Narcopolis

He dropped his voice slightly, which only served as a signal to the men around us. He said: The thing to remember is one small but supremely important fact: pimps are cowards. Pimps are worthless. Pimps make their money from the weak and the diseased, from men and women whose will has deserted them, who will never fight or put up any kind of resistance, who want to die. Once you know this, that a pimp is a cowardly little fuck, there’s no problem; you can stand up to them like a man. You’ve got to face facts and the fact is life is a joke, a fucking bad joke, or, no, a bad fucking joke. There’s no point taking it seriously because whatever happens, and I mean whatever the fuck, the punch line is the same: you go out horizontally. You see the point? No fucking point.

I thought: He’s trying to impress me. I thought: Chandulis are slaves to the pipe, which diminishes us in the world, and we make up the difference with boasts and lies.

Then the tall man sat up and yelled across the room at Bengali. He said, ‘Can I get a pyali, boss, today sometime? I’ve been here half an hour and I’m tired of waiting.’ Someone coughed and the room became still. Bengali, very reluctantly, it seemed to me, put a pyali on Dimple’s tray.

‘I don’t think they like you very much here,’ I said.

‘Ah, fuck that, I wouldn’t come to a place like this without protection.’ He looked meaningfully at his briefcase. ‘So, where you from originally?’

‘Kerala, South India.’

‘Undu Gundu Land, I know where it is. You get any trouble?’

‘If I make the mistake of speaking Malayalam to the locals, yes.’

‘Locals? Like me, you mean? Well, not to worry, things are changing: you Southies will be okay. We’re going after bigger game.’ He dropped his voice and said, ‘Mozzies.’

‘Is that the new strategy, guaranteed to win friends and generate income?’

He propped himself on an elbow to get a better look at me. ‘Chief? You should watch your mouth. Maybe you’ve got a bellyful of opium and you don’t care. Or you want to go off and you’re looking for an easy way. Or maybe your head is full of bugs, like me.’ He was smiling, a wide patronizing smile, and when he held out his hand, his grip was firm and moist. ‘Anyway, name’s Rumi. And you?’

‘Dom.’

‘With a name like that, you’re fucked. All you have in common with these people is smoke.’

I said, ‘What’s the music you’re listening to?’

*

He handed me the headphones. The sound was high-pitched, like the soundtrack of a movie in which random scenes had been strung together, or cut up and played backwards, or deliberately placed out of order. Bottles clinked and a door creaked open. A shot rang out. A child whispered, Is he here? Where is he? A woman wept and said, Nahi, nahi. There was the sound of water falling from a great height. A door creaked shut and a bottle smashed on a tiled floor. A woman’s high voice fell deeply through the octaves and a shot rang out. A man panted like a dog. A child wept and water lapped against the side of a boat or a body. A bottle of champagne popped and a doorbell rang. James Bond guitars played against cowboy string orchestration. The child said, Here he is. Where is here? The woman’s voice, soaked in reverb and whisky, executed another perfect fall and I experienced a sudden drop in my head like a vertigo rush. I heard the sound of water and Dimple handed me the pipe. I put it against my lips and heard a man shout, Monica, my darling, and I felt so dizzy that I had to close my eyes. Then a woman said, Is he here? and a child whispered, Nahi, and a shot rang out and everything went silent. I took the headphones off and gave them back to Rumi.

He said, ‘Bombay blues.’

Chapter Three A Painter Visits