book review
talk|25 oct 2012|talkmag.in
Dope and longing on a Bombay street Jeet Thayil’s Narcopolis, which missed the Booker by a whisker, startles you with some wise lines about a ganja adda but is reluctant to yank off all the curtains
omebody in Huffington Post called it the Oscar night of the book world. You couldn’t have missed the news about Jeet Thayil’s debut novel Narcopolis making it to the short-list of the Man Booker Prize this year: every chance we get, we Indians would like to worship our achievers on the world stage. In the end though, he has lost out to British writer Hilary Mantel. I had rooted for him, but not out of patriotism, but because, to me, he seemed almost an underdog, and I usually tend to root for those sorts. Narcopolis, in one line, is the story of Bombay’s (Thayil insists on calling the city by its old name) opium dens and the regulars who go there. The story is set mainly in Shuklaji Street, which “isn’t really much of a street” and has “rooms that contracted in the daytime and expanded at night.” The author, during his Bombay years, lived close by, and was an opium smoker for several years, his interviews tell you. When you start on the novel with all this, you cannot help but feel Narcopolis is autobiographical. The reviews weren’t too encouraging, and while I snobbishly like to shy away from books and films that everyone is consuming, I picked up Narcopolis because of its theme. Books about Bombay are aplenty and mostly feature the sea and the cosmopolitanism, and in passing, the slums and the towers. Thayil’s debut promised a look into opium dens or khanas,
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Deepa Bhasthi Bangalore-based writer. She blogs at dbhasthi.blogspot. com
which robbed people of their best years, their money and their brain cells. If I was looking for insight into that secret world, I was disappointed. While page 148 does tell you that the most popular version of smoking a pipe is “on your back with your knees bent and your legs triangulated,” I felt the author had stopped shy of yanking the curtains off. This is not meant to be an anthropological work, of course. The soul of the dens remains just out of reach and that’s where the book falls short. The author’s love for Bombay is evident, it is a city that has seduced him in his youth. His breathless prologue, one very long sentence that runs to six pages and a half: “Bombay, which obliterated its own history by changing its name and surgically altering its face, is the hero or heroine of this story…” The last word in the book is ‘Bombay,’ too. I won’t tell you how it ends, but the punch line, the very last line, blew me away. The beginning and end impressed me. As for the pages in between, I have mixed feelings. Narcopolis doesn’t immediately take off and you only see brief bursts of brilliance. But just when you are ready to dismiss it as another hyped-up first attempt, the bursts become more frequent, and you decide it is a commendable work. Along Shuklaji Street you meet Dom the narrator, a regular at Rashid’s khana, the most popular place on the street where people come for the O, to talk, to stare at the eunuch Dimple as she fills the pipes and passes them around, or just to visit as tourists. Just up the road is Mr Lee, whose life and that of his family was “purged” by the Party in China, and who wanders through Asian cities and towns he never learns the names of. He settles in Bombay only because he discovers the sea by accident and that is the “only thing about Bombay that did not disgust him.” There is Rashid, with not much of a business sense—he says so himself—who still
manages to make his khana the most popular adda on Shuklaji Street. Dimple, the eunuch, quickly became my favourite character. Hers is the most fleshed out in the book, and it’s she who gets to voice the most insightful passages. Here’s Dimple on why people take drugs: “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 is an antidote to loneliness, and the way it becomes your family.” It is Thayil’s dreams and hallucinations that I have the most difficulty with. Perhaps the reader had to have some experience smoking up to appreciate the sometimes absurd dreams. There isn’t, strictly speaking, a plot, and Narcopolis follows a set of people around as they smoke O first, then move to newer, more dangerous substances. I love a book that wows me in the middle of a sentence and makes me envy the writer for its construction , and wish I had written it. Contradictory as it may sound, a seamless blend of envy and fantastic language is what I wish for each time I pick up a new book. Narcopolis does not disappoint there. But this isn’t an easy book to read. You can’t sit back and read it half-distractedly, it demands you sit up straight, read breathlessly, and take frequent short breaks to pace about and think. I like demanding books. Narcopolis is not as ‘grassroots’, let’s say, as Shantaram was over a decade ago (thank goodness for that), but it has its surprises. I will stop just short of calling it brilliant.
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