Narcopolis

Dimple shook her head once. 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 rich crave meaning. The first thing they ask when faced with eternity, and in fact the last thing, is: excuse me, what does this mean? The poor don’t ask questions, or they don’t ask irrelevant questions. They can’t afford to. All they can afford is laughter and ghosts. Then there are the addicts, the hunger addicts and rage addicts and poverty addicts and power addicts, and the pure addicts who are addicted not to substances but to the oblivion and tenderness that substances engender. 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? The saint talks to flowers, a daffodil, say, and he sees the yellow of it. He receives its scent through his eyes. Yes, he thinks, you are my muse, I take heart from your stubbornness, a drop of water, a dab of sunshine, and there you are with your gorgeous blooms. He enjoys flowers but he worships trees. He wants to be the banyan’s slave. He wants to think of time the way a tree does, a decade as nothing more than some slight addition to his girth. He connives with birds, and gets his daily news from the sound the wind makes in the leaves. When he’s hungry he stands in the forest waiting for the fall of a mango. His ambition is the opposite of ambition. Most of all, like all addicts, he wants to obliterate time. He wants to die, or, at the very least, to not live.

Dimple said, ‘I need a translator to understand you.’

‘I think I do too,’ said Xavier, ‘I think maybe I’m going off my head again.’

I said, ‘Saints and addicts, I like that.’

And that was when Dimple asked the question I couldn’t answer for many years. She asked why it was that I, who could read and write and had a family that cared enough about me to finance my education, who could do anything I wanted, go anywhere and be anyone, why was I an addict? She didn’t understand it.

At the time, I couldn’t either. I didn’t know my own compulsions well enough to reply. Instead, I broke out the pharmaceutical morphine I’d stolen from the office stores and made myself a small shot. Xavier had one too.

*

When she tapped the stem he took the pipe and held it comfortably, the way a man holds a telescope, with two or three fingers. She said later that she felt his eyes travel the length of her body and settle on her cunt and all the while he pulled at the pipe, the sound loud in the room, and she felt that he was sucking at her amputated penis, sucking in a way that would end her life if she didn’t resist him. Some time later, she heard the sound of water, running water, as if a tap were open somewhere, or not the sound of water exactly, but a voice imitating the sound of water, a voice that was low and uninterested and busy and she realized it was his voice and he was speaking to her. Eunuchs used to carry quills in their turbans, he said, like a portable penis that could be attached when they wished to urinate. I’m sure you could get something custom made, bone or hard plastic, a funnel of some sort, something you could carry with you. Imagine how much easier it would be. You wouldn’t have to sit, you could stand and pee like a man. She noticed that his eyes protruded like the eyes of a snake or a lizard, pop eyes that didn’t blink or waver. She understood that it was very important to close her own eyes and breathe calmly. But when she shut her eyes she felt him in her anal cavity, a dry grating pressure that threw words into her head she could not dislodge: Satan. Shaitan. Shat On. She opened her eyes in panic and just then he exhaled a great cloud of smoke, too great for a single pair of lungs, and she saw only his torso clad in white kurta and churidars: where the head should have been there was thick vapour, as if a burning sword had decapitated him, as if inside he was all smoke, a man-shaped river of smoke that was leaking into the room. Later she said it was at this moment that she began to pray and the prayer that rose to her lips was not Muslim or Hindu but Christian, and she said it to herself in English: Hell mary midriff god pray fussiness now and at thee owruff ower death.

*