Narcopolis

Author: Jeet Thayil

• She said that men, whatever their sexual preferences, had more in common with other men than with women. It was possible they had more in common with males of other species, with chimpanzees, goats and dogs, particularly dogs, as she’d explained to me before, than with women.

• Genuine union is impossible; all we can hope for is cohabitation.

• The thing to remember is one small but supremely important fact: pimps are cowards.

• There’s no point taking it seriously because whatever happens, and I mean whatever the fuck, the punch line is the same: you go out horizontally. You see the point? No fucking point.

• I was showing him off to her, it’s true, but I was also showing her off to him. Addicts are alike in that way, we’re always eager to show civilians our subterranean relationships and outlaw skills.

• There was nothing incredible about it, she said. I thought it was so because I spoke English, because I read books, and because my parents paid for my education and my upkeep.

• For me everything was surprising, the world was full of wonder, the most random idiotic occurrence was incredible because my luck made it so. For people like her, for the poor, the only incredible thing in the whole world was money and the mysterious ways in which it worked.

• She’s right, Xavier said. Only the rich can afford surprise and or irony.

• The poor don’t ask questions, or they don’t ask irrelevant questions. They can’t afford to.

• An addict, if you don’t mind me saying so, is like a saint. What is a saint but someone who has cut himself off, voluntarily, voluntarily, from the world’s traffic and currency?

• some among that group of career criminals and addicts didn’t know if it was 1978 or 1975, much less the minutiae of government policy.

• He said, This Bombay? Only nice two month of year, December and January, rest of time it no place for human being.

• Old Chinese saying, you don’t need take off your pant to fart.

• It was a quote from the Mahabharata that the newspaper had placed on its editorial page as a thought for the day: Only eunuchs worship Fate. The girak had made a joke of it, asking her if it was true, but the words had stayed with her.

• In fact, without the peasant the nation would plunge into a crisis. Without writers, the nation would most likely prosper.

• A deep stain spread across the tablecloth and the commissar watched in fascination, as if it were the stain of communism itself, the unstoppable stain that had spread across the world and dyed it the colour of blood.

• A man who does not return to his native place is like a man who dresses in finery and sits in the dark, he told her.

• Indians were too mild, said the paanwallah, and it was Gandhi’s fault. The old man had taken a race of bloodthirsty warriors, taught them non-violence and made them into saints and grass eaters.

• Chandulis and charasis were like cockroaches, he said, they would survive anything, including the end of the world.

• A man’s reputation depended on never seeming intoxicated.

• The beggar woman was completely still, a black marble statue listening intently to the decades as they passed through her; the salt march to freedom; the years of upheaval and bloodletting and so-called Independence; the years of the Pakistan wars when headlights were painted black to keep automobiles safe from enemy jets; the years of regulation and control and planned socialism; the years of failure.

• It’s a funny thing, only the uneducated set so much stock by education.

• When you go to school you realize how little it means, because the street belongs to whoever takes

• When you go to school you realize how little it means, because the street belongs to whoever takes it.

• ‘Kaam,’ said Bengali, as if to himself, ‘is work in Hindi, but desire or lust in Sanskrit. So kaamvali has a double meaning, which this gentleman is doubtless aware of.’

• She admired the uses to which women put the sari, how they wore it without underwear, slept in it, bathed in it, used it as a towel and comforter, and the convenience, to simply lift it up if you wanted to pee or if there was a customer.

• She went out in the burkha and she saw the way the men looked at the lipstick on her mouth and the kaajal around her eyes. The men looked at her, Hindus, Muslims, Christians, they all looked.

• She bought a clutch purse and paid him in small notes, grubby one- and two- and five-rupee notes that she dug out of her bra. The vendor took the notes with a smile, making sure their fingers touched.

• No, she said, looking at the semi-circles under her eyes, so dark they were like bruises. No, I’m like a woman whose only admirer hanged himself so long ago that she can’t remember his name or why he killed himself or whether she misses him; all she’s sure of is her own solitude and regret and, above all, her anger.

• No, I’m like a woman whose only admirer hanged himself

• She was always tired, so tired she woke up exhausted, which wasn’t surprising, since she spent most of her time watching Doordarshan.

• He said he wanted to do what poor people do, eat the air on Chowpatty, eat the air and drink the breeze and enjoy.

• she put on a black-and-white chiffon polka-dot that was the happiest thing she owned.

• A Spaniard at the khana called the actress Zeenat A Man – he had to explain the joke – because he said there was something drag-queen glamorous about her.

• Yes, I’ve never been so happy. It’s good to run away from home when nobody needs you and you have so much love to share with the world.

• Parents, why do they have us? A moment of pleasure and they’re saddled for life. They don’t really want us.

• This is the movie that got me into drugs. This is why I opened my first adda and became a hippie. The only thing I can’t stand is that Dev Anand.

• He told her to move to the back seat and climbed in beside her, already conscious of her stink, what was it, garlic? Asafoetida? She’d been cooking recently and she had a powerful body odour, which excited him.

• Children were at a hopeless disadvantage; they were unsuited for the world. They were short and ungainly and stupid, half-people, dwarf bundles of ectoplasm and shit, stunted organisms incapable of finding food or keeping their asses clean.

• Her manner had changed almost to the month and day that he’d lost the job at the agency and taken up employment at her father’s brokerage. In that case, if money was the lubricant that made her agree to sex, what was the difference between her and the woman he’d paid earlier in the evening?

• It was difficult to buy fruits and vegetables, but garad was available in plenty.

• In fact talking about something is a way of not jinxing it, because if you say it, it won’t happen. He didn’t know this basic fact because he was still an amateur when it came to superstitions and she on the other hand was a master of the science, and that was were they left

• She said, In fact talking about something is a way of not jinxing it, because if you say it, it won’t happen. He didn’t know this basic fact because he was still an amateur when it came to superstitions and she on the other hand was a master of the science, and that was were they left it.

• They held their hands to their mouths and kissed the tips of their fingers. White smoke lifted from their cupped palms.

• The day’s emissions had settled into night-time mode, a toxic dust cloud that sat on the tarmac and flavoured the air with the taste of industrial effluents.

• He wound the window down and took a deep breath, filling his lungs with the usual acrid metal of Bombay.

• The city claimed seven islands from the sea. In the rainy season, the sea claimed them back.

• For two days the sky was iron and on the third the rain poured itself into every crevice. It didn’t let up for a week.

• The sky was the colour of someone’s black eye. Cows stood in the water, too bewildered to move. Snapped power lines sputtered near a movie theatre.

• The only non-chooths in the entire country are Maharashtrians.

• The sea was swollen with waves and rain. There were no birds in the sky, or there were fluorescent birds that piped harsh melodies, birds that revealed themselves to be kites, and moments later revealed themselves to be not fluorescent at all but transparent, and not kites but crows, transparent albino crows barking dissonance, not melody,

• The words were in German, but I got it, the function of opera, I understood that it was the true expression of grief.

• And for a moment I understood what it was to be God, to take someone’s life and ash it like a beedi.

• Doubt is another word for self-hate, because if you doubt yourself and your position in the world you open yourself to failure.

• he will talk about the Miles Davis album Kind of Blue, which he says is an example of heroin time, not musical time,

• The city had changed, but it was still a conglomeration of slums on which high-rises had been built.

• Communication between animals, for example, was wordless and highly effective. Perhaps communication between father and son should be the same, mostly silent.

• He thought of the strange one-word text messages Jamal and his friends sent each other: ‘gr8’ and ‘rotflmfao’ and ‘ftds’. It was as if they didn’t care whether they were understood, or they took pleasure in being misunderstood, or they’d decided that the rewards of obscurity outweighed the rewards of clarity.

• This is the story the pipe told me. All I did was write it down, one word after the other, beginning and ending with the same one, Bombay.