Narcopolis By Jeet Thayil, Faber, Rs 499

Having been an “addict” for almost two decades, Jeet Thayil decided to kick the habit and write a novel. Narcopolis, he says, is “a kind of memorial” to the people he knew in Bombay’s opium dens, “a record of a world that no longer exists”. Perhaps it is also an addict’s memorial to his addiction, and a tribute to the literature of addiction. It certainly bears the traits of such literature. But Narcopolis is no product of drug-induced delirium. This is addiction recollected, with the crippling self-consciousness that sharpens with the departing haze.

The novel opens with the clarification that this story is really about Bombay. The prologue, which stretches over four and a half pages, is one long sentence — somewhat like one long drag from an opium pipe that “stitched the blue smoke from pipe to blood to eye to I”. The sentence is perhaps meant to stream from the page into the reading mind like smoke. This impression is helped by the title of the prologue — “Something for the mouth”. But this is a surprisingly discursive drag. It includes, among other things, a patient and complicated positioning of the narrative voice — “the I you’re imagining at this moment, a thinking someone who’s writing these words... an engineer-god in the machine, well, that isn’t the I who’s telling this story, that’s the I who’s being told”. Finally, you are informed that what follows is the story the pipe told. Armed with this little manual on how to read, you are deemed fit to proceed.

This is the story of people who frequent an opium den in Bombay in the 1980s. The novel eddies into the personal histories and experiences of each of the characters. There is Dimple, the well-read eunuch, who worked at a brothel before she learned to dispense her languid charms at the opium den. There is Rashid, the owner of the den; and Bengali, who works at the den and holds forth on Tagore, Satyajit Ray, Gandhi and Gina Lollobrigida. Then there is the ironically named Rumi. Trapped in an unhappy marriage with a couch potato, he wears Pink Floyd t-shirts and listens to Jimi Hendrix in a speeding car, before pulling the brakes and plunging into a violent sexual encounter. Clearly, vice must be redeemed by cultural references.

As promised, this story told by the “pipe of O”, follows the logic and cadences of an opium dream. Thayil seems to locate himself in a long tradition of addict-writers. At one point, he even has Dimple cite a category of influences — De Quincey, Cocteau, Baudelaire and Burroughs — the practitioners of “evil”, the poster boys of addiction. They preside over the novel like rock stars. De Quincey, in particular, seems to recur. Cityscapes turn into dreamscapes; the streets of Bombay suddenly acquire the contours of a nightmare, much like Oxford Street in Confessions of an English Opium-eater. De Quincey’s “man from Malay” is resurrected in Mr Lee, the exile from China who haunts Dimple’s opium dreams long after his death.

But De Quincey writes in the throes of addiction, imprisoned in a habit that is both his torment and his escape. His glittering opium dreams are attended by a powerful claustrophobia. Thayil will not let you luxuriate in such hallucinations. He has his characters interrupt their opium reveries to complain, “life is a joke, a fucking bad joke, or, no, a bad fucking joke”. Then he takes you to rehab and reads you lectures on god and violence. Pithy social commentary must be embedded in the pornographic dream that Dimple has in rehab; it has the subtitles, “Tradition” and “Values”, followed by “This is India”.

De Quincey’s London and Baudelaire’s Paris might have blossomed out of their tortured minds. Thayil never conjures up Bombay; his narrator is no flâneur walking the city into being. The city is already there — a massive, flaking, mouldering narcopolis — when he discovers it. It has already been sung of by other poets; the narrator is called Dom, perhaps in coy tribute to the Bombay poet, Dom Moraes. Thayil claims a more historical interest in the city. Bombay’s opium dens disappeared with the arrival of heroin and other chemical drugs. But even a city rising out of opium smoke cannot escape pious descriptions of poverty and squalor — “the poor, everywhere the poor”.

Thayil is clearly anxious to be relevant, making clumsy jabs into the polemical. With dazzling irony, he observes that the Pathar Maar or stone killer of Bombay is “a pure saviour of the victims of a failed experiment, the Planned Socialist State of India”. Rashid’s opium den is a tiny republic, where people from different places congregate. Later, a heroin-addled Rumi covers every state in the country in a colourful, if mystifying, rant. Then there is the rather mawkish engagement with communal harmony or the lack of it. The riots of 1992 filter into the dens, but a few moments of tension are frittered away in clichés. Smokers at the den ask Rumi why he thinks “Muslims cannot be trusted”, reminding him that he is named after a great Muslim poet, and a pimp recites a shai’iri to illustrate the point. Dimple slips from frock to sari to burkha. She is renamed Zeenat, after the film star, but wishes she were called Janice. Dilip Kumar’s real name, we are reminded, was Muhammad Yusuf Khan. You almost expect one of the characters to break into Amar, Akbar, Anthony....

But it is at the movies that this narcopolis finds some of its most endearing moments. Rashid takes Dimple to watch “Hare Krishna, Hare Ram”, his favourite film, and shouts out the dialogue along with the actors on screen. He goes back home and sits down to dinner, singing “Dum aloo dum”. These are moments of respite from the pontification. But then the debilitating self-consciousness returns, and it will not allow the story to breathe easy or the prose to sustain its intensity. In the end, you are left with a wan novel, the confessions of a reformed opium-eater. A novel that disappears in a wisp of smoke the moment you close the book.