Narcopolis by Jeet Thayil

On reading the first sentence of Narcopolis you instantly know Jeet Thayil is a poet. The Prologue reads like a long sprawling verse, the language curling on the paper, rising and slipping into stories, images breathing and drifting, like a single line of smoke. 

Words are framed and measured with space for imagination to seep in.

Bombay, a city of mangroves, the Stoneman killer stalks the streets of sleepers and handcarts, a hallucinatory world of outcasts, opium dens, hijras, and travellers…

In the haze of the chandu khana characters wait to open up like synapses flowering in Jeet Thayil’s brain. 

The first exhalation comes from Syrian Christian Dom Ullis, a travelling drug addict who seeks out the best pipe in Rashid’s place. 

As the pipe is passed around the room others emerge and recede, each with their own stories, addictions and philosophies to leave behind.

There is Xavier, an alcoholic poet whose sexual perversions mix with an unsettling obsession with Sainthood; Rumi, an unhappily married businessman, who finds a release in violence, and Mr Lee, a Chinese refugee reveals his family’s trauma during the Mao’s cultural revolution; an unhappy bunch of bums, pimps and addicts who survive in poverty only by living off a hourly hit of feverish bliss. 

Narcopolis covers the hard subjects of drugs, sex, and the slums, and admittedly it is at times difficult to read. Scenes of matter-of-fact brutality stand out in the riots of Bombay’s streets and behind hijra brothel’s closed doors. The novel’s theme of degradation is embodied the main character Dimple, an ennuch who feeds her growing addiction through prostitution, and who is used and violated by all of the characters. 

Often the reader will allow themselves a restful moment of clarity and intake some clear air, an option the characters are otherwise denied. 

The unusual prose, however, is something to admire in its intangible and unstable form which successfully evokes the fogginess of addiction. It makes sense then, once you learn that Narcopolis took five years to write and is a recount of the Jeet Thayil’s twenty year career as a drug addict. His poetic writing captures the remarkable experiences of the poorest of the poor and evanesces with a faint memory of Bombay’s forgotten characters.