Narcopolis (20 page)

He got the shits when the garad wore off. The toilet was a hole in the floor that was impossible to locate because there was so much shit around it, weeks and months and years of shit. He stood in his shoes, pulled his pants down and added to the pile, trying not to breathe through his nose. Then he went back to his spot on the floor and yawned and shivered through his withdrawal. There were bodies all around him, silent men with their hands on their valuables, if they had any, and he lay in his spot, his eyes and nose streaming, until one of the bodies appeared beside him, a tall pig-nosed Iraqi who materialized from a puff of beedi smoke and asked if he had money and if he wanted garad. Rumi bought three pudis and snorted two off his hand and only then did the shits stop. He also bought beedis from the Iraqi and he smoked them carefully, half a beedi at a time, and when he got to the end he untied the string and opened the leaf and saved what little tobacco remained. That night Rumi sat in his sleeping spot, surrounded by the bodies of thieves and faggots and murderers and atheists, and he thought about doubt. He thought: Doubt is another word for self-hate, because if you doubt yourself and your position in the world you open yourself to failure. You have no place among men. You are the carrier of a virus and you’re contagious and you should be put down, because doubt is the most dangerous indulgence of them all, more dangerous than vanity or greed, because doubt feeds on itself like cancer or tuberculosis, and unlike the sufferers of such ailments, the doubter does not deserve sympathy: doubt is a decision. He told himself, I am unkillable because I am without doubt and the saying of it will make it true. He repeated the words aloud: I am unkillable. He breathed deeply and filled himself with the stale smells of the cell, with the odours and emissions of the criminals around him. Then, aiming carefully, he spat into the corner where the murderers slept, in the best spot, under the window. There were two of them, a man who strangled his wife and two children as they slept and a man who stabbed a friend to whom he owed money, stabbed him thirty-two times and dumped his body in a drainage canal and would eventually (months later, long after the case had fallen off the pages of the local dailies) escape the death penalty on a technicality. The two murderers were unimpressive in the flesh, one was pot-bellied and asthmatic and the other was a scrawny younger guy with terrible halitosis. But they were treated like movie stars, they didn’t wear the prison uniform and they were allowed out for a walk once a day whenever they felt like it. Rumi’s gob of spit landed on the bare foot of the man who had strangled his family. He opened his eyes and wiped his foot against the floor, carefully wiped it clean. Then he sat up and looked around him until he saw Rumi. In the dim light the man’s eyes were like water. I know what you want, he said. You don’t know a thing, Rumi said. Not a single thing that makes a difference in the world. Friend, said the murderer, I’ll tell you what I know and you tell me if I’m wrong. You want to hit me and you want to be hit, you want to be beaten almost to death, isn’t that right? You want to taste blood because you’re bored and pain is preferable to nothing. Isn’t that right? I, on the other hand, prefer boredom because it’s a comfort to me. What I’m saying is, if you can’t sleep ask the Iraqi for Mandrax. I’m not going to fight you. After making the speech, the murderer flung his elbow across his eyes and lay still.

It was her first dream in weeks, her first sleep since arriving at Safer. She dreamed of a poster that had been on the wall of Rashid’s for more years than she could remember, a poster of a blonde girl in a sun hat. In the dream she got up from the turkey mattress and went to the window, which gave out on a lawn that was lush and green, the kind of green that hurt the eyes, it was so bright. She watched the blonde girl take off her large, her overlarge hat and place it on the lawn (and here the dream took on a cinematic quality, because she was no longer looking at the scene from a window: the frame became a kind of lens that zoomed in and out with dizzying speed), and she saw that the girl wasn’t alone, that she was in fact surrounded by an army of shadows that moved on the lawn’s periphery, moved as if their claim on the lawn and the colour green, on the sky and the colour blue, on the earth and its thousand unknowable colours, was older than hers, was so old that it could be ignored only at her peril. The girl, who was not more than thirteen or fourteen, removed her hat and placed it carefully on the ground. Then she lifted her dress or shift, a light cottony garment with a flowery pattern, and squatted above the hat and filled it with blood or shit, something, at any rate, that was black and crusted on the hat’s upturned brim. And then the words began to flicker across the bottom of the screen like subtitles and the shadowy figures who crowded around the edge of the frame moved into the centre, towards the girl, whose skin was white and rose. The camera focused on her face, on her petal-like lips that mouthed, very clearly, the word
What?
But the subtitles that appeared at the bottom of the window or screen said something very different: ‘You were nameless and pagan. I gave you context. For two hundred years I gave you context and how did you reward me?’ Then the girl’s eyebrows took the shape of an inverted V and she mouthed the word
No
. As soon as the word left her lips she was overrun by the shadows, who, as they came into the light, revealed themselves as ethnic ecclesiastical figures in robes of white or saffron, and others in skullcaps, and still others in conical hats and tattered purple. In minutes, one of the figures in purple lifted his cassock to display a great brown belly and black penis surrounded by grey fuzz. He dipped his hand into the hat and smeared himself and soon the other figures were doing the same. The camera fell to the ground as if the person holding it had been attacked or was taking part in the activities he or she had until then been recording, and when the camera was picked up again there was a close-up of a penis penetrating, very slowly, the girl's anus, and then two words began to slide across the screen, words that were repeated with each stroke, the penis now sliding to half its length in the girl’s small orifice, and there was a close-up of her face, which looked stupid more than pained, and again the words appeared, in quotes, ‘Tradition’ and ‘Values’, and the camera cut to the priest, whose face was glazed with spit and sweat and the words he spoke needed no subtitles because they were synced and perfectly audible, ‘This is India,’ and Dimple woke, her heart beating so fast she thought she might die and the thought of dying was a sudden comfort.

On the third day, or it might have been the second, they took him downstairs and put him in a room with a lawyer, a Muslim, who told him his bail had been arranged and they were going to try something new, they were giving him a choice between rehab and jail. Well, now, Mr Advocate, what a wonderful deal you’re offering me, said Rumi, thank you. He took a matchbox from his pocket, opened it and shook out half a beedi. He lit it and took a deep drag and when he exhaled the Muslim flinched because the smell was so strong. Thank you, thank you, thank you, for nothing, Rumi said. Jail or freedom, that’s a choice, rehab or garad, that’s a choice, but rehab or jail? That’s like choosing between death and dying. No, I take it back, it’s like choosing between syphilis and gonorrhoea. I know what I would choose, said the Muslim. I know what you’d choose too, said Rumi, but it’s the wrong choice. You want to know something? When they put me in here I thought it was all over. I thought I’d be fucked up right away, stabbed or strangled, something, for being Hindu. I thought jail would be full of Muslims and I’d be at the bottom of the undertrial hierarchy. Well, I am at the bottom, but not because I’m Hindu. Can you believe it? The Muslim said nothing. I asked myself, what does it mean that a garaduli is lowest on the ladder, lower than a ragpicker or a thief? How can it be? I asked a shooter who was in for the contract killing of a movie producer. Tell me, I said, I want to know. Why would a Hindu trust a Muslim over a garaduli? You’re a Hindu, you tell me. The shooter looked me over, as if he was measuring me for a suit or a coffin, and then he said: Garadulis will do anything. I said: Why single out garadulis? Anybody will do anything. The shooter said: Garadulis turn on their own kind – not even a pocket-maar will do that. Rumi was silent for a while and then he said, What did you bring me? News, said the Muslim, the best news you can hope for. I mean, did you bring me food and cigarettes and money? No, said the Muslim, I brought you something better, we’re getting you out: we’ve worked out a bargain with the court. Rumi said, Just leave me some cash, whatever you have. You can get it back from my father. Look, Ramesh, the Muslim said, you’re getting out, it’s all been arranged and the money’s arranged too, take it cool, don’t take so much tension.

Of course it didn’t go as easily as the Muslim, whose name was Majid, said it would. It took another week of watery daal and uncleaned rice and watching his back, and then, a trip to court, where Majid the Muslim did most of the talking. Afterwards, a constable put him in a jeep and escorted him to a place recommended by the judge, who said it was the first facility of its kind in India, that it was a programme run by former users, that it used both physical and spiritual exercises to help bring about a speedy recovery (which phrase made Rumi smile, because it sounded like the judge was making a paid advertisement, and because if you knew anything at all you knew there was no such thing as a speedy recovery when it came to heroin), and that it was talked about mainly for the sessions, part psychotherapy, part literary criticism, conducted by a former monk and heroin addict named Soporo Onar, who had taken over the running of the centre some months earlier. The judge said the doors of the facility were locked, though only at night and therefore escape was not impossible, but he was of the opinion that it would be wiser for Rumi to stick out the six months of his sentence than dodge the court for the rest of his life.

With the dreams came memories, or perhaps they weren’t memories at all but fantasies she imagined were memories. It was as if, by lifting the cloud of garad and chandu that had been her companion for so many years, she had also liberated her recollections of infancy, if they were true recollections at all. It surprised her that she remembered the church her mother had made on the bottom shelf of a steel cupboard, something no one knew about except her mother and she. She remembered the marigolds her mother placed on the shrine, and the framed image of Swayambunath’s painted eye, and a figurine of a woman in a blue veil. She knew now that the woman in blue was Mother Mary and that her mother had worshipped both Hindu and Christian gods. But how could she possibly remember such things when she’d been separated from her parents at the age of seven and at eight had already come to live with the tai, who had named her Dimple, not because she had any, but because there was an actress of that name who had, for the briefest of moments, captured the nation’s excitable imagination? But she did, she remembered with absolute clarity her mother placing her in the hands of the priest. And she remembered too her mother’s fits, when she screamed for no reason and tore her hair, and the fights with her father, whom she didn’t remember at all because he died young, and she remembered the noose her mother was rescued from, a noose made from a dupatta that had been fastened to a nail on the kitchen wall. Or was it Mr Lee’s mother who was rescued from a noose? Had she stolen the memory? Perhaps she had no memories at all; perhaps she was stealing other people’s because she had none of her own.

In his first days at the centre, Rumi met only the two inmates who had been told to stay up with him during his withdrawals. The Parsi gave his name as Bull and was the tougher of the two. The Catholic’s name was Charlie and he claimed to be an electrician and knife-fighter. They took turns sleeping so one of them could keep an eye on Rumi at all times. On his second night, when the drugs they gave him seemed to have little or no effect and he began to pound the wall, first with his fist and then with his head, the Parsi and the Catholic moved his bed to the centre of the room and tied him down with nylon rope and cotton wool. He kept asking for stronger drugs but the best they could do was Diazepam in useless five-milligram capsules. Bad timing, man, said the Catholic. Since Soporo took over things have changed, otherwise they would have given you the best medication, full-on hallucinations. Soporo thinks cold turkey is the best turkey. Fuck Soporo, said Rumi. The Parsi laughed and hit him in the stomach and the pain was such a relief from the withdrawals that Rumi said it again, Fuck Soporo. This time the Parsi only laughed and said, If you had a razor you’d be cutting yourself, wouldn’t you? Rumi said, Fuck you too, and vomited in his direction. Bull the Parsi danced easily out of the way. He said, At least you have the right attitude.

He felt like he’d joined a cult, because all they talked about all day long was Soporo this and Soporo that, stories he didn’t want to hear, much less hear again and again: how Soporo exposed the guy who’d been in charge of the centre, a cross addict (sex, alcohol and heroin), who’d been using right under their noses, nodding off during Sharing Sessions and nobody the wiser because after all this was the session leader; how Soporo went after him at an NA meeting and made him admit it; how, three months after taking over, he persuaded the trustees to put up more funding and leased another floor from the church to build a gym and meeting rooms; how all kinds of people turned up at his talks, including those who’d never done drugs in their lives; and how, if Rumi made a good recovery, he’d be able to attend the talk on Wednesday night, which was titled ‘The End of Time’. I heard a rumour, said Jean-Luc, a French junkie who’d been living in India since the seventies and had graduated from opium to heroin to Tidigesic, a synthetic opiate. You want to hear? The rumour is he will talk about how heroin annihilates the idée of time as a logical or chronological imperative, and he will talk about the Miles Davis album
Kind of Blue
, which he says is an example of heroin time, not musical time, and he’s going to prove it by playing some of the tracks. Where’s the talk going to be held? Rumi asked. Down the road at the Church Annexe, said Jean-Luc. We need a bigger room than this one because a crowd will turn up, I don’t know why. How do we get there? asked Rumi. We walk, what else? Hey, turkey, said Bull the Parsi from across the room, you want to be carried? Is that it? It was Rumi’s first time at the lunch table, sitting with everybody, trying to eat. His hands shook so much he couldn’t hold a glass and he felt weak and nauseous; the sight of food, in particular, the tongue served for lunch on Sunday, only made him sicker. The tongue had the exact shape and rough texture of a human tongue, except it was four or five times the size, and pinker and thicker and difficult to chew or swallow. He watched the others gobble it down and it seemed to him that they were attempting to swallow their own tongues, to commit suicide in this most ferocious of ways, and he was carried by a wave of white nausea mixed with disgust. He thought: You don’t deserve to eat, not with so much appetite, and you don’t deserve your good teeth and excellent digestion. You don’t deserve to live, he thought, touching his neck surreptitiously to feel for the fever steaming under the skin.
Down the road
suddenly seemed like an impossible distance and he barely made it from the table to the turkey mattress without assistance.