Narcopolis

I returned to the city in stages. I flew into Delhi and, some days later, took a train to Bombay. I spent most of the final leg standing by the door of the Rajdhani Express and watching the countryside fall past. Late in the night, a shape staggered up to me. His face was wet with blood and pockmarked with smallpox scars and though his mouth was moving I heard no words. Then I realized that the stains were paan, long spatters on his chin and shirt. He wiped his mouth and fell backwards into the compartment. There was silence in the corridor but only for a minute. The door opened again and this time he made it all the way to the sink, where he gripped the sides and bent into the small space between the mirror and the drain to retch into the bowl. I went into the compartment and climbed into my bunk. I fell in and out of sleep. I met Rumi in a dead man’s bar; I imagined I heard gamblers whisper good-luck theorems, complex prayers for the winning of money; I thought I saw the painter Xavier, drinking Martinis and losing money to Dimple, who wore a gold tooth and eye-patch and had an opium pipe dangling between her legs, and to each of the painter’s questions she made the same reply, that the city was a large accumulation of small defeats, nothing more, and each new arrival to the city brought his own minuscule contribution to the inexhaustible pile. I could not understand a thing. Much later, when I went into the corridor, the pockmarked man was still there, still gripping the sink and examining himself in the mirror. Now I understood what he was saying. Sick, he said, I’m sick, which he was, unquestionably.

*

I dreamed it was twenty years earlier, in 1984, and I was in Colaba. There was a blackout in the city and I kept hearing the cries of small children. I went into a restaurant favoured by Bombay’s Nigerians and my friend was sitting in the back room drinking vodka shots and beer. Candles burned in a row on the bar. I took a stool and said it was good to see him. Where had he been for twenty years? Rumi laughed for a long time. This is the past, he said, not the present. Then he said, I died. Didn’t you hear? He laughed some more, softly, as if to himself. I said, I’m sorry I forgot. What happened to you when you died? He shook his head and smiled. I don’t know why you bother, he said. It’s not like you’ll do anything about it. You’ll just go on pretending. You should ask yourself why: is it because you have no imagination or because it’s the only way you can bear the thought of extinction? To be honest with you, I have no idea why you do it, but you do, all of you, pretend this life is for ever. His eyes were half closed and in the candlelight his face was red. He said: But that isn’t what I came here to tell you. I waited while he tried to catch the bartender’s attention. I asked him to tell me whatever he wanted to tell me, because I’d come a long way to hear it. He banged on the bar top and asked for a frozen vodka shot and a beer back. He said When I was a high-caste Hindu I beat my wife once or twice a month, did you know that? Sometimes with my slipper and sometimes with my hand; I had to teach her the inevitability of obedience. I knew my duty even if she did not. And what was my duty, my difficult duty, which, to begin with, I performed reluctantly, though not without a certain excitement? To teach those who were born from the belly-button of the Lord, from the hip and thigh of the Lord, from lower down, from the Lord’s unmentionable parts, from his nether regions, his Africas and South Americas, from his unnameable parts that may not be spoken of without grave risk to the speaker. I tried to teach the low-born that there is more to the world, immeasurably more than the little they knew. I wanted to teach them radiance and humility, also endurance. I tried to teach my wife and the other women, the low-born women I favoured, the cunts into which I put my wheat-complexioned penis, because I wanted to teach them and also because I liked it. Do you know why I came to this bar? To tell you this, to tell you I beat my wife with my slipper and my open hand. I beat her till she liked it too. Do you hear me? And now that I’ve told you may I go? I said, Wait, why are you telling me this? I don’t have a wife. Rumi looked at me and laughed. He said, You don’t understand a thing. Then he pulled a stone out of his cowboy boot, a flat black stone that had been sharpened to a dull point. Pathar, he said. But that’s not it, or not exactly. Then he drank his shot and finished his beer and walked out of the bar and I sat where I was until I woke up on a train traversing the Indian plains.

*