Narcopolis

You tell me, the dealer told Rumi, what was she, the singer, pussy or cunt? Cunt, said Rumi, they’re all cunts, and that was when someone rushed into the room, a man so black he could have been African, with a red mouth that smelled of sweat and sewage, and for a moment Rumi thought it was the devil in his natural state, blackened and sooty and looking for company, or the devil freshly returned from the flames of hell, his red mouth about to burst into laughter, but it was Shakoor. He was offering trial hits of some new maal. Free, he said, who wants to go first? The pimp opened his eyes and said, Me, I want to go, and he cooked up and tied off before Rumi had said a word. The pimp stuck the syringe into his ruined veins but couldn’t find any blood and the deeper he dug the more frustrated he became. Shakoor gave Rumi a vial and he spilled a little of the powder on the table top and snorted it up and felt his body go limp and his heart wind down, actually felt his heart expand and seize up and start again. He staggered to the bathroom and put water into his nose and spit out as much of the powder as he could. He threw up and he threw up again and his legs wouldn’t obey him and it was a while before he felt well enough to walk back to the room. Shakoor and the dealer were standing up, close in the small space, looking intently at the unconscious pimp. Get him out of here, said Shakoor. The dealer pulled a gun from under his shirt, a country-made pistol that would almost certainly misfire, though there was a chance it would not, and he pointed it at Rumi and said: Go on, fuck face, get this sisterfucker motherfucker out of here. He followed as Rumi dragged the pimp, first by the arms and then the feet, dragged him out of the khana and onto the road in broad daylight. See you, cunt, said the dealer as he walked back to Shakoor’s. Rumi, dry heaving and sick, put the pimp on the road and passed out or fell asleep. He was woken by a skinny constable, low caste or no caste, probably a chamar, who put him in a van and told him the pimp was dead and he could be dead too. And the low-caste cop also told him something he knew: he was in a lot of trouble.

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Carl asked if she would take a session at the centre the following week. She could do whatever she liked, pick a topic like pride, say, or faith, or she could discuss a book, Anthony De Mello’s great work Prayer of the Frog, for example, or hold a study class of some sort. She was still shaky from the withdrawal medications, the chlorpromazine and Avil; she felt like she was shedding skin, not dead skin but living skin, and her flesh felt raw and chafed. Then Carl asked what kind of class she would take, what subject, and the answer popped into her head almost as soon as she heard his question: she would teach history, she said, a history of evil as suggested by certain individuals, obscure and not, including but not limited to poets, priests and prostitutes. Carl started to shake his head before she had finished speaking. Inappropriate, misdirected and overcompensation were some of the words he used, and there were others too, but they were not as interesting. Carl thought the kind of session she had in mind was more suited to a university or some kind of arty lecture series. There was nothing uplifting about it, so how would it benefit a group of recovering addicts whose hold on sobriety, not to mention reality, was shaky enough to begin with? She agreed that there was nothing uplifting about the subject, or nothing obviously uplifting, but it would certainly benefit those in recovery, since addiction was one of the fringe topics that fell under the general heading of evil, and she wanted to talk about the ideas of Burroughs, Baudelaire, Cocteau and de Quincey, to name only four historians of evil, though the last named was a cusp case. Who are they, Carl asked, poets and prostitutes? Writers, said Dimple. Carl asked if they all took drugs. Yes, said Dimple, they did, opiates mostly. Well then, they’re junkies plain and simple, fuck-ups who got lucky; they were not to be trusted. And besides, said Carl, they’re not the kind of positive thinkers we prefer to focus on at the centre. This programme is aimed at getting people off heroin, not glamorizing it.

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