Narcopolis (19 page)

Before I could reply the hijra in the stained sari reappeared and it was our turn. Rumi and I jumped up and went inside.

The hijra led us behind a partition to a back room where the Nigerian sat at a desk. A plastic jug of water stood on a side table, with a saucer of used tea bags and a collection of small bottles. There were several brands of laxatives and a bottle of cough syrup. On a room-service tray were a dozen or so latex eggs, washed, but large enough that I wondered how he’d managed to put them in his ass. He wore a fresh skullcap and a striped business shirt and his shoes had a deep shine. There was a prayer bruise on his forehead and behind gold-rimmed spectacles his eyes were clear. He introduced himself as Pepsi and apologized for the delay. It was difficult to shit knowing a crowd of people was waiting, he said. Then he cut two uneven lines of dirty white powder on the cover of a movie magazine. He handed Rumi a hundred-rupee note rolled very tight. The twin lines ran diagonally across the famous mouth and vertiginous cleavage of the actress on the magazine’s cover. Rumi bent over the currency note and snorted up a line and closed his eyes and put his fingers in his ears. I broke my line in two, one for each nostril. The powder hit the back of my nose with a hard chemical burn, and, in an instant, my knees dissolved in the anhydride rush that disconnects neurons from nerve endings, obliterates bone and tissue, and removes anxiety by removing all possibility of pain. I thought: If pain is the thing shared by all living creatures, then I’m no longer human or animal or vegetal; I am unplugged from the tick of metabolism; I am mineral.

Rumi and Pepsi were on the couch, smoking a joint of heavy Bombay black, afloat on the smoke and conversation. The Mandrax man was there too, bent, his eyes wide with understanding or stupidity. The hijra, on the floor, smoked tiny bits of powder on a strip of tin foil. She cut an empty Gold Flake packet into long tapers that she lit from a candle and held to the foil, and when the powder melted and a coil of smoke appeared she sucked it through a foil-lined straw. She held the drag deep in her lungs until it disappeared into her cells where it mutated and multiplied. Her hair was cut very short and there was a wound on her chin, a deep excavation filled with mucus. I was watching her, I couldn’t look away, and when she caught me looking her eyes filled with water and that was when I realized it was Dimple and I was ashamed that it had taken me so long to recognize her. She pointed at the hole in her chin but she didn’t speak. I’d seen her last about ten years earlier, when she’d been Rashid’s personal pipe maker and known for her beauty. There was no trace of it now in the white stubble on her cheeks and the thin honey-coloured hair. We had once been friends, but I’d never thought of coming to see her or to ask after her. There was always some sort of crisis, a crisis every day, and heroin trumped friendship every time. Now, I did the easy thing: I took the money out of my pockets, kept some for a taxi home and what was left I put on the floor beside her. It amounted to a little over six hundred rupees. I wanted to do something more but the truth of it was I was too high to care. In a corner a television flickered: mute images of healthy men and women, white, running in slow motion on a beach. There was clean sand and sunshine, the water clear, the colour so vivid it seemed as unreal as the people running in their tight swimsuits. I said something, I don’t remember what, and Dimple tried to look up but she couldn’t, the nod was too heavy.

I thought: For every happiness there is an equal and opposite unhappiness. Then I took a drag of charas and the room filled with light. Everything was transparent. The skin on my arms was as thin as paper. I looked into my flesh and saw the moving bones wrapped in pink translucent sheets; and all the while the rain fell in great washes against the roof, sheets of water that streamed from the windows and gathered in the corners of the room. We smoked that dirty hash, Bombay black charas with the colour and texture of goat shit, and we chased heroin on strips of foil. We spoke those words, the beautiful ones without meaning or consequence. We laughed for no reason and interrupted our laughter with silence. Pepsi spread a prayer mat and prayed and we waited in the room where the television flickered like firelight and the rain gurgled and crashed. We smoked. People came and went. We spoke the beautiful words and we called heroin by its joyful name. I didn’t sleep but I was full of dreams and when I made my way outside it was dawn. The rain had thinned. Everything was lit with meaning. Water lapped against the city’s ruined buildings, dirty water strewn with petals and garbage and smelling of attar. People waded on the street, soaked to the skin, their faces ecstatic in the charcoal light. I knew them as my brothers as I stood in the rain. I spread my pitiful, deluded arms wide. I wanted to hold the city, each woman and child and animal and man. I wanted to save them. And then I saw Dimple on the balcony reading a book, squinting as if her life depended on the words. When she saw me she stood up. There was a piece of sticking plaster on her chin and she said something I didn’t understand, or maybe I did understand but I don’t remember. I went to say goodbye and she whispered something in my ear, repeated what she’d said earlier or said something else, though I still didn’t understand until I saw the Air India carry case in her hands. She had packed her belongings and she’d been waiting for me on the balcony. It was still raining and below us the floodwater suddenly seemed very deep, though I knew it wasn’t. Dimple watched a puddle form on the balcony. She said, Take me with you. I’ll die if I stay here.

What excuse could I have made, other than the fact that I was leaving and I had nowhere to take her? And then it occurred to me that it wasn’t true, there was a place she could go. We set off as if it was the most natural thing to do, set off together, I carrying her case, Dimple looking straight ahead, concentrated on the task of climbing down the flimsy wooden staircase, and only I looked behind to see if anyone had noticed that we were leaving, Rashid maybe, or one of his minions, lumbering after us, but no one was there. The water had receded a little and we found a taxi on the main road. Dimple was silent until we passed the waterfront near Worli and then she recalled something someone once told her, that the only beautiful thing about Bombay was the sea. She said it wasn’t true, there were other things that were beautiful, though at the moment she couldn’t think of a single one. After a while, she asked when we would be passing Chowpatty Beach and I told her that it was behind us, but she looked so stricken at this that I asked the cabbie to turn around and take us back. We parked on the road and walked a little way onto the beach, which was deserted at that time. The sea was swollen with waves and rain. There were no birds in the sky, or there were fluorescent birds that piped harsh melodies, birds that revealed themselves to be kites, and moments later revealed themselves to be not fluorescent at all but transparent, and not kites but crows, transparent albino crows barking dissonance, not melody, and Dimple crouched under the terrible sky wheeling with luminous birds and asked me if I could see the lights of a ship where the horizon was. I followed where her finger pointed but saw nothing, because the sea was full of chop and rain. I don’t remember what I said in reply, or whether I replied at all, but just then I experienced a moment of clairsentience, a feeling of longing and anxiety, Dimple’s, and for a moment I saw what she saw, a lost junk with tattered sails that seemed to have travelled a great distance of time, from the past into the future, with too few stops for refuelling and repairs. And I knew that she wanted the ship to send a boat to collect her and take her away, take her somewhere calm and clean, where she could rest and repair her own wounds, and just then, just as I felt her sadness settle in my chest, she got up and went back to the taxi.

I heard the phone ringing when we got out of the elevator at my apartment. It was the airline calling to say my flight had at last been rescheduled and I would be leaving that day. I hung up and looked around the apartment and suddenly it seemed I was leaving too soon. In a suitcase I found a pair of jeans and a shirt and Dimple changed out of her sari. We sat on the floor and she talked of many things. She said garad no longer got her high, she smoked just to be okay, to be not sick. She’d been to a doctor who said she had a problem with her stomach and she might need an operation. The thing that gave her pleasure, perhaps the only thing, was reading and more than anything she liked to read about the sea. At the moment, she said, she was reading a book that had a hundred words for the sea, words she had never seen before and other words, better words, words that were more helpful because they were common. She said she liked the book because the men in it were as obsessed and insane as the people she knew; and though it was a big book the chapters were short, like poems, short and mystifying, and there were songs – sea shanties and lullabies and drinking songs and strange chants to make men brave. She looked at the stained walls of the empty apartment and asked if she could have some tea, but the kitchen had been dismantled and in a while I picked up her case and we took a rickshah to a stall where the tea was strong and served with bread and butter. I heard bells and realized it was Sunday. The rain had stopped. There was even a hint of sun. I took Dimple to Safer, the rehab centre where I’d taken my most recent unsuccessful cure. The centre operated out of a church on Chapel Road and was usually open by six in the morning, when the inmates took yoga classes before breakfast. They were making morning tea when we got there and in an hour she was processed and settled. When it was time for me to leave we shook hands like a couple of guys.

And though I’d been waiting a week, packed and ready to leave, I arrived at the airport with only minutes to spare. I rushed through immigration, down the flaking corridors and water-stained halls that were empty except for the security detail who watched as I ran past, my pupils tiny pinpoints filled with heaven’s white light. On the plane, I threw my carry-on
into
the overhead bin, but my suede jacket I handled very gently, holding it in my lap for the duration of the flight. In its inner pocket was a hole in which I’d hidden a bag of heroin. While the plane was still on the tarmac I made my first trip to the bathroom and cut a line on the back of my wallet. I returned to my seat and sat with my head tilted back and let the heroin dissolve into the back of my throat. I was nodding out when the plane lifted into the air and through half-closed eyes I thought I saw the rusted corrugated roofs of the Bandra slum where I bought drugs for so many years, the one-room dwellings that housed entire families, the broken-down shops selling cigarettes, batteries and light-bulbs, the open sewage-clogged drains and crowds of people walking in single file; and in a moment I saw the streets of Bombay Central and the staircase at the back of the Pilahouse Lodge, still flooded though the rain had stopped; and then, the faces of the people I knew blurred and reassembled into a face that seemed very familiar to me, though I couldn’t say why, the face of a sister I’d lost, or a son I’d never known, or the face of someone loved, who died.

Rumi was at Shakoor’s not Rashid’s, because Shakoor laid on complimentary lines of cocaine and his heroin was cheaper and stronger and anyway Rumi didn’t want opium so what would be the point of going to Rashid’s? He was in the inside room with a couple of guys, a dealer and a pimp, and the dealer was saying to the pimp: Listen to me, are you listening to me? Have I got your attention? The pimp was spot smoking with a short plastic straw. He took the straw out of his mouth and looked at the dealer. Well, said the dealer, if you’re sure you can spare a minute of your precious time, I’ll tell you something you want to hear. The pimp kept looking at the dealer, who was younger than him but similar in build and complexion. In fact, thought Rumi, they could be brothers, or cousins; even their moustaches are similar. Bring a woman with you, said the dealer. Haven’t you learned anything? Shakoor sees a woman, any woman, even one of your street whores, and he’ll lay on the lines like they’re free. The pimp said something inaudible, then his eyes closed and he dropped into a nod. The dealer looked at the pimp for a while and turned to Rumi and said in English: Fucking pimps, no ambition except for pussy. Rumi said, Say cunt, don’t say pussy. Only pussies say pussy. The dealer said, What? You think I don’t know the difference between cunt and pussy? Rumi said, I ever tell you about my days in LA? Yes, said the dealer, you did. You’re from a good family and you went to school in the States and you drove a limousine. You weren’t always a garaduli. I ever tell you about the singer? Rumi asked. Not sure, said the dealer. What singer? Well, listen, said Rumi, let me tell you about the singer.

I drove a limo, and not just any limo, a stretch custom job, Rumi told the coke dealer whose name he didn’t know though they’d had business dealings several times. Sometimes I took movie producers or music industry guys to the airport and they’d lay out cocaine and cognac and I’d think, yeah, these guys are living the life. Or I took party girls out for the night, strung-out chicks who’d crash in the car, so stoned they’d fuck anybody. Sometimes I’d be on the road for days, running on speed. Change of clothes in the trunk, drive around from fare to fare, sleep at the airport parking lot and stay high all the time. It was school, man. No, said the pimp, it was better than school, you got fucked and you got fucked up. You’re right, said Rumi, for once in your life you are a hundred per cent fucking correct: it was better than school. One time I picked up a fare from the airport, older woman, maybe thirty. We get to her place and she changes her mind. She says she doesn’t want to go home, she wants to drive around some more. She’d just flown in from a concert in New York and she was still wired. She wanted to wind down. Are you a performer? I ask. Yes, she says, I’m a soprano, a coloratura soprano. I sing opera. I drove some, thinking: opera. Then I say, Listen, I know this is asking a lot, but maybe you could sing something. I mean, I’ve never been to the opera. I could see her in the rearview and I saw the look on her face, pure pity, because she couldn’t believe there were people in the world who had never heard opera. She puts her drink down and does some breathing exercises and she says, no, she’s not going to do it because she can’t sing sitting down. So I say, no problem, and I open up the sunroof. But she needs a pick-me-up, that’s what she called it, a pick-me-up for her nose. I take her to this place I know in East Venice and we walk into a house with no furniture, one broke couch, pit bulls in the yard, the works, and the singer sits down and does everything that comes her way, smoke, toot, shots of malt. Late in the night she asks me, Do you believe in ghosts? She says she didn’t either, until recently, when she came to believe that ghosts are a source of comfort, perhaps the only source of comfort for the bereaved. And then she reaches for my dick and sucks me on the couch, with these kids crashed everywhere, sucks me like it’s the first time she’s sucked dick and she can’t believe how good it tastes. Or like she’s sucking someone who just died, someone who hasn’t fully departed, and she’s trying with all her might to keep him in the land of the living. Or like she’s sucking the future, sucking it down one day at a time, the days she never expected to see, the days that would vanish in a gust of wind if she didn’t suck with all her tenderness and talent and ambition. You ever been sucked like that? he asked the pimp. The pimp laughed. What about you? Rumi asked the dealer. You ever been sucked like that? The dealer said nothing and Rumi called for a Thums Up, in a glass, with lots of ice. He said, At dawn, she woke me up. We do a couple quick lines and get into the limousine. I’m driving past the beach and it’s still dark, the street all quiet and pretty before the freaks and the fuck-ups start their daily shit – right? – the ocean on my right, and that’s when she tells me to open the sunroof and she starts to sing, so loud you’d never believe that big voice was coming out of this small woman and all of a sudden I got it, you know? The words were in German, but I got it, the function of opera, I understood that it was the true expression of grief. I understood why she needed to stand and turn her face up as if she was expressing her sadness to God, who was the author of it. And for a moment I understood what it was to be God, to take someone’s life and ash it like a beedi. I thought of her life, her useful life, and I wanted to take it from her for no reason at all. And I drove that big car better than I ever had, the sky lightening, the clean water close by, and her voice carrying up to heaven. I wanted her to sing for ever. I thought, as long as she keeps singing, I’ll keep driving.

Rumi told the story the way he drove on the freeways of California, on autopilot, his mind half elsewhere. Where exactly? What was he thinking about when he talked about the opera singer? His mind was not in the air with the high voice that was trying to reach the ears of God, but down to earth below, on a pair of cowboy boots, to be specific, a pair of ostrich Tony Lamas, the most beautiful pair he’d owned and he’d owned a few. The opera singer asked him to stop at a diner, she needed food or her blood sugar would spike. They stopped at a twenty-four-hour place, toast, eggs and beer for him, poached eggs for her, with bacon and coffee. The restaurant had framed photos of dead musicians on the walls, but only if they died when they were young; musicians who died of natural causes at a ripe old age were not similarly honoured. Rumi was surprised at how many photos there were, how many musicians in how many genres. After breakfast, she got in front with him and curled up on the bench seat and put her head on his shoulder. He took her to Mulholland Drive, where she told him to wait in the car. He couldn’t come up. He waited, he found news on the radio, then a rock station, except the music wasn’t rock exactly, it was some kind of chant, a robotic voice saying something about corpses rotting in the red alleys of the moon, giving up their flesh to the cat-sized rats that came out to feed when the dog-sized cats had fed their fill and gone. When the song ended, the singer put her head in the window and gave him the boots. Whose are they? he asked. A friend’s, she said, a friend who died. I want you to have them. Rumi didn’t want a dead man’s boots, but when he tried them on they fit like they’d been handcrafted specially for him. He never mentioned this part when he told the story about driving the opera singer around the hills of Los Angeles: he kept the boots to himself.

Dimple’s new life at Safer was governed by the clock. They gave her a complete medical at Holy Family Hospital. The hole in her chin was not dangerous, the doctors told her, at least not at the moment. It was better to wait and see what happened, but first she had to detox. The staff at Safer put her on chlorpromazine, available on the street under the brand name of Largactil, and it was months later that she discovered how controversial the drug was, and dangerous, because it was still experimental. But she did what she was told, she took the pills they gave her and tried to live through detox. The chlorpromazine made her hallucinate so heavily that she wasn’t aware of the torment her body was enduring, the pain, the panic and diarrhoea, because she was tripping. Four or five days after she started on the drug, when the worst of the withdrawals had passed, they took her off it. For two weeks her bowels were loose and for a month she didn’t sleep, not at all, she lay awake on the turkey mattress and waited for dawn. The centre was on the top floor of the church premises and from the roof she heard the birds at four in the morning. Then the sky lightened and the others woke and the day began. At six there was a yoga class. All turkeys had to attend, one of the other inmates told her; it was compulsory. Yoga was followed by breakfast: two fried eggs, two pieces of toast, jam, butter and milk tea. Then the morning’s physical therapy session began, an hour and a half of sweeping and swabbing. Once a week they swept out the church in which the centre was located, Mount Carmel’s, where the yearly Feast of Our Lady of Infinite Sorrow was held. Afterwards, the turkeys showered, or most of them did. The new turkeys who couldn’t stand the touch of water went straight into the morning meeting. There were two house meetings a day, run by those inmates who’d been sober longest. At her first meeting, the guy who was in charge, an older Catholic fellow named Carl, asked her a question. She was still feeling the effects of the chlorpromazine, which made it difficult to lie. The only lie she could keep straight in her head was the lie of her name and gender. So when Carl said, Why do you take drugs? she told him what she thought, told him the truth because the least such a question deserved was a real answer. She said, Oh, who knows, there are so many good reasons and nobody mentions them and the main thing nobody mentions is the comfort of it, how good it is to be a slave to something, the regularity and the habit of addiction, the fact that it’s an antidote to loneliness, and the way it becomes your family, gives you mother love and protection and keeps you safe. Carl, trying to keep to the moral high ground, trying to protect his position as the meeting’s architect, said: But there are good habits and there are bad habits. Drugs are a bad habit, so why do it? Because, said Dimple, it isn’t the heroin that we’re addicted to, it’s the drama of the life, the chaos of it, that’s the real addiction and we never get over it; and because, when you come down to it, the high life, that is, the intoxicated life, is the best of the limited options we are offered – why would we choose anything else? When she looked up she found Carl gazing at her with narrowed eyes, and when he asked her to continue, in a tone of voice that suggested animosity or at least reluctance, she said she was feeling sick and she had nothing more to say.

You tell me, the dealer told Rumi, what was she, the singer, pussy or cunt? Cunt, said Rumi, they’re all cunts, and that was when someone rushed into the room, a man so black he could have been African, with a red mouth that smelled of sweat and sewage, and for a moment Rumi thought it was the devil in his natural state, blackened and sooty and looking for company, or the devil freshly returned from the flames of hell, his red mouth about to burst into laughter, but it was Shakoor. He was
offering
trial hits of some new maal. Free, he said, who wants to go first? The pimp opened his eyes and said, Me, I want to go, and he cooked up and tied off before Rumi had said a word. The pimp stuck the syringe into his ruined veins but couldn’t find any blood and the deeper he dug the more frustrated he became. Shakoor gave Rumi a vial and he spilled a little of the powder on the table top and snorted it up and felt his body go limp and his heart wind down, actually felt his heart expand and seize up and start again. He staggered to the bathroom and put water into his nose and spit out as much of the powder as he could. He threw up and he threw up again and his legs wouldn’t obey him and it was a while before he felt well enough to walk back to the room. Shakoor and the dealer were standing up, close in the small space, looking intently at the unconscious pimp. Get him out of here, said Shakoor. The dealer pulled a gun from under his shirt, a country-made pistol that would almost certainly misfire, though there was a chance it would not, and he pointed it at Rumi and said: Go on, fuck face, get this sisterfucker motherfucker out of here. He followed as Rumi dragged the pimp, first by the arms and then the feet, dragged him out of the khana and onto the road in broad daylight. See you, cunt, said the dealer as he walked back to Shakoor’s. Rumi, dry heaving and sick, put the pimp on the road and passed out or fell asleep. He was woken by a skinny constable, low caste or no caste, probably a chamar, who put him in a van and told him the pimp was dead and he could be dead too. And the low-caste cop also told him something he knew: he was in a lot of trouble.

Carl asked if she would take a session at the centre the following week. She could do whatever she liked, pick a topic like pride, say, or faith, or she could discuss a book, Anthony De Mello’s great work
Prayer of the Frog
, for example, or hold a study class of some sort. She was still shaky from the withdrawal medications, the chlorpromazine and Avil; she felt like she was shedding skin, not dead skin but living skin, and her flesh felt raw and chafed. Then Carl asked what kind of class she would take, what subject, and the answer popped into her head almost as soon as she heard his question: she would teach history, she said, a history of evil as suggested by certain individuals, obscure and not, including but not limited to poets, priests and prostitutes. Carl started to shake his head before she had finished speaking.
Inappropriate
,
misdirected
and
overcompensation
were some of the words he used, and there were others too, but they were not as interesting. Carl thought the kind of
session
she had in mind was more suited to a university or some kind of arty lecture series. There was nothing uplifting about it, so how would it benefit a group of recovering addicts whose hold on sobriety, not to mention reality, was shaky enough to begin with? She agreed that there was nothing uplifting about the subject, or nothing obviously uplifting, but it would certainly benefit those in recovery, since addiction was one of the fringe topics that fell under the general heading of evil, and she wanted to talk about the ideas of Burroughs, Baudelaire, Cocteau and de Quincey, to name only four historians of evil, though the last named was a cusp case. Who are they, Carl asked, poets and prostitutes? Writers, said Dimple. Carl asked if they all took drugs. Yes, said Dimple, they did, opiates mostly. Well then, they’re junkies plain and simple, fuck-ups who got lucky; they were not to be trusted. And besides, said Carl, they’re not the kind of positive thinkers we prefer to focus on at the centre. This programme is aimed at getting people off heroin, not glamorizing it.