Narcopolis

‘Garad wrecked everything. If we’d stayed with opium my place would still be open. I’d be making money every day instead of sitting on a chair saying, if, if, if. So many people would be alive: Dimple, even your friend, the crazy one with the hammer. No, maybe not that sisterfucker.’

Instead of saying behenchodh like everyone else, Rashid’s variation was behen ko chodhu, and the way he said it made the words sound Arabic, a guttural clearing of the throat.

I said, ‘Rumi.’

‘Yes, him. Came here with a set of teeth, old dentures in a jam bottle. He said they were Mahatma Gandhi’s and tried to sell them to me for ten thousand rupees. I told him, chief, you’re a crazy man and this is a chandu khana not a pagal khana. He liked that. He said the dentures were Gandhi’s, totally genuine, money back guarantee. He said he got them from a man who got them from a man who stole them from Gandhi’s son, the drunk, who was neglected by the father. He said the government would give me a cash reward, saying all this loudly, and people laughing at him. I imagined the newspaper headlines: MUSLIM DRUG TRAFFICKER BUYS GHANDI’S TEETH. I told him to get them out of the khana before there was another riot. So this pagal smokes some garad and goes away. The jam bottle with the teeth, he leaves behind.’

The girl came in with a tray of tea and biscuits.

He said, ‘Years later I went for a talk at Bhavan’s College by one of Gandhi’s grandsons, a scholar of some kind. Afterwards I asked him if it was true, what Rumi said, that the old man had neglected his family. You know what he told me?’

‘I can’t even guess.’

‘He said the children may have suffered slightly from inattention, but the next generation made up for it. Of course he was bragging. He said the sins of the fathers may be visited on the children but the good is visited on the grandchildren. He was a tall corpse-like man with glasses that were too big for his face. He seemed annoyed. He told me I didn’t understand a thing about Gandhi, nobody did, no one understood that for him the most important thing in the world, more important than ideas and politics, were the simple facts of living. Life lived in quest of itself was the greatest art form. But the way he was saying these things, it was as if he didn’t believe his own words.’

‘How did Rumi die?’

‘Someone smashed his head with a piece of concrete pipe. They say it was the Pathar Maar, but I don’t think so. I think the Pathar Maar died a long time ago, or moved to some other city. Maybe Rumi met a copycat. Case is still unsolved.’

Rashid got up slowly. He took a set of keys from his pocket and gave them to the girl. He told her to take me to the flat on the half landing. He said, Zeenat’s old place. There’s a trunk under the bed. She’ll help you bring it up.

*

It was an old Bombay apartment with high ceilings and tiled floors. The front door opened into the living room, which had a marble-topped Irani table and some chairs. The rest of the space was crowded with computer equipment and obsolete or broken keyboards and terminals. The girl went through into the back and nodded at a tin trunk that lay wedged under the single bed. I pulled it out and between us we carried it up to Rashid. He unhooked a clasp and threw back the top and a handful of newspaper cuttings and documents fell on the floor. They were in Chinese and there was a photograph of a young officer in uniform. Rashid pulled out a striped shopping bag, the kind Bombay housewives stuff to the brim with coriander, onions and tomatoes. Inside was a pipe, the only one that had survived. He handed it to me. I sniffed the bowl for its long-gone scent and I thought I smelled it, like molasses and sleep and sickness.

‘You can have it,’ Rashid said. ‘I don’t want it.’

I saw a jar, with the dentures Rumi had tried to sell Rashid, and I asked if I could have them.

‘What will you do with it? Sell it to the government for millions of rupees? Take whatever you want. Jamal wants to throw it all away.’

I picked my way through the things in the trunk, making two small piles. The opium pipe and dentures I put in one pile. I added a newspaper cutting from the Indian Express, a copy of a school textbook, some notebooks, and an issue of Sex Detective.

Rashid said, ‘What will you do with all of this?’

‘Who knows? Make a museum exhibit, maybe.’

‘Yes, why not? Put our shame on display, so people understand the lowest of the low, prostitutes and criminals and drug addicts, people with no faith in God or man, no faith in anything except the truth of their own senses. This is a worthwhile thing to you?’