Narcopolis

I was still unsteady on my feet. And when I saw a taxi out of the corner of my eye and turned to hail it, my own momentum carried me twice around. I fell heavily to the road, hurting my elbow. The PEN night watchman picked me up and put me in the cab. Then he did the same with Xavier. He told the driver to take me to my hostel in Colaba and to drive Xavier to his hotel, which was in the same general direction. And so it was that Newton Xavier ended up dropping me home. He did it angrily and he made a bitter speech.

‘Unbelievable. Where did Akash find you? You can barely walk and he puts you in charge of me. I end up minding the minder. What a lovely pile of shit.’

‘Let me understand this, you’re berating me?’

‘You’re welcome, asshole.’

*

He stared out of the window as the taxi sped past Hutatma Chowk and the tiered breasts of Flora and her friends, toward the sodium lights of Colaba Causeway and the Victorian ruins piled one on top of the other, once-grand facades behind which squalor lived, and more squalor, cobbled alleys lined with cots on which the better-off pavement sleepers settled for the night, as the speckled water, the septic seething water, the grey-green kala paani, the dirty living sun-baked water lapped against the sides of the broken city. This is how I would describe the taxi ride later, when I embellished the story of my evening with the famous drunken painter, who was taking small contented sips from a nip bottle of whisky.

‘Wait a minute,’ I said. ‘Didn’t I read somewhere that you were on the wagon?’

‘On, off, off, on. I have a friend who says you never really quit, all you do is take breaks.’

He nodded politely and took another sip. Then, as if he were asking about my job or the weather, he said, So, what are you on? I debated it. I did, for about half a minute, and then I thought how laughable it was that I was bashful about confessing my drug use to an alcoholic. I told him, and of course he wanted to see Rashid’s. He’d tried opium in Thailand, had in fact spent a month in Chiang Mai smoking too much for his own good, but that had been many years earlier. He’d heard about Bombay’s drug dens and he would be in my debt if I took him to the khana. If there was anything he could do for me in return, I should consider it done. And there was nothing to worry about; he would not talk about it. In fact, he had more to lose than I did if word got out that he’d been carousing in Bombay’s red light district. He could keep a secret. The question was, could I?

It was late, but I knew Rashid’s would be open and it was a simple thing to redirect the cab and keep the driver waiting with the promise of a tip. On the way, the painter continued to sip at his whisky without offering me a taste, and soon we were falling up the wooden steps to the khana, where Bengali sat bent over a newspaper and Dimple was making herself a pipe. For a moment I saw the room from a stranger’s eyes; I saw a wavering image, unreal, something out of the sixteenth century. I stood there in my bell-bottoms and I felt like an interloper from the future come to gawk at the poor and unfortunate who lived in a time before antibiotics and television and aeroplanes.

*

I ordered two pyalis and let Xavier go first. Who’s the old man? Dimple asked, having assumed from Xavier’s subdued manner and tone of voice that he was from Elsewhere (a place where Hindi wasn’t spoken or understood). But he replied in the same colloquial Bambayya she had used.

‘My dear, I’m not that much older than you. My hair’s white and my bones are rickety but that’s because I drink. I look older than I am. Whereas you look your age.’

I told Dimple she’d seen his work in a magazine some weeks earlier. She didn’t remember, but Bengali did. He spoke from deep inside a nod. Christ, Bengali said, from the Sanskrit ghrei, to rub, which in Greek became Christos, the anointed, which may mean that Christ is an Indo-European concept, much as your paintings suggest. And that was when Xavier realized that though Bengali’s eyes were closed he was looking directly at him. I reminded Dimple that she’d been disturbed by Xavier’s pictures, which was a pure reaction, maybe the most gratifying response an artist could expect. I was addressing Dimple, but I was speaking for Xavier’s benefit. 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. At the time, I still thought of Xavier as a civilian.

‘And now here he is in person,’ I said. ‘Isn’t it incredible?’

It was at this moment that Bengali whimpered in his dream and uttered a sentence nobody understood. We heard only the last word: kaun?