Bombay High

Angad Singh Chowdhry and I met in college. We were the same age but he was in first year while I was on the lofty pedestal of a second-year undergrad student. He’d lost a year because he’d been expelled from another college for substance abuse. Initially, I thought Angad was an obnoxious brat. He has, over the years, collected a variety of labels for me; one of which is “ice queen” apparently. In the early years, I straggled along, watching Angad wide-eyed because he had the most excess-ridden life. Name an intoxicant and Angad can tell you what its high is like, where to get it and how to savour it. Now, nothing Angad says or does surprises me.

And so it was that while we were swerving through the empty roads of New Delhi last weekend, with Angad having drunk enough Grey Goose to quack instead of talk, I remembered Jeet Thayil’s Narcopolis. (Because that’s how I roll: instead of doing drugs, I think of books about junkies. Yup, I’m wild). Starting off in the Mumbai of the 1980s, the novel wanders a couple of decades and through the lives of people connected to one another only by their addiction. The most intriguing parts are set in a city that no longer exists. Shuklaji Street, deep in the crevice of Mumbai’s red-light district in the 1980s, has undergone gentrification and at least in the light of day, it has none of the striking squalor that Thayil describes in his book.

There’s a lot in Narcopolis that makes for fascinating reading and some of it is tiresome. A eunuch named Dimple, an enfant-terrible artist, a serial killer who bashes people’s heads in, a Chinese soldier who remained in India despite disliking the country—Thayil’s cast of characters is a mesmerising bunch. They have stories that force you to imagine people who are unaligned to any stereotype. For one thing, they are dauntingly well-read, thinking nothing of dropping names like Baudelaire and Tagore in their drug-addled conversations. While that may not be entirely credible, the fact that Thayil has written about junkies and people hooked on excess is a refreshing change from the characters that usually people Indian writing in English.

Particularly in recent times, it’s the quotidian that has been the focus of most authors. Novels set in Mumbai, whether they win prizes or become bestsellers, rarely offer a glimpse of the narcotics that are so deeply embedded in the city’s life. Yet everyone in real life talks about it and if they don’t do drugs, then they know people who do. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. There are doobies, lines of cocaine, strips of acid, pills and tablets cheerfully circulating through the city’s blood stream. Some indulge themselves occasionally while others are more compulsive. And their antics generally give rise to some fantastic stories and anecdotes, which circulate as cheerfully as the drugs themselves.

Drugs have generally been depicted as an indulgence of the very rich and a compulsion of the very poor, but it’s not just these extremes that keep the dealers in business. In urban India, drugs are recreation for a large section of the middle classes. You’d never guess from our literature. This isn’t to suggest Thayil’s Narcopolis reads like a social document. Its language is too carefully wrought and the characters are too surreal for the novel to feel like anything but fiction. Yet there are glimpses of reality in it, from the artist F. N. Souza to the Stoneman who killed pavement dwellers in the mid-1980s. I asked a friend who has read Narcopolis if a drug-induced high makes everything feel as surreal as the characters and events in the novel. “If only drugs made all of us quote Baburnama,” she replied. “To begin with, where the hell do you get the Baburnama in the first place and why on earth did you read it when you could smoke some dope instead?”

Sadly, my encyclopaedia of excess, Angad, hasn’t read Narcopolis and he has no interest in doing so. When I told him about Thayil’s novel, he said, “Let me tell you about opium” and took me whizzing around Delhi in a black and yellow ambassador. As I listened to him talk, it struck me—Angad sounds much like Thayil’s super-literate junkies despite the fact that he hasn’t read the book and he’s not an addict anymore. Perhaps Thayil was on to something when he wrote “Dreams leak from head to head; they travel between those who travel in the same direction … those who share the bonds of intoxication and death.”

Deepanjana Pal is a journalist and the author of The Painter: A Life of Ravi Varma. She is currently a consulting copy editor at Elle magazine.