INTRODUCTION
Jeet
Thayil belongs to a brave new generation of Indian authors; who are out to
challenge the established norms of writing without having any fear of controversy when presenting their opinion.
Thayil is a poet and musician who has been writing poetry since he was thirteen, paying careful attention to form. In his prose,
as in his poetry, he has introduced new areas of feelings and emotions to
Indian literature, as has been done by
authors like Arundhati Roy, Salman Rushdie and Kiran Desai. He has often been concerned with the pleasures and pains of
drugs and alcohol, sex and death – emblematic of Keats and Baudelaire. He
is said to have more in common with figures such as William S. Burroughs
and Roberto Bolano than with writers
traditionally connected with the firmament of Indian literature.
He is now being hailed as the leading light of a new
generation of Indian novelists, who are willing to take on the less salubrious
realities of life in the world‘s largest democracy. Born in Kerala, Thayil is the son of the author and editor
TJS George, who at various times in his life was posted in several places in
India, in Hong Kong and New York. Thayil was mostly educated abroad.
Jeet Thayil, an
alcoholic and drug addict for nearly two decades, found his antidote in writing
with his debut novel Narcopolis.
There are comparisons drawn between Narcopolis
and its thematic literary precedents like those of the writings of
Burroughs, Baudelaire, and Paul Bowles or with other Commonwealth writers like
J. M. Coetzee or Margaret Atwood. Some readers might as well be reminded of
Thomas de Quincey's Confessions of an
English Opium Eater for its ability to make the audience see the world with
its psychedelically distorted but earnest vision. Yet, it is not easy to state
categorically that Thayil's Narcopolis,
a tale of opium dens and heroin addiction in Mumbai, joins the above select
group. Narcopolis fits into the
recent literary wave of "Dark India", a body of literary fiction
which seems to have found a niche in the market, writing as it does of the
underbelly of Indian society: its slums, poverty, deprivations, depravations,
and destitutions. Narcopolis, with
its setting on Bombay's Shuklaji Street of the 1970s, and 1980s crowded with
opium dens and brothels, with its cast of drug addicts, drug peddlers,
prostitutes, criminals, and even a eunuch is a book which definitely sets out
to depict a non- shining India, which may be a less represented aspect of India
than the exotic, lush, extravagant India that appears in most of the writings
today. Above all, it is a fantastic portrait of a beautiful and damned
generation about to sell its soul. His idiom is the result of a cosmopolitan blend of
styles, and is yet, quite clearly, his own. About Narcopolis,
Thayil said,
I've
always been suspicious of the novel that paints India in soft focus, a place of
loved children and loving elders, of monsoons and mangoes and spices. To equal
Bombay as a subject you would have to go much further than the merely nostalgic
will allow. The grotesque may be a more accurate means of carrying out such an
enterprise. (Thayil, 12 October 2012)
The novel draws on his
own experiences as a drug addict, and which he calls “the lost 20 years of my
life”. (Thayil, 12 October 2012) It took him five years to write the novel, and
he calls it “the opposite of catharsis. Catharsis gets stuff out of you. But
this put back feelings into me”. (Thayil, 12 October 2012) The novel is about
Bombay in the late 70s, 80s and 90s and the author wanted it to be a memorial
to a vanished city and to people he knew there. He decided to call it Narcopolis, because Bombay seemed to him
a city of intoxication, where the substances on offer were not only drugs and
alcohol, but also god, glamour, power, money and sex. He called Bombay Narcopolis because the city was built on
opium shipped to China by the British East India Company working with a small
group of Parsi ship owners - a secret history omitted by most history
books. Thayil in an article in The Guardian speaks about the subjective
and objective reasons for entitling the book this way:
I thought of the people I used to know as
NarcoPolos, voyagers into the unknown, who seldom returned whole or alive;
because I was living on Cemetery Road and it seemed to me I was living in a
city of the dead; and because this title suggested another, a hidden title, Necropolis.
(Thayil, 12 October 2012)
As the title suggests, the book is about drugs
and about places. But it’s about much more than that as well. Thayil tells this
story through the city's microcosm – an opium den in Shuklaji Street, whose
existence was known only to those who needed to know:
Shuklaji Street was a
fever grid of rooms, boom-boom rooms, family rooms, secret rooms that
contracted in the day time and expanded at night. (135)
It stretched roughly from Grand Road to Bombay
Central and to walk along it was to tour the city's fleshiest parts the log
rooms of sex and "nasha". His Narcopolis
treads a neater narrative line, but is no less adventurous in its exploration
of story and place. This is Old Bombay as seen from the slums and the gutter,
the city illuminated in all its sweat and temper, stories lifting from the
streets like the smoke from an opium pipe. Centered on Rashid’s squalid drug
shack, this portmanteau novel picks up strands, weaves them with others,
journeys to Mao’s China, and makes us stand mesmerized. The story – or network
of stories, for the novel is formed of several interconnected narratives, each
focused on a different character – revolves around Rashid's opium
establishment, which is frequented by gangsters and pimps, pushers, junkies,
tourists. His novel takes the reader through the Mumbai drug world's smoky
alleys and features the musings of opium addicts in the late 1980s; it is a
journey into a sprawling underworld written in electric and utterly original
prose. Thayil has presented an episodic phantasmagorical account of the drug
life through this novel.
The
first chapter of the dissertation deals with the Narrative Techniques that are
used in the novel Narcopolis. The
second chapter presents a panoramic view of the social life of the underworld. The third chapter deals with the
Transition of Old Bombay to the New Mumbai, which depicted in the novel. The
conclusion is that the author, by making use of his innovative techniques, has
effectively presented the state of a degenerating society and how it has
gradually emerged out of such a calamitous state.
Narrative Techniques employed in Narcopolis
Narrative structures are generally described as
the structural frame work that underlies as the order and manner in which the
narrative is presented to a reader, listener or the viewer. The narrative structures are the plot and the setting. Jeet Thayil has used several narrative techniques
for the narration of the story in Narcopolis
in order to make the story much more impressive and effective.
The book is that structural oddity, a first
person narration with a (mostly) absent narrator, a story that switches quickly
to the third person and stays there for most of the duration. This is because
Thayil presents the reader in an interesting authorial device, not only with a
single omniscient narrator to guide the uninitiated through the potholed
journey on Shuklaji street, but with a cast of narrators, each taking over the
telling of the story so seamlessly that sometimes it is unclear whether one
narrator has left off and another has picked up. There is, very occasionally,
the voice of the omniscient narrator towards the end of the book, but for most
part, the narrative voice switches from character to character and it is not
always clear who the first person narrator is. The multiple narrators, the
slippage from one voice to another, the very long sentences and monologues are
reading experiences which disorientate the reader, as does non-linear timeline
which moves in leaps and jerks, perhaps intentionally giving the reader the
simulated experience of being in an opium drug haze, where time, and even
facts, are somewhat fluid and uncertain.
This mental state is induced from the very beginning of the book where
the opening sentence runs for seven pages.
None of Thayil’s characters are
particularly reputable, and some critics have called them “uninviting” and
certainly, although they tell coherent stories, and are consistent within
themselves, it is impossible to ascertain if their accounts are accurate or
drug induced confessions and fantasies. Their less than respectable, fairly
unorthodox, alternative, marginal life-styles, their drug-abusing habits and
addictions, their rants, their desperation, all combine to render the
characters’ seemingly unreliable narrations.
On the other hand, there is also a case to be made for the reliability
of these narrators despite their lacking conventional credit or social capital
: the narrators often demonstrate high degree of self awareness, awareness of
the world, and often present what appear to be bleak, uncompromising versions
of realities, which come across as convincing and reliable. Though there is no
attempt to euphemize, questions regarding the authenticity of the stories
related may arise in the mind of the reader. However reliable, or otherwise,
collectively, these narrators patch together a riveting portrait of the seedier
side of Bombay.
The novel has a very unreliable
quasi-narrator in Dom Ullis, whose return to 1970s Bombay from New York, and
his immediate descent into an opiate languor, opens the novel. The readers rarely hear the narrator’s name. Dom is absent for much of the book, and what
we know about his personal history doesn’t extend far beyond snippets. Dom,
like the author, is from Kerala, but spends his time in New York, working in an
editorial capacity as a proof-reader for a pharmaceutical company, and comes
and goes from Bombay and the readers can easily guess his drug habit. Thayil
and Dom could both be regarded as providing a certain “staged marginality”
which denotes the process by which marginalized individuals or social groups
are moved to dramatize their subordinate status for the benefit of a majority
or mainstream audience.
That the narrator is atypical and
largely undefined says a lot about the way the book works. As it turns out, narrator Dom is only one of
the narrators, only the vessel, most of the time, for our other narrator, an
omniscient voice spanning the length of history and breadth of the globe. The
identity of the narrator behind the omniscient voice is not revealed in the
novel. It is actually all explained in the prologue, though one may need to spend
a spell deciphering it, given that the prologue, though over six pages long, is
one continuous sentence: clauses, details, explanations, voices strung together
in a way that shows chronology and clear-cut narration are not the goal here. Speaking about his choice of long sentences
in the narrative, Thayil says:
The
opening sentence, the prologue, I wrote that about halfway through the writing
of the book, and when I wrote that sentences... rather than short sentences
because I realized the only way to write about opium was to write long,
open-ended sentences where the writer who is writing it has no idea where the
sentences is going to go. So you follow
it and there is a sense of discovery –for the reader as well, I hope. You
couldn’t write a book about opium, which is a very slow, long process, with
short quick Hemingway, journalistic, telegraphic sentences. So once I kind of stumbled on that it changed
everything. Then the book happened very
fast. (Thayil, 12 October 2012)
Having set the stage for the twisting
narrative that follows, Dom abandons his reader for the drug. Dom resurfaces periodically, although he is
almost entirely absent from the whole middle of the novel.
Thus, this rambling provides us with a
glimpse of what’s to come in terms of narrative structure, and in terms of the
tumultuous, ever-changing but never-resting Bombay the book is set in. The prologue introduces us to the
unconventional narrators, and it tells us quite straight forwardly not to
expect linearity. Dom warns us that
The
I you’re imagining at this moment… who’s arranging time in a logical
chronological sequence, someone with an overall plan, an engineer-god in the
machine…. Isn’t the I who’s telling this story(12).
He further clarifies:
That’s the I who’s being told,” which, though
perhaps not immediately transparent, is actually the key to understanding the
book’s somewhat unusual style of narration.
It’s not tidy, but neither is what it is apparently about, addiction or
Bombay. It is Dom whose voice we hear in
that seven-page first sentence, in which he introduces us to the idea that
there are more narrators to a given story, the I and the other I(13).
Dom is a very appealing narrator
whether reliable or otherwise; unlike many caught up in the snares of the
underworld, he has not lost his humanity and still attempts to understand and
treat others with respect. In a city
teeming with danger, violence, addiction, sensations, and most casual of
brutality and commonplace cruelties, perhaps finding in Dom a narrator who
attempts to hold onto his principles and basic decency may well be reason
enough to trust him. Thus, Dom is a
reliable narrator, although it is hard to tell, sometimes, when he is narrating
and when he is not. He is rarely
present, and when he is there, he is a mess.
Within the novel itself Thayil discusses the use of reliability of the
various narrative voices, demonstrating his awareness of unreliability of
narrators, but making the case that reliability was not necessarily something
to be aspired:
I
told Dimple that the Professor, if that what he was, seemed to be unreliable
source, though he was entertaining being reliable, like a dog or an automobile
or armchair? I said it was fine with me as long as he didn’t call himself a
historian or moral scientist. (15)
But
the question of truth, and of reliability, is one that bleeds through the whole
novel, setting up one of its many binary challenges. We are asked to consider “hero” as the
opposite of “heroine” as well as “heroin” on the first page, but heroin is also
opposed by opium; Hindu by Muslim; clean by dirty but also by addicted; rich by
poor; real by not real; I by not I. And
through Dimple, Thayil asks one of his most relevant questions –“who is a man,
and who is a woman, and how do we know? ” (17)
In the last sentence of the novel, the
narrator disclaims responsibility for reliability ingenuously claiming that
“this is the story the pipe told me. All
I did was to write it down, one word after the other, beginning and ending with
the same one, Bombay”(292). As always, things are never quite clear or certain
in the novel: It is not made clear whether the pipe is a real pipe, a literal
pipe, or a pipe inherited from Lee, given to Dimple, then to Rashid and finally
to Dom. It can be a mere metaphor, standing for drugs in
general, or standing for stories of the people through whose hands it has
passed. In passing responsibility onto the inanimate pipe, Thayil shifts the
burden of realism and authenticity, and in course, story-telling is neither
transparent nor a translation of life, merely to be written down after
manipulation process of writing a novel.
As Tabish Khair points out,
Fiction
is not a fact and a novel is not sociology or history or anthropology. And yet there is an intricate relationship
between fact and fiction, between sociology, history, anthropology and creative
writing. (2001:4)
Nevertheless,
the attempt to deny that relationship and disclaim responsibility is an
interesting one. Thayil chooses seduction over prescription as the method of
convincing instead of claiming authority, the narrator leads the reader into
unfamiliar lands thus disconcertingly turns shrugs and claims to know no better
than the reader.
Nacropolis
contains stories, narratives colliding and being passed on almost
arbitrarily, changed, lost. It would
seem that Thayil is implying this is the only possible way to render an
accurate account – by undermining traditionally accepted markers of reliability
and accuracy. As U.P.Mukherjee observes:
Learning to see oneself with other eyes, eyes that
belong to the lost and the broken, is made possible in the novel only when
melodrama is staged by borrowing folk theatre idioms of heightened emotional
language mythic morality and judgment…(2010:128)
Perhaps this method is the most faithful
possible and least compromising of the integrity of both tale and reader.
The significance of text extends beyond code
switching and ear candy. There are clear
similarities between the way the book is told and Bombay itself and the drug
state itself. The book is highly
intertextual, containing references to invented texts and real-world ones,
stories form a broad mix of genres (magazine articles, poems, books, song,
lyrics, films), and repetitions of key phrases and narratives. Among this assortment of texts, layers of
reality mingle and swirl so that it is not always evident what is dream, what
is nod; what is fact, what is fiction; what is past, present, future, or
prophecy.
The intertextual elements of the
narrative are so ubiquitous that one feels that one is reading or hearing a
story within one’s own story just as much as one is reading “the” story itself. In the first thirty or so pages along, there
are extracts from Time magazine
(“what a big name for a small book,” Dimple says (8) ), Free Press Journal, the Daily
Mail, and several other papers talking about Newton Pinter Xavier, “a
postmodern subversive who rejected the label ‘postmodern’(25)" (could this
be true of Thayil as well?); the enigmatic S. T Pande, whose texts appear
several times throughout the book: and a few poems by Xavier himself. One of these tells of a boy in a dystopian
future that becomes separated from his family and homeland.
It is through Mr. Lee, himself an
exile, who “lost a war and a homeland at one stroke,” that we receive perhaps
the most significant text within text.
Lee’s father, we learn, wrote a book in 1957 that broke from his
previous popular literature and whose content was incendiary enough to the
Maoist government that the author was thrown in a labour camp, branded a
revisionist, and forced to carry a sign reading, “I am a monster.”(82) Lee finds the book, Prophecy (another fitting
title), after his father’s death. As the
contents are unveiled, a stir of recognition sparks, and grows the more we
hear. Prophecy is “presented like a
biography but there were things in it that no biographer could know, for
instance the things that men and women were thinking at important moments in
their lives” and “at the centre of it all was a character who was neither man
nor woman.”(94)
Mr. Lee’s story is the most
consistently chronological narrative in Narcopolis
- it tells his entire life start to finish, in one (fairly) continuous
stream. Yet it comes in the middle of
the book, is buried between layers of other characters’ stories, is related to
us second hand (or third) , and is one of the only major stories that takes
place outside of Bombay (other stories are hinted at, like the narrator’s time
in New York City, for example, and Rumi’s story of chauffeuring the rich in
LA). The life in China and the life in
Bombay are having a common element and that is the opium connection. Thayil has said that living in India and
China gave him knowledge of the two historic “poles” of the opium trade. And this is where Nacropolis is anchored.
After all, it is Mr. Lee’s story, but it is also the story of the pipe,
the narrator, who originally belonged to the senior Mr. Lee - and was his
constant companion during the writing of Prophecy. It seems Dom is not the only one writing down
a book based on what the pipe has told him.
The jumble of genres and narratives in the
novel is to a certain extent an essential ingredient in a postmodern
narrative. Scattered throughout the
narrative are references to other texts and other stories, which make the novel
multi-layered. Books appear within
dreams. Mr. Lee is visited by visions of
his father’s novel when he grows older and closer to death. Dimple has a parallel vision too. Before he drops her at rehab, Dom takes
Dimple to Chowpatty Beach and has a “moment of clairsentience” (90) where he
reports that Dimple was looking for the ghost ship on the horizon, reflecting
the ghost ship Mr. Lee looked for recalling what his father had written about
Zheng He. Dimple later writes a story,
that Dom finds, in which a boy has similar visions.
What we have in the novel are many
different stories, many different storytellers, and many modes of seeing these
same stories. We are also made to
realize layers of perspectives: The story that can be a true story, a fable, a
dream, a drug-induced vision or a memory.
Near the beginning of Book One, the nod takes Dom and he dreams he is
visited by the spirit of deceased Dimple.
This dream’s significance becomes clearer as the book unfolds. We begin to understand that these dream
visitations may actually be from spirits, traversing time and space, to visit
people who know them. Dimple tells Dom
that her spirit is always there, just beyond a veil, behind a mirror’s
reflection, or under the surface of water.
Spirit hover nearby, she says, just waiting for someone to listen.
Dreams almost merge reality and there
is “only a veil… a transparent veil as flimsy as the one that separates you
from your dreams” (20) It is not important if dreams touch reality and facts
for “You’ve got to face facts and the fact is life is a joke, a fucking bad
joke, or, no, a bad fucking joke” (22) Facts on the other hand are like the
clothes that one wears., they are costumes and disguises: “The image has nothing to do with the
truth. And what is truth? Whatever you
want it to be. Men are women and women
are men. Everybody is everything” (57). Our sense of reality has this one
feature. We are dogged by a constant
thought, “Anything can happen to anyone at any time” (117)
Dreams too are layered, and often
contain important messages in the form of secrets or revelations of the
future. “With the dreams came memories,
or perhaps they weren’t memories at all but fantasies she imagined were
memories” (239). Dreams of a character
do not just remain within the head of the dreamer. Dimple’s dream of Mr. Lee leaks into Rashid
while they are having sex, and Rashid has a dream vision of his own future
which Dom later witnesses come to pass.
These different dimensions of reality blend with one another.
Memories
contain pain like the way dreams contain lessons. Dimple’s mother gave Dimple away at age seven
or eight to the Tai at the brothel where Dimple is castrated, and where she
spends many years of her life. Upon
explaining what she can remember of her past to her new father, Mr. Lee, Dimple
told: “Forget is best", “Why remember and make yourself sad? (67) the
slippery nature of recollection is evident in Mr. Lee’s response. “Why remember when anyway you memory wrong,
all wrong.”(240) Stories mix and melt into each other and states of reality are
interwoven together. Indeed, flux, and
the mixing, shifting, changing, defying, reincorporating of norms,
expectations, cultures, languages, codes, stories, reality, etc.., is central
to the book, which intriguingly often departs from norms yet conforms to them
at the same time.
There
are some “magical” elements like the dead speaking to the living, a talking
pipe, a prophetic book called Prophecy and so on, but this “image” is confined
to the land of dreams and drugs. Its
magical features actually lend strength.
We are not able to dismiss anything as unreal, because it is real to the
characters and perhaps even real within the book’s reality as well possibly, a
dream, an opium nod, a heroin vision, all these could also be a glimpse behind
that veil separating the reader from the realm of the magical. Surely it is not a coincidence that so many
of the dream apparitions directly speak of this very thing. That the magical stuff happens in the realm
of dreams or the realm of the intoxicated means we have no way to dismiss
it. Of course, it becomes easy to forget
that the pipe’s all-knowing narration comes through Dom—who has himself spoken
of the impossibility of reliability. It is not made clear whether the pipe is
really speaking to him, or he is just thinking so. Again there is uncertainty regarding
the prophecy. Whether the prophecy is really prophetic, or the entire book is a
story he has made up remains uncertain. The sense is that it is genuine, as
genuine as it can be anyway, but the very fact that one can’t be sure makes
those magical moments all the more powerful.
“Bombay,”
the book begins, “which obliterated its own history by changing its name and
surgically altering its face, is the hero or ‘heroin’ of this story.” (4) Narcopolis
is not a typical Bombay book. It does
not feature the great figures of Independence of Colonial history. It is a peculiar subjective secret history
told with lot of intimacy and familiarity about the world of opium dens
familiar to Thayil. He had witnessed the
heroin destroying the culture and many people’s lives. The history we are told in Narcopolis is easily Thayil’s as much as
it is the narrator, Dom’s but extends for both of them. Narcopolis
is about a specific India in a specific time period. The destructive chaos of the Bombay riots in
the early 90s accompanies the characters own descent into ruin. But the book is also a timeless and universal
story. Narcopolis dares to tell the past 30 years of the then-Bombay’s
history from the vantage point of a single street. That street is Shuklaji Street- since the
days of the Raj the heart of the city’s red-light district but by the end of
the novel undergoing gentrification.
Thayil
undoubtedly writes from close experience about that sordid world of pimps and
prostitutes, drug addiction and sexual deviance, grotesque crime and heinous
punishment. It fascinates as much as it
shocks – even as one might recoil in horror, knowing he would probably never
set foot in Mumbai’s innards, yet one quite desires to know more about them. It
may seem rambling to reader whose primary pleasure is plot development, but Narcopolis’s narrative style is perhaps
the only way to come close to depicting the inexpressible nature of addiction
in the ineffable nature of a place like Bombay. The narrator gets sucked into
the city’s seedy underworld life with opium and prostitutes. The narrator is
high on opium (or heroin, later) for much of the book, so the novel contains
much long poetic, drug induced rambling. In that way, the book’s postmodernism,
is actually serving a much more modernist, realistic goals. In many ways it is
not the typical Indian novel. Throughout the book, characters talk about the
difference between the slow use of afeem and the fast use of heroin. The novel
works the same way, relying on the same slow, rather ritualistic assembly and
smoke of the pipe. The language makes one want to go slowly, to smoke it like
opium and lie around with the thoughts and dreams it evokes, but the narrative
accelerates and has to keep reading to keep up. The book tells the story of
addiction but also freedom and readers wonder if they are the same thing. It
talks about homelands and exiles, which again, seem to have no real
distinctions in the novel. Like its central character, it is neither, either,
and/or both. The reader would get the feeling that in the end Narcopolis is Dom’s story, his eyes help
us see these other people, particularly Dimple, for the wholly realized people
that they are. This is a story in which “dreams leak”, and in which we are
compelled not just to entertain, but to embrace, the idea that “the addict
wants to think of time the way a tree does”( Mitra).
When he was asked how he had gone
about his research on opium-induced Bombay in the 1970s and how much of ‘him’
is spaced within the book, Thayil
replied, “All information, detailing, figures, characters, composition of
chemicals were the byproducts of what I would like to call ‘embedded research’.
The novel grew out of that period of embedded journalism, of my days into
addiction and intoxication.”(Thayil, 12 October 2012)
Life
in the Opium House: Bringing out the Half-hidden
Degenerating
Underworld Society
Narcopolis
does not seem to have a plot, which makes it difficult read at times. Thayil
offers is a series of vignettes, at times gritty and raw, at times melodious
and soft. Setting his narrative against the backdrop of a changing India seems
overarching and parts of the text feel long and even unnecessary. Yet, Thayil
is an accomplished poet and that sensibility serves him well. We slide in and
out of characters' lives, emerging occasionally inside a vivid drug- induced
recollection. The narrator has fallen into trouble in New York City, caught
with drugs in his pockets after running from a police officer, shipped to
Bombay “to straighten out”. It is difficult to imagine a place less conducive
to straighten out than the 1970s Bombay of this novel. Episode after episode
for year after year for more than thirty years, the drug use and casual sex
continue with little evidence of redeeming social value. Appropriately, the use
of "heroin" in the opening sentence is not a misspelling of
"heroine". Called Mumbai since 1995, it is now the commercial and
entertainment center of India. As the novel makes clear, however, efforts to
stamp out the lawlessness that it endured when the novel opens in the 1970s
have not worked. Opium gave way to heroin and the raw underworld continued on
its merry way.
Upon arrival in Bombay, Dom finds himself
entranced with the city's underworld, particularly with an opium den attached
to a brothel and begins his descent into the squalid world of poverty,
prostitutes and pimps.It is Rashid's opium house on Shuklaji Street in Old
Bombay where the air is thick and potent, heavy with intoxicating fumes,
sometime in the 1970s. Rashid's is the axle around which Narcopolis revolves, the lens through which Thayil considers the
city. The narrator quickly becomes a regular at Rashid's opium den- a place to
where it is possible to lie still and dream for hours or talk quietly with his
fellow addicts. There is certain elegance in the preparation of the pipes, the
ceremony of it, and Rashid's seems for a while to be the ideal place to
disappear. "After a while of this",(26) the narrator says, speaking
at a much later point in the book of splashing after someone half-glimpsed on
the street during a monsoon, " I lost track of time, I lost myself ,which
is the reason people like me get into drugs in the first place."(30)
A voluptuous young woman with her hair falling across her dark eyes
holds a long - stemmed pipe over a flame, offering it to the men sprawled
around her and mutters in the gloom, each one drifting with one's own
tide."Here, people say that you introduce only your worst enemy to
opium."(10) The seduction of opium beckons even the most stalwart of men
.In this world, stray dogs lope in packs and street vendors hustle. Prostitutes
call out their quarry as their pimps slouch in doorways in the half- light,
eager to collect their due. This dark and pitiful world is threatened by an
underworld whisper of a new terror, a stone killer known as Pathar Maar. This
killer is after the invisible poor, an infinitely large tribe in this dark and
shattered city. In a broad sweep, this novel covers the lives of people living
in the Bombay of the 1970s. It is an odyssey into a large underworld of
unimaginable depth where we meet a cast of unforgettably degenerate and
magnetic characters who work and patronize the venue.
The novel is broken up into four "books". The story opens with
the arrival of Dom in Bombay, and he quickly weaves himself into the fabric of
Bombay's sordid underbelly, specifically, the opium dens. Here he meets Rashid,
owner of a khana on Shuklaji Street where much of the novel takes place (and
where Dom smokes his first pipe Dimple, the beautiful hijara who works for
Rashid preparing bowls of opium; "Bengali", who manages Rashid's
money; Rumi, the unflinchingly confrontational businessman whose addiction is
violence; Newton Xavier, the celebrated painter who both rejects and craves
adulation; Mr. Lee, the Chinese refugee and businessman; and a cast of poets,
prostitutes, pimps and gangsters. The seduction of opium beckons even the most
stalwart of men.
The readers are introduced to the novel’s key character Dimple who
worked at Rashid's opium den during the day time and disappeared in the evening
to the hijara's brothel. We are introduced to her understanding of love and
relationships between men and women. Comparing men and women, she says that,
"Women are more evolved biologically and emotionally... But they confuse
sex and the spirit; they don't separate. Men ...always separate: they separate
their human and dog natures" (12). She has even drawn family resemblance
between men and dogs.
Dom's introduction to Rumi is made to sound very casual. He overheard a
conversation between a pimp and a tall man. After the pimp left him, he turned
to Dom and said
...pimps are
cowards...pimps make their money from the weak and diseased, from men and women
whose will has deserted them, who will never fight or put up any kind of
resistance, who want to die...You've got to face facts and the fact is life is
a joke, a fucking bad joke... (22)
Dom also gets introduced to a famous
painter, Newton Xavier who was to make an appearance in the city to read poems.
He was art- obsessed, self- absorbed, precocious poet who explored chaotic
themes like,' the world as a manifestation of the estranged mind. His audience
hoped to see him combust in front of their eyes, or implode, or die of a heart
attack or leap from his seat and rape an audience member".(30) Xavier's
pithy statements like, "only the rich can afford surprise and irony"
(39), "An addict... is like a saint" (40) are sufficient nourishment
for those inclined to think philosophically. Soon readers realize Newton Xavier
is the hand- off; he arrives in the story from the perspective of the narrator,
and then goes off alone with someone else as the story shifts into the third
person and Thayil begins to follow the stories of the other denizens of
Rashid's.
Book Two centers on Mr. Lee a drug dealer and former soldier, who fled
communist China several years back. He had a minor stroke and after being hospitalized
for a few days, he came home with lot of fear in his eyes. “His mind skipped
years, slipping backward or forward without regard for chronology. He lost
faith in linear time."(76) He told Dimple his autobiography describing the
places he lived in like Rangoon, Chittagong, Delhi and Bombay. His voice rarely
rose above whisper and the readers witness his childhood and youth, his falling
in love with Pang Mai, his time in the army, and his subsequent exile and
flight to India and, eventually, Bombay, which he hates but stays in because he
is drawn to the sea.
Narcopolis speaks of a
deranged, starved and epileptic wisdom that's crawled to the surface from the
bottomless pit circling a rudderless culture to reveal its true face. Jeet
Thayil uses a language that is filled with graphic sexual imagery and violence
to portray a side of life that exist on the footpath, merging with dust,
sharing needles, and crumbling beneath the starry dynamo, which doesn't shield
or hide when you roll up tinted glasses of your air-conditioned car, in a bad
part of town. The sentiment and apathy of these motley characters is
infectious, poisonous, drug-induced, stained by semen, and diseased by junk.
"This country, cunt country, how the fucks are you supposed live here without
drugs?” (123) goes one particular thought about how the entire nation is run by
conniving, cheating and murderous communities out to outdo each other, all
apart from Bombay, which is why it is the Narcopolis,
the capital of Opium, and the hero or heroine of this story. It also gives you
a glimpse of a man , a former addict ,whose own experiences crawl and slip
under the mask of his characters like smoke, who survived and suffered a long
time ago from being burnt or consumed by dancing too close to the flame.
Narcopolis also tells a story
about choices- those who have them and those who don't. It takes place in India
in the 1970s, when Mumbai was still called Bombay, and political and social
turbulence reigned supreme. Thayil's story, though, could have happened, and still
can... In any metropolis where poverty, illiteracy and deep- set economic
inequality dictate people's lives, where many seem predestined for “the usual
ending ",as he writes , due to a "fatherless childhood, an
adolescence of petty crime, garad (smack) or alcohol .....More crimes and
illness". (23)
In the case of the eunuch, Dimple, the main character of Narcopolis, it is the abject poverty and other forces beyond
her control that drive her mother into selling her eight- year-old-child. That
exchange leads to the crudest form of castration- its pain will torture Dimple
in later life and leave her with no option but to seek the relief of opium.
Dimple naturally wonders why people with choices in life she did not have
grovel in the floor in front of her, desperate for fixes. Why, Dimple
asks...and well Thayil ask it too “...Do people who seemingly have it all -
education, jobs, families, and prospects for the future-become addicts?”(14)
That impossible question never gets an answer, although it feels at times as if
Thayil pushes readers to pass judgment on those for whom drugs become a
deliberate choice. The question why, for example, does an educated young man
like Dom Ulisis (most likely a character based on Thayil himself), choose to
while away the best years of his life in an opium den on Mumbai's Shuklaji
Street after a bust by cops in New York and deportation to India is also not
answered.
Salim, a petty black market scotch and cocaine peddler whose powerful
boss regularly sodomites him is from the lowest social stratum. Unlike him is
the renowned artist Newton Xavier, a drunk and a junkie with fame and fortune
and scores of admirers around the world. He gets wasted on opium simply because
he has never tried it before. He has sex with Dimple the eunuch just for the
heck of it. Then his wealth and standing allow him simply to walk away from it
all. He cleans up and makes an appearance in front of adoring, unsuspecting
fans “...to give them what they want". (38) Thayil leaves the reader with
a realization. The line between those born with choices and those not so lucky
is very thin. The side of the divide you're born on is purely random.
Mr. Lee bequeaths
Dimple his opium pipes - Chinese, the real deal - eventually taking her to an
opium den run by Rashid. The pipes bring widespread fame to the den - so much
fame that people from all over the world and all walks of life pass through it.
Rashid’s competitors are hell bent on destroying it. In that den; Rashid and
Dimple build a rock-solid friendship through the years.
In those years, Bombay becomes Mumbai. Drugs change from opium and garad
to cocaine and harder stuff. Rashid gets clean, and other characters that flit
in and out of this story disappear or die. Dimple too dies. Still, Rashid cannot
forget Dimple. Dimple, he tells Dom, haunts him every day. She is always there,
always will be."Dead do not always become ghosts”, Dimple told Rashid.
"We are like dreams that travel from one person to another. We return, but
only if you love us"(186).
Early in Narcopolis, when Dom
first arrives in Mumbai, a fellow opium smoker - an educated middle class man-
mockingly tells him all he has in common with "these people are
smoke"(13). Indeed, the characters in this story find themselves separated
by economics, education, religion, politics, circumstances, but there is a
factor that links them, “Opium”. Enduring relationships prove that everyone,
everywhere, high or low, is worthy of friendship and love.
From a State of Dreams to Damnation
The presentation of a degrading
metropolis has become one of the important themes for literature in recent
times. And in both popular and academic literature Bombay (present day Mumbai)
is typically characterized as India’s most modern city which has a long history
of transition. Much has been written about the degrading and broken metropolis
but such moments are rare indeed these days when one takes a book in the hand
and have to go through a test in the first few pages to enter into the story of
the novel. That can happen if someone started reading Narcopolis. The book opens with a hypnotic sentence that runs into
six and a half pages, effectively for connecting time and space to make
chronology between dreams, conversations and visitations from absent friends,
setting up the mood of the story. Narcopolis
begins as “Bombay which obliterated its own history by changing its name
and surgically altering its face, is the hero or heroin of this story” (1). The
word ‘heroin’ has two meaning in the opening sentence of the novel, indicating
both a protagonist and a substance. Heroin also suggests the historic change in
the business of intoxication as it overthrows the age old queen of delirium,
opium. This rambling introduction of the novel in the form of ‘Prologue’
provides us with a glimpse of what’s to come in terms of narrative structures,
in terms of the tumultuous, ever changing but never resting Bombay in which the
book is set. Most of the novels set in Mumbai show the magic, the glitter. But
Jeet Thayil’s Narcopolis shows the
whole, other, intricate side of Mumbai. What Narcopolis does is that it gives us a chance to re-read the history
of Bombay, the history which is not captured in the history book or which is
inconvenient. The novel basically deals with what Thayil calls ‘the secret
history’ (5) of the city, Bombay – it’s past and present.
This is not a typical novel which shows
the subcontinent’s familiar literary lights as the novelist here introduces a
new kind of format for novel writing which is more in common with the Russian
novels. Above all, it is a fantastic portrait of a beautiful and damned
generation; about to sell its soul. With the use of Thayil’s poetic
craftsmanship and unconscious prose language Narcopolis draws the evolution of a great and broken metropolis.
The history we are told in Narcopolis
is not only of the narrator, Dom Ullis’s but it extends far beyond. Here Jeet
Thayil has created a painful portrait of a cluster of people whose stories
compel us to think. The book is broken in four parts. The first part is “The
Story of O” which opens in Bombay in the late 1970s as its narrator Dom first
arrives at Bombay and he quickly finds himself entranced with Bombay’s sordid
underbelly, specifically the opium den. Here he first meets with Rashid the
owner of a Khana on Shuklaji Street around which most of the actions of the
novel takes place. Dom comes in contact with unforgettably degenerate and
magnetic characters who patronize the venue including Dimple the beautiful
eunuch and Tiresias-like figure who works for Rashid preparing bowls of opium;
Rumi, the frustrated businessman; Bengali who looks after Rashid’s money;
Newton Xavier, the famous painter and poet who sketches a controversial picture
of Jesus; Mr. Lee, the Chinese immigrant and a variety of other characters. But
after the second half of the third chapter the narrator vanishes from the story
and then turns out the other “I’ (which Thayil defined as pipe the other “I”
narrator) resumes the narration. It is through the mouth of an opium pipe that
we come to know about Dimple’s interaction in her youth with Mr. Lee who
provides her with opium to ease her pain and treated her like a father. The
second book “The Story of Pipe” talks about the childhood and youth of Mr. Lee;
his love and his time in army; and his exile in India and final settlement in
Bombay, the city he hates but stayed back only because of the sea. We also come
to know that after the death of Mr. Lee Dimple joins in Rashid’s Khana for
making piyalis by using Lee’s old opium pipes in exchange for opium of her own
to smoke. The third book “The Intoxicated” shows the transition of opium dens
into the brutally effacing world of garad heroin and Rashid’s Khana is also
affected in this change. Dimple moves from brothel to Rashid’s home to find out
better future but she crashed out from the track by the new drug of choice in
the city. Furthermore we come across to the early 90’s and get the experience
of the horrific Bombay riots that burned and inflamed the city population,
where heroin is more easily available than the food. Here our narrator Dom
appears and prepares himself to leave Bombay for his too much addiction with
heroin. But before leaving the city he makes his last effort to save Dimple in
dropping her in the rehab centre, better known as “Safer”, where later on we find
Rumi. Again the next section precedes by the other “I” narrator. The fourth
book “Some Uses of Reincarnation” deals with Dom’s return to Bombay and his
visit to Rashid’s old Khana. It is 2004 and Dom finds that old Khana is
transformed into a new business office run by Jamal, Rashid’s son. We get a
glimpse of new generation by following Jamal and his fiancé Farheen selling
cocaine in the club. The city shines more and more but the bottom-line is
totally destroyed as Farheen says “Dance or we die” (284). After coming to know
the death of Dimple from Rashid, Dom discovers the ancient opium pipes from the
belongings Dimple left to Rashid. Thayil has ended the book in the same place
where it started by saying-“All I did was write it down, one word after the other,
beginning and ending with the same one, Bombay” (292).
If someone wants to write a story about
Bombay one has only to connect the dots of history as Thayil did in his novel.
A city made of islands where all of India's languages, faiths and castes
mingle, where the prevailing currency is money as Dimple says “Bombay money is
the only religion” (199) and its dreams are spoken, and also the unforgettable
colourful lives of Bollywood movies which played a major role in day to day
social life and character .This novel is
also influenced by it as there are again and again references of movies. Though
it gets terrific blow from the terrorist, it returns to life in the very next
day. As Umasankar says-
The result is a
scorching saga of a city traced through its narcotic dens and whorehouses
housing a motley crew of addicts, prostitutes, eunuchs, drug lords, murderers
and religious fanatics. He knows the blue smoke inside out and is familiar with
the valleys and plateaus of intoxication like the back of his palm. He has
observed the chandulis and garadulis in microscopic detail, their execrable
lives, their abysmal despair and the many tiers of deaths that they undergo
(Umasankar 2012).
Bombay has variously been maximum city,
underworld den, city of dreams.
Narcopolis
is not the typical Bombay book as Thayil says: “It did not feature the great
figure of Independence or Colonial history, or even the bit players” (Thayil,
12 October 2012). Though the most part of novel is set in Bombay but it is not
the glorious presentation of slum Bombay of Slumdog Millionarie or the
Anglo-influenced post-colonial India of Vikram Seth’s novels. Its theme is more
in common with Meera Nair’s film Salam
Bombay which also captures the
Bombay around the same time in which Thayil’s novel is set. The film is about a
railway slum of Bombay like the Shuklaji street in the novel which portrays
similar kind of characters like Krishna who comes in Bombay to earn five
hundred rupees but till the end of the movie he cannot fulfill his desire;
Silim who at last dies because of drugs; The sixteen Year old who hails from
Nepal has no other choice but to become a prostitute in that attached brothel
and this has resemblance to the story of Dimple; and the character like Baba
gives us the sense of Rashid in Narcopolis.
Bombay and drug addiction—the two are
often synonymous, as Dom says, “I found Bombay and opium, the drug and the
city, the city of opium and the drug Bombay” (7). The story of Mr. Lee and
China is not an inconvenient portion of the novel. What Thayil wants to do by
exposing Lee and China, is that he wanted to trace out the history of opium and
Bombay. A city which is made of seven islands reclaimed by the British within a
short period of time becomes one of the greatest cosmopolitan metropolises in
India and the centre of financial market. And even now it is the commercial and
entertainment hub of India. But these changes have taken place within a short
time. And the novel shows opium as the reason of that transformation and in
that point Lee and China are linked with Bombay. India's opium links with China
are old and as its reference we can get a detailed description in Amitav
Ghosh's novels, Sea of Poppies and River of Smoke. British traders got
China addicted to opium grown in India, and transported it on ships owned by
Indian merchants. As historian Amar Farooqui has also portrayed Bombay’s
prosperity as the result of opium trade in his Opium City, and Salil Tripathi also says-
Narcopolis
is set at a time when the popularity of opium is waning, and more dangerous
drugs are about to invade the city. It makes the opium den look like a piece of
innocent nostalgia. Thayil completes the story that began in the 19th century
through Lee's pipe, as it becomes the instrument of escape for the city's
tormented souls” (Tripathi 2012).
Narcopolis
is not a typical drug book like Burroughs’. But in an interview Thayil says
that he used drugs in his novel as a hanger to portray his multi-varied
characters and to draw the social life of Bombay. The novel captures characters
from almost all sections of the society. Whether it is Rashid who runs a very
good business of opium and lives a happy life with his family and his business
partner as well as sex partner Dimple whom he named as Zeenat after the famous
heroine of the movie ‘Hare Rama Hare Krishna’; or Dimple who also leads a happy
life by making pyalis for Rashid in her neither/either/both condition. But when
the garad heroin comes in the market they are vehemently affected by it. Dimple
ultimately dies and Rashid’s den is shut down. The city which once welcomes all
to fulfill their desires is now divided in the name of religion, caste, regions
and so on. And it is this reason the narrator speaks –“The city was revealed as
the true image of my cancelled self . . . I lost track of time, I could have
been anyone, I lost myself . . .” (209).
Narcopolis
belongs to an interesting lineage of books on the City, where contemporary
history mingles with the narrator's comment on the present. We have come to the
early 90s and the horrific Bombay riots that leave the city burning and the
population inflamed. As Dimple repeatedly used – ‘the city was burning’ and
heroin is easier to get than fruit. The 1992/3 riots thus have a number of
implications in regard to understanding the changing city space. It is even
clear in the words of Jim Masselos:
In breaking down the
integrity of the city into its disparate parts, the 1992/3 riots thus
highlighted awareness of the full extent of what Bombay/Mumbai, the effective
city, had come to be: an extraordinarily complex and dynamic entity which
somehow or other managed to retain some sense of unity, whatever the conflicts
over what kind of a city and whose city it should be (Patel 47).
Thayil might have said in an interview
that “I would love to live my whole life in a city of intoxication” (Thayil
CNBC TV18) but here in his novel he does not talk about the chemical drugs
rather celebrates the time of opium and the city life of Bombay. And by the time
he comes in contact with garad heroin he loses his all hope in the city and
leaves Bombay. He may hate Bombay as it did not fulfill his desire but he has
great attraction regarding the city and wants to do something for the people.
We come across his love for the city in the novel when the narrator before
leaving flood affected Bombay says:
Water lapped against
the city’s ruined buildings. . . 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.
(220-221)
Finally, Thayil has agreed that the future of
this city is going to be worst and Rashid repents – “Garad wrecked everything.
If we’d stayed with opium my place would still be open ... so many people would
alive.” (285) to clap it all, it is true that Narcopolis is a rich hallucinatory dream of a novel that captures
the Bombay of the 1970’s in all its compelling squalor. Stretching across three
decades, with an interlude in Mao’s China, it portrays a city in collision with
itself” (Mitra). It is a special tale which Thayil tells very smoothly and
secretly. In the novel like the narrator he also struggled very hard to
overcome his twenty years of addiction to succeed at last in 2002. Whatever
Thayil portrays here in this novel about
Bombay’s social life and the opium dens- all these have come out from
his own experience. He knows very well about the world of opium den and he
witnesses how garad heroin destroys the culture and many people’s lives in
Bombay. This is the secret history of Thayil and not only his own history but
also the secret history of the evolution and abolition of opium and the city,
Bombay as well. Hari Kunzru remarks-
“Jeet Thayil’s Bombay is a city dreaming troubled dreams, and Narcopolis will change the way you
imagine it”. (Thayil,Cover Page)
CONCLUSION
Thayil, in one of his interviews speaks
about the purpose of writing this book:
Honour the addicted,
marginalized and people perceived to be the lowest of the low. The book was
born out of empathy. The book in a way challenges the negative thoughts that we
harbour for addicts, it urges us to have an open mind toward them. (Thayil, 12
October 2012)
The literature of drugs can be both wearisome
and curiosity smug: low life glamour exulted with florid prose and
cod-spiritual awakenings. And while ghosts, visions and trash -can decadence
occasionally cloud atmosphere Thayil's sympathy, range and clear eyed, yet
fluid style finds something other in the addicts cycle of relief and relapse.
Ultimately this is a novel of escape. Disparate characters meet at the den,
leaving behind the complications the world outside presents. And while this is
hardly a ground breaking interpretation of narcotic abuse, Thayil subtly
inhabits lives destined to forever end back to the pipe: Dimple ,a
transsexual prostitute ; Mr. Lee, a
Chinese soldier, son of a dissident writer and a community zealot mother;
Rashid ,a drug dealer still in thrall to the old ways, willfully ignorant to
the changing society around him .Their sadness and their shattered lives are
depicted with empathy and a sharp eye for the dark comedy that resides there.
After Dimple tries the new heroin, she has a hallucination in which she is
visited by dead Lee.
I'm here because my
spirit has not been able to travel to its rightful place, he said. I’ve left my
body or my body has left me, which is the first death. The second death occurs
when those who love us and are lived by us also die, or forget, and our names
no longer spoken. (183)
The ingenuity of Thayil's novel lies in
how he has squeezed this entire universe into an opium pipe. And when the
narrative dissipates into smoke, it leaves a deceptively addictive odour, with
memorable characters at the margins of society There are others too, given
peculiar names drawn from Bombay slang, but most try to do no harm, and often
show heartwarming humanity.
In an interview to The Paris Review, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
once said:
Bad readers have asked
me if I was drugged when I wrote some of my works. But that illustrates that
they don't know anything about literature or drugs. (Marquez, para.76)
The statement that Marquez made is like
a double - edged sword, where on one side it is probably true that his creative
output may have been different had he been on drugs but on the other, it shows
a kind of prejudice towards literatures written under the influence of
stimulants. But upon reading works like Narcopolis, one wonders how
different it would have been if the author really wrote these under the
influence if all the drugs that they had described in their respective works.
The attempt by a
debutant novelist to try something as a memory narrative, that too, a story of
people who are looked down upon by the society: the addicts, the prostitutes
and the neurotic people who are inclined to commit crimes, are truly
commendable. But in fact, the work got criticized by almost all major critics
and dailies. The fact that it was set in an Indian city showed its nakedness
without any presumptions of being a spiritual haven surely helped the novel
gain respect in the West.
Thayil and Narcopolis quickly got noticed by the
masses, partly due to the media hype and partially because it got short listed
for the Man Booker Prize. Published in an age of new media, the success of Narcopolis, even though it got mixed
reviews, has also become a fine example of the power of social networking
sites, the popularity of new books like Narcopolis,
hints at the emergent reading pubic of India
In ambition, Narcopolis is reminiscent of Roberto
Bolano; but it is Denis Johnson‘s Jesus'
Son – the best junkie book of the last quarter century – that is its closer
kin. It may seem that apart, none of the characters is in the least bit nice:
they are to a man greedy, needy, egotistical and prone to bursts of irrational
violence. Yet Thayil has shown that he is a poet, and it shows in the prose,
which contains countless moments of great beauty. The book, indeed, is studded
with scenes of shocking physical violence. Bombay in the 1970s is a cauldron
which frequently boils over. At the end of the book the readers are to admit
that his debut is an unsettling portrait of a seething city, a
beautifully-written meditation on addiction, sex, friendship, dreams, and
murder. It is a simultaneously brutal and beautiful work, dreamlike without
ever being sentimental or vague or softhearted, a novel exposing a world which
has been kept hidden and uuspoken of so far. Narcopolis is a truly
impressive achievement.
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