Narcopolis

I got up at midnight. There was a twelve-thirty curfew at my hostel and in any case it was time we were on our way. But Xavier wanted biryani and kababs, which he hoped Bengali would be kind enough to bring from Delhi Durbar’s late-night window. He wanted more whisky and maybe another pipe. When I got up, Dimple did too. Xavier asked why she was leaving. Was she afraid of being alone with an old man? She told me to go ahead. She would stay and shut up shop.

The cab was still waiting and I took it home to Colaba. In my room, which faced the street, there was a smell of camphor from the evening’s anti-mosquito effort. I opened the window and the moonlight lit up the bed and desk and mirror (the only furnishings) as if I’d turned on an electric lamp. I arranged myself in the usual way, on my back with my hands folded across my chest. I slept and woke suddenly and found that the sheets were wet and there was a gash between my legs. I tried to stop the blood with my hands but it soaked into my trousers and filled my shoes. I fell asleep with my shoes on, I thought stupidly, touching the crusted blood that had formed on my thighs. I looked on the floor but there was nothing there except moonlight and dust. I was reaching blindly for the telephone when I woke up. It was noon and I was in the same position in which I’d fallen asleep. Though I’d slept for ten hours I was exhausted and sweaty. I had a shower and ate lunch in the mess. I did the laundry and went back to my room where I arranged and rearranged the objects on my desk. By four in the afternoon I could think of nothing else and I was on my way out the door when the hostel manager said there was someone waiting to see me. In the lounge, a grand name for what was in reality nothing more than a corridor without light or air, was Akash Iskai reading a newspaper. He wore a blue T-shirt that had been washed many times and he looked slightly less like a Hindustani musician than he had at Xavier’s event. The poet had gotten my address from the PEN watchman, who said Xavier and I had gone off together in a taxi. Iskai had assumed his friend would be fine, but he knew now his friend was not fine at all. Xavier had disappeared. He wasn’t at his hotel and he hadn’t turned up for a press conference at the gallery where the new show was about to open. Where was he? Did I know? Iskai said he felt responsible for the latest disaster that had overtaken the poor man. He would be blamed if something had happened because the PEN event had been his idea and he had organized the funds to bring Xavier to Bombay. I thought about what Xavier had said the night before, that he didn’t want it to get around that he’d been smoking opium. And, I thought, Xavier is a man of the world. It would be wrong not to offer him the minimum respect one gave an adult, which was the option to let himself down, with a crash perhaps, if that was what he wished to do. I told Iskai that Xavier had dropped me off first and gone in the direction of his Colaba hotel, that he seemed fine at the time. And of course I hadn’t noted the taxi’s registration number, why would I? Iskai went off, still upset, and I went to Rashid’s.

*

The khana was full, but Dimple wasn’t there and neither was Xavier. I ordered a pyali and smoked it slowly, at Dimple’s station, where Pagal Kutta was tending the pipe. He was the most incompetent pipeman in the khana. His pipes burned too fast and too strong. Worse, he was in a rush for you to finish so he could smoke the dregs. But it was the way he sucked at the pipe that had earned him his nickname, because he huffed and snorted like a mad dog. I endured the smoke he made me and I endured Rashid’s stories while I waited for Dimple. Rashid was talking about the Pathar Maar’s latest killing. He had struck late the night before and the newspapers hadn’t gotten around to reporting it. He’d picked off a mother and baby who were sleeping under the Grant Road Bridge. He’d crushed the woman’s head with a stone from the pavement and taken the baby by his ankles and smashed him against a wall. Others had been sleeping nearby but nobody heard a cry. It wasn’t until someone woke to use the toilet that the murders were discovered.

‘The Pathar Maar is a Congress stooge,’ said Rashid. ‘This is the culmination of the Garibi Hatao campaign. What do you say, Bengali?’

When he laughed, the others joined in, pipemen, customers, even Bengali laughed, though it was clear not everybody understood the joke: 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. Dimple came in an hour or so later and Rashid said something that made her duck her head and go straight to work. And when I asked Bengali about the man in the kurta who’d come to the khana the previous night, he looked at me blankly, as if he had no idea who I was, much less what I was talking about.

*