Narcopolis

Rumi and Pepsi were on the couch, smoking a joint of heavy Bombay black, afloat on the smoke and conversation. The Mandrax man was there too, bent, his eyes wide with understanding or stupidity. The hijra, on the floor, smoked tiny bits of powder on a strip of tin foil. She cut an empty Gold Flake packet into long tapers that she lit from a candle and held to the foil, and when the powder melted and a coil of smoke appeared she sucked it through a foil-lined straw. She held the drag deep in her lungs until it disappeared into her cells where it mutated and multiplied. Her hair was cut very short and there was a wound on her chin, a deep excavation filled with mucus. I was watching her, I couldn’t look away, and when she caught me looking her eyes filled with water and that was when I realized it was Dimple and I was ashamed that it had taken me so long to recognize her. She pointed at the hole in her chin but she didn’t speak. I’d seen her last about ten years earlier, when she’d been Rashid’s personal pipe maker and known for her beauty. There was no trace of it now in the white stubble on her cheeks and the thin honey-coloured hair. We had once been friends, but I’d never thought of coming to see her or to ask after her. There was always some sort of crisis, a crisis every day, and heroin trumped friendship every time. Now, I did the easy thing: I took the money out of my pockets, kept some for a taxi home and what was left I put on the floor beside her. It amounted to a little over six hundred rupees. I wanted to do something more but the truth of it was I was too high to care. In a corner a television flickered: mute images of healthy men and women, white, running in slow motion on a beach. There was clean sand and sunshine, the water clear, the colour so vivid it seemed as unreal as the people running in their tight swimsuits. I said something, I don’t remember what, and Dimple tried to look up but she couldn’t, the nod was too heavy.

*

I thought: For every happiness there is an equal and opposite unhappiness. Then I took a drag of charas and the room filled with light. Everything was transparent. The skin on my arms was as thin as paper. I looked into my flesh and saw the moving bones wrapped in pink translucent sheets; and all the while the rain fell in great washes against the roof, sheets of water that streamed from the windows and gathered in the corners of the room. We smoked that dirty hash, Bombay black charas with the colour and texture of goat shit, and we chased heroin on strips of foil. We spoke those words, the beautiful ones without meaning or consequence. We laughed for no reason and interrupted our laughter with silence. Pepsi spread a prayer mat and prayed and we waited in the room where the television flickered like firelight and the rain gurgled and crashed. We smoked. People came and went. We spoke the beautiful words and we called heroin by its joyful name. I didn’t sleep but I was full of dreams and when I made my way outside it was dawn. The rain had thinned. Everything was lit with meaning. Water lapped against the city’s ruined buildings, dirty water strewn with petals and garbage and smelling of attar. People waded on the street, soaked to the skin, their faces ecstatic in the charcoal light. I knew them as my brothers as I stood in the rain. I spread my pitiful, deluded arms wide. I wanted to hold the city, each woman and child and animal and man. I wanted to save them. And then I saw Dimple on the balcony reading a book, squinting as if her life depended on the words. When she saw me she stood up. There was a piece of sticking plaster on her chin and she said something I didn’t understand, or maybe I did understand but I don’t remember. I went to say goodbye and she whispered something in my ear, repeated what she’d said earlier or said something else, though I still didn’t understand until I saw the Air India carry case in her hands. She had packed her belongings and she’d been waiting for me on the balcony. It was still raining and below us the floodwater suddenly seemed very deep, though I knew it wasn’t. Dimple watched a puddle form on the balcony. She said, Take me with you. I’ll die if I stay here.

*