now. Even the heat seemed milder, the sun directly overhead but not uncomfortable; and the noise in his head had settled into a hum, steady and controlled, like paper burning in a tray. His white shirt lay open to the sternum and his pants were hitched low on his belly. He wore only white. He spotted the colour on the mannequins in store windows and people on the street and to him the figures in white were as distinctive as angels among the earthbound.

He was thinking of Salim’s line,
Are you a man or a pyjama?
He wanted more options than just the two. His father said they were descended from the Mughals, from a Beg who’d ridden with Humayun. There was a branch of the family in Delhi that had owned sixteenth-century buildings and gardens. It was a family legend that he mistrusted, but every now and then he would catch himself thinking of the Mughals and the majoun they liked to eat, swallowed with a glass of milk like medicine, and he’d see himself as a new Mughal, mixing it up, juggling the booze with the coke and charas and chandu. This morning he was planning to take it easy. He’d keep the whisky down to manageable quantities, a half bottle, no more, and then the rest of it would be manageable too: 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, the powder caked so heavy the joint would have to be lit and relit. This is the new thing, brown powder, garad heroin with the compliments of the Pakistani government, something sweet for the mouth from our Muslim brothers; the question being, what kind of government would see anything in heroin but poison? Which god would welcome such a drug? Not the Hindu gods and not even the god of the Christians. So what did it mean that the Pakistanis, who worshipped the same God as he, were sending garad to India? It meant that politics, or economics, overrode every other thing in the world. They shared the same faith, but in other ways they were enemies. Above all, the Pakistanis were sworn enemies.

Guide thou us, thou, who are round about the infidels.

He had been a believer for most of his life, had observed the five prayer times and followed the dietary strictures. Then he’d exchanged one habit for another, he’d given up God and accepted O. With heroin he’d opened himself to the ungodly and for this he would pay, he knew. He would be seized by the feet and flung into the fire. Because the powder was a new thing, the devil’s own nasha. Rashid knew it the first time he saw street junkies bent over strips of tin foil, the way they sucked at the smoke, the instantaneous effect of it, how it closed their eyes and shut them off from their own bodies and the world. He saw them and thought: This is it, the future, coming too fast to duck. And now he was doing the same. And he was helpless against God’s great wrath.

He rounded the alley to the khana and there was his son at the beedi shop buying cigarettes. Jamal saw the speed at which his father approached and he looked wildly around the alley. Rashid grabbed the boy by the wrist and squeezed until he dropped the cigarettes. The cigarette wallah said, Bhai, he didn’t have money so I gave him on credit, I thought it was for you. Rashid looked at his son’s face, the stupidity and
stubbornness
of it, and rage filled his chest with carbon.

‘Six years old and you’re on the street, fucking smoking.’

He crushed the cigarettes in his hands and let the debris fall to the ground. He caught his son by the neck and propelled him into the building. When the boy stumbled, he wanted him to fall and break something. He wanted to hear something break inside his son. Jamal was terrified but his fright only made Rashid angrier.

‘Get up those stairs. Go on or I’ll kill you.’

He looked at his hands and was surprised to see he was still carrying the bottles of whisky and the cocaine. He put the bottles on the ground, carefully, giving his entire attention to the action, but he was unable to clear his head. He heard his son make small sounds that seemed to come from far away, or from a tunnel, a narrow tunnel that smelled of fresh mutton. Then Rashid heard crows, sudden caws from directly above him though there were no birds in the building or even in the sky outside. He made a fist around the vials in his hand and hit the boy on the head and Jamal sat in the dust of the stairwell, his sobs audible in the street. Rashid stood over him, shoulders heaving, and hit him again. Then he saw the beediwallah and his customers staring at him from the doorway. What? he said to them, his rage now mixed with shame, and when the men disappeared, he put the cocaine in his pocket, picked up the whisky and used his free hand to drag the boy up the stairs.