Narcopolis

He looked at his hands and was surprised to see he was still carrying the bottles of whisky and the cocaine. He put the bottles on the ground, carefully, giving his entire attention to the action, but he was unable to clear his head. He heard his son make small sounds that seemed to come from far away, or from a tunnel, a narrow tunnel that smelled of fresh mutton. Then Rashid heard crows, sudden caws from directly above him though there were no birds in the building or even in the sky outside. He made a fist around the vials in his hand and hit the boy on the head and Jamal sat in the dust of the stairwell, his sobs audible in the street. Rashid stood over him, shoulders heaving, and hit him again. Then he saw the beediwallah and his customers staring at him from the doorway. What? he said to them, his rage now mixed with shame, and when the men disappeared, he put the cocaine in his pocket, picked up the whisky and used his free hand to drag the boy up the stairs.

Chapter Two Bengali

It was too early for customers. When Rashid arrived, agitated and muttering to himself, only Dimple and Bengali were in the khana. The old man kept his accounts and looked after the shop, and had been with him since the early days, when Rashid was a tapori selling charas near Grant Road Station. Bengali spent most of his time locking and unlocking a tin box that served as the register, putting in money, paying it out. He’d been working for Rashid for many years, and no one knew anything about his life before he came to Shuklaji Street, except that he’d once been a clerk in a government office in Calcutta. He was between fifty and seventy, wrinkled skin on bone, and he spoke English with an affected British accent.

‘Syzygy,’ he said one afternoon, and he repeated the word in case the student had not heard him. ‘That is the reason the world has gone mad.’

‘What?’

‘Syzygy. It has never happened before and it won’t happen again.’

‘No, probably not. It’s a once in a lifetime occurrence.’

‘How can it not affect everything? Nine planets, lined up on the same side of the sun. Does it mean the end of the world as some people think?’

‘It’s tempting to see it that way, I suppose, kind of like a unified theory of apocalypse.’

‘You understand, all the planets in a row, like sitting ducks. I say it’s an important question, the question of syzygy. Maybe the most important question of all.’

Bengali was in his usual position, sitting on his haunches with his head between his bony knees. He seemed to be smiling but it was difficult to tell, because his face was so thin and his skin shone with a papery yellow light. He told the student not to worry. Chandulis and charasis were like cockroaches, he said, they would survive anything, including the end of the world. He quoted a Punjabi proverb or poem or limerick:

Charasi, khadi na marsi.

Gar marsi, tho chaalis admi agay karsi.

And he talked about the historical tradition of the apocalypse myth and other matters, for ten minutes, very slowly, like a scholar, and the student listened open-mouthed. What Bengali was doing, Rashid thought, was making up big what-ifs, making them up out of thin air. Bengali was a what-if. He talked about mythological, religious and political figures as if he knew them well, knew their numerous personal failings and feet of clay. He was on first-name terms with Jesus, Nehru and Gandhi, Cassius Clay, Winston Churchill, Gina Lollobrigida and Jean-Paul Sartre. Would Orpheus’s story have been different if he’d chosen another, slightly more cheerful song? Bengali asked the student. Perhaps, in his distraction, he made a mistake, an error of judgment, and he chose the wrong tune. If you’re singing for the Furies, I personally would choose something to please them. What if he had chosen wisely? What would have happened? Would he have kept his wife and his head? And purely as an aside, mind you, I’ll point out that the real interest of the tale is the psychological portrait of a person in grief. Because, if you know anything about grief, you know that its main outward manifestation is a deep distraction, like absent-mindedness without the insouciance.