Narcopolis

He turned into Foras Road and entered Timely Watch Showroom, ringing the bell on his way in, the shop empty, as it usually was. Salim was in the office in the back and he got up when he saw Rashid, came around the desk with the city’s newest fashion accessory clipped to his belt, the headphones pumping a tinny beat into his skull, some disco beat, Saturday Night Fever, what else? Salim’s models were John Travolta and Amitabh Bachchan, and he picked up most of his style and language from the two tough-guy actors, or so said Rashid’s wife. Today he was wearing light blue bell-bottoms and platform shoes, his shirt the same shade of blue as his trousers. His hair, parted on the side, fell to his shoulders in untidy bunches. Rashid went to Salim’s side of the desk, to the leather executive chair with the fancy headrest, and he pulled an envelope from his pocket and slammed it down for the pleasure of hearing that cash-money bang. And for the pleasure of seeing Salim jump to attention and take a mirror out of the desk drawer and, tenderly, a bundle of vials. Rashid had a hundred-rupee note already rolled. He spilled the contents of a vial on the mirror and snorted it before Salim had a chair pulled up to the other side of the desk. Salim was being respectful, properly so: he didn’t touch the envelope.

‘Did you get the whisky?’

‘Of course, Rashidbhai.’

‘“Of course, Rashidbhai,” so polite, like I’m your uncle. Did you get Red or Black?’

‘Black Label, your choice. Not so easy to find these days.’

He made himself comfortable in Salim’s chair, the seat tilting backwards in tiny clicks, some special mechanism that made minute adjustments for his weight and let him lean all the way back without any danger of tipping over.

‘Nice chair, yaar, you must be doing well.’

‘Doing okay, bhai. I work hard, I make money. I stop working, I’m on the street.’

Rashid knew this was the truth. There wasn’t much of a margin in Salim’s line of work, selling cocaine and black-market whisky for the Lala. He did some pocket-maar business on the side, risky work with questionable results, and he spent the day at his boss’s watch shop taking care of non-existent customers. He’d been with the Lala for less than a year and already it was showing on his face, the shadows scored like leather under his eyes. The Lala picked his boys young and put them to work when they got too old for his tastes. The old gangster liked to quote the Baburnama: ‘Women for procreation, boys for pleasure, melons for delight.’

Salim handed two bottles of Johnnie Walker to Rashid, who checked that the seals hadn’t been tampered with and there were no punctures in the caps. He held the bottles up to the light to examine the colour and Salim asked if he’d seen the new Amitabh Bachchan movie, Polyester Khadi, in which Bachchan played a policeman’s son who becomes a criminal because he sees how hard his father’s life is. Rashid said no, he hadn’t seen it and he wasn’t planning to, he had better things to do than watch Amitabh fucking Bachchan. Salim said the best scene in the film was the showdown between policeman father and gangster son.

‘You know what he tells his father, played by the veteran, Sanjeev Kumar?’

In response, Rashid spilled a small mountain of powder on the mirror and looked up, the hundred-rupee note aloft in his hand. Salim stood up to say the line, delivering it in a bored baritone very much like the tall actor’s. ‘Are you a man or a pyjama?’

Rashid said, ‘And what is Sanjeev fucking Kumar’s reply?’

Salim got up again.

‘If I am a pyjama at least I am cent per cent Indian khadi, not American polyester.’

*

Rashid bent to the mirror and he was startled by the sight of his face up close, blue veins swollen at the temple, skin the colour of clotted milk, a sickly sap of green stubble on the jaw. His hair was too long, almost as long as Salim’s, he needed a cut and shampoo. Paan had stained his mouth a permanent red. Worst were his eyes, bloody and clouded at the same time. Then he felt the back of his throat go numb. There was a close thump in his ears. He rubbed a bit of powder into his gums and a wave of nausea hit him and he looked away from his degraded image. But there was half a line still left on the mirror. He snorted it up. His heart beat so erratically and so fast he was sure it would leap right out of his chest and land on the glass-topped desk.

‘Bhai, that chanduli at your khana, Dimple, who makes pipes.’

‘What?’

‘Dimple.’

‘What about her?’

‘She makes pipes in your khana.’

‘I know what she does, she works for me.’

‘She’s a hijra, right? She was a man once?’

‘Long ago. Her dick was probably bigger than yours.’

‘So what I was wondering, bhai, is why she looks so feminine. I mean, if you didn’t know she was a hijra you’d think she was fully a woman.’