It’s creepy … yet kind of cool … to think that Jeet Thayil, author of Narcopolis, once skulked the opium dens of Mumbai, India.
Thayil—an addict for 20 years—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 you recoil in horror, knowing you’ll probably never set foot in Mumbai’s innards, you’re dying to know more about them.
Thayil, recipient of the 2013 South Asian Literature Prize and shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize, doesn’t give us a shock-and-awe kind of story, nor an account of an addiction per se (though if you know little about drugs, you’ll learn a lot). In fact, ruthlessness, filth and depravity—the guts of Mumbai’s underworld, and what makes it turn—along with opium-dependent existence turn out to simply be smokescreens for a story about genuine love and deep friendship … and how they exist where you’d least expect them.
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 pre-destined 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.”
Witness the eunuch, Dimple, main character of Narcopolis. Abject poverty and other forces beyond her control drive Dimple’s 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 on the floor in front of her, desperate for fixes. Why, Dimple asks … and we feel Thayil ask it too … do people who seemingly have it all—education, jobs, families, and prospects for the future—become addicts?
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. 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?
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