Narcopolis (18 page)

On that last day – a day of deluge, water stacked in green and brown layers under a floating membrane of debris, the streets and houses flooded and the neighbourhood returned to its original aspect of swamp fed by pestilential rain, a place for mangroves and undersea life, not human habitation; when the city’s network of supply and demand had broken down, and it was impossible to find eggs and coffee, much less the drugs I wanted; when everything had at last been arranged, I was
leaving
the neighbourhood, the apartment, the habit, I was
leaving
and I wouldn’t return – on that last day, in parting, the city was revealed as the true image of my cancelled self: an object of dereliction, deserving only of pity, closed, in all ways, to the world.

The city claimed seven islands from the sea. In the rainy season, the sea claimed them back. For two days the sky was iron and on the third the rain poured itself into every crevice. It didn’t let up for a week. I looked for the black kites that lived in the coconut tree near my fourth-floor window. I put both hands on the ledge and leaned out until I saw them, two big birds,
huddling
, miserable in the downpour. I went from room to room. There was a stain on the bedroom wall, a waist-high discoloration where water had seeped into the brickwork, and though the floor was clear of everything except dust, I sat in the exact spot where my armchair had been. This is what I did, I leaned out and hunkered in and waited for a call from the airline. But the phone didn’t ring and I went out into streets that were bright with water. I’m leaving, I thought, and this is my last time. I wanted to be generous to the city because I was leaving it and I thought I heard a wind blowing through the broken streets, a clean wind unimaginable in the midst of such decay. I felt a heaviness settle in my chest and just then I was sure I’d never be free of that chaotic obsolete Bombay, and I’d never be free of my beloved lie, that heroin was an aberration, a last time. I thought: How close I am to happiness and how far in understanding.

At Bandra Station, stranded commuters were playing card games on their briefcases. The weighing machine was silent and on its base a small boy slept with his mouth open. I saw a fight break out among a group of boys who couldn’t have been more than ten years of age. It didn’t stop until a cop came along and clubbed them with his lathi, clubbed them repeatedly. Not even the sight of their own blood pulled them off each other. I saw a woman with her leg in a cast bang her crutch against the weighing machine to wake up the boy sleeping on its base. She shooed him off, sat and lit a beedi. I saw three small children set up a stone under the eaves to chop onions for lunch. They were focused on their task, oblivious to everything, like practitioners of a great and dying art. It might have been there that I saw Rumi, or if not there then not far away, under the eaves on Platform One, or he might have been facing the other way, looking towards the sea and the road to Bandstand, I don’t remember now, but there he was in the drowned light, with his pleated trousers and white shirt, his ballpoint aligned with the vertical, no colour on his person except for the saffron tilak near his shaved hairline. He yawned like an old man and fixed his watery gaze on me and said: Crazy fucking city. Then he said the dealers were out of maal and we would have to go to Bombay Central. But he didn’t move from his spot. He lit a Charminar and offered one to me. Try this, he said. No filter, no menthol: compared to Charminars, Camels are crap and Gauloises are for homos.

The rain hammered down and I saw or I thought I saw Rumi’s tall figure in front of me and I splashed after it. After a while of this, I lost track of time, I could have been anyone, I lost myself, which is the reason people like me get into drugs in the first place. Just then, a man splashed past astride an oil drum, paddling with his hands, riding the drum like a water scooter. The rain streamed into my glasses and I lost sight of him, but I was affected by the joy on his face. A red double-decker stopped and we got on. Water ran in sheets down its rusted metal sides. From the bus’s upper deck the view was legendary, like footage from a documentary. The sky was the colour of someone’s black eye. Cows stood in the water, too bewildered to move. Snapped power lines sputtered near a movie theatre. People stepped carefully on the dividers in the middle of the road. They walked in a long broken line and they carried boxes and dead umbrellas and plastic bags filled with flotsam. When they saw the bus some of them tried to run after it but the others stood where they were. We got off at Grant Road and made our way to Hijde ki Galli. The shops and restaurants were open, but under the bridge, where the crowd of shoppers was usually too thick to negotiate, there were no people, just bamboo scaffolding standing in the floodwater, tethered to nothing.

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 for 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?’