Narcopolis

He felt like he’d joined a cult, because all they talked about all day long was Soporo this and Soporo that, stories he didn’t want to hear, much less hear again and again: how Soporo exposed the guy who’d been in charge of the centre, a cross addict (sex, alcohol and heroin), who’d been using right under their noses, nodding off during Sharing Sessions and nobody the wiser because after all this was the session leader; how Soporo went after him at an NA meeting and made him admit it; how, three months after taking over, he persuaded the trustees to put up more funding and leased another floor from the church to build a gym and meeting rooms; how all kinds of people turned up at his talks, including those who’d never done drugs in their lives; and how, if Rumi made a good recovery, he’d be able to attend the talk on Wednesday night, which was titled ‘The End of Time’. I heard a rumour, said Jean-Luc, a French junkie who’d been living in India since the seventies and had graduated from opium to heroin to Tidigesic, a synthetic opiate. You want to hear? The rumour is he will talk about how heroin annihilates the idée of time as a logical or chronological imperative, and he will talk about the Miles Davis album Kind of Blue, which he says is an example of heroin time, not musical time, and he’s going to prove it by playing some of the tracks. Where’s the talk going to be held? Rumi asked. Down the road at the Church Annexe, said Jean-Luc. We need a bigger room than this one because a crowd will turn up, I don’t know why. How do we get there? asked Rumi. We walk, what else? Hey, turkey, said Bull the Parsi from across the room, you want to be carried? Is that it? It was Rumi’s first time at the lunch table, sitting with everybody, trying to eat. His hands shook so much he couldn’t hold a glass and he felt weak and nauseous; the sight of food, in particular, the tongue served for lunch on Sunday, only made him sicker. The tongue had the exact shape and rough texture of a human tongue, except it was four or five times the size, and pinker and thicker and difficult to chew or swallow. He watched the others gobble it down and it seemed to him that they were attempting to swallow their own tongues, to commit suicide in this most ferocious of ways, and he was carried by a wave of white nausea mixed with disgust. He thought: You don’t deserve to eat, not with so much appetite, and you don’t deserve your good teeth and excellent digestion. You don’t deserve to live, he thought, touching his neck surreptitiously to feel for the fever steaming under the skin. Down the road suddenly seemed like an impossible distance and he barely made it from the table to the turkey mattress without assistance.

He got better, or he pretended to get better, and on Wednesday when he saw them showering and shaving he did the same, and when they put on their best clothes, he did too, put on the only clothes he owned, a check shirt and jeans that he’d hand-washed once in prison and once at the centre, and when a dozen turkeys and non-turkeys went out, chaperoned by the Parsi and the Catholic, he was among them, walking with a convalescent’s hesitant step, a misfit in a company of misfits, stumbling or walking placidly among the normals, while Jean-Luc combed his dirty blond hair with his hands and Walter the obese chain-smoker talked to himself in Oriya and all of them eyed the women on the street. They stopped for tea and cakes, then made another stop for beedis and cigarettes, and between the cigarette shop and the Annexe where Soporo Onar’s talk was to be held, a distance of twenty metres or less, Rumi walked backwards into a crowd of pedestrians and vanished.

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