Narcopolis

At Bandra Station, stranded commuters were playing card games on their briefcases. The weighing machine was silent and on its base a small boy slept with his mouth open. I saw a fight break out among a group of boys who couldn’t have been more than ten years of age. It didn’t stop until a cop came along and clubbed them with his lathi, clubbed them repeatedly. Not even the sight of their own blood pulled them off each other. I saw a woman with her leg in a cast bang her crutch against the weighing machine to wake up the boy sleeping on its base. She shooed him off, sat and lit a beedi. I saw three small children set up a stone under the eaves to chop onions for lunch. They were focused on their task, oblivious to everything, like practitioners of a great and dying art. It might have been there that I saw Rumi, or if not there then not far away, under the eaves on Platform One, or he might have been facing the other way, looking towards the sea and the road to Bandstand, I don’t remember now, but there he was in the drowned light, with his pleated trousers and white shirt, his ballpoint aligned with the vertical, no colour on his person except for the saffron tilak near his shaved hairline. He yawned like an old man and fixed his watery gaze on me and said: Crazy fucking city. Then he said the dealers were out of maal and we would have to go to Bombay Central. But he didn’t move from his spot. He lit a Charminar and offered one to me. Try this, he said. No filter, no menthol: compared to Charminars, Camels are crap and Gauloises are for homos.

*

The rain hammered down and I saw or I thought I saw Rumi’s tall figure in front of me and I splashed after it. After a while of this, I lost track of time, I could have been anyone, I lost myself, which is the reason people like me get into drugs in the first place. Just then, a man splashed past astride an oil drum, paddling with his hands, riding the drum like a water scooter. The rain streamed into my glasses and I lost sight of him, but I was affected by the joy on his face. A red double-decker stopped and we got on. Water ran in sheets down its rusted metal sides. From the bus’s upper deck the view was legendary, like footage from a documentary. The sky was the colour of someone’s black eye. Cows stood in the water, too bewildered to move. Snapped power lines sputtered near a movie theatre. People stepped carefully on the dividers in the middle of the road. They walked in a long broken line and they carried boxes and dead umbrellas and plastic bags filled with flotsam. When they saw the bus some of them tried to run after it but the others stood where they were. We got off at Grant Road and made our way to Hijde ki Galli. The shops and restaurants were open, but under the bridge, where the crowd of shoppers was usually too thick to negotiate, there were no people, just bamboo scaffolding standing in the floodwater, tethered to nothing.

*

The Playhouse Lodge had once been a theatre, three storeys, peaked roof, gothic parapets and arches, and a grand colonial name. But English fell out of use and the Playhouse came to be known by a phonetic variation, Pilahouse, with a nonsensical bilingual meaning, yellowhouse. Now it was a lodge in name only, there were no rooms and nobody lived there who expected room service or clean sheets. It was where Rashid had set up shop after his opium room on Shuklaji Street finally closed. The staircase that led to the Pilahouse was made of rough wood, its planks warped, the lower steps lost in water. Half a dozen men stood huddled near the top. The air was heavy with flies and the smell from a public toilet next door. Rumi wanted to cut the line but the man at the top of the staircase wouldn’t give up his spot. He was huddled in a Mandrax stoop and he mumbled baby talk. He said, Hold on, wait his sheeting, understand? He said, You want, you wait, like. Rumi reached around him to bang on the door. There was a conversation, Rumi’s words rapid, monotone, the Mandrax man hoarse and slow.

‘So we’re waiting for the African to shit, that’s what you’re telling me?’

‘Yes,’ said the Mandrax man, and he laughed without making a sound. ‘He brought the garad in his ass and he’s been trying all day to shit.’

‘That’s completely fucking disgusting.’

Rumi made a face but he made no move to leave.

‘The shit’s in his shit, that’s why we’re waiting?’

‘That’s how it gets here. Mules, like.’

‘African donkey, more like.’

‘You want government-controlled health warnings? Everything neat and organized, nutrition information on the side and best-before dates, stuff doesn’t get you off take it to the Consumer Protection Bureau, petition the dealer?’