Narcopolis (11 page)

He put an official requisition through for a jeep. The requisition was a lie from beginning to end. He expected to be found out and arrested and punished, but nothing happened and the jeep came through. He found a map of old Asia. Names change but geography stays the same, he told himself, and he put his trunks into the jeep and drove south and never once looked back. He drove long stretches, drove as long as he could before the necessity of food or sleep made him stop. He travelled at night and slept in his uniform. When necessary, he said he was on special assignment for his division. He stopped in Sian and Chengtu and Kunming. He found that his map was so out of date it was inaccurate. He burned it and bought a new one. Once he left China travel became easier. He didn’t have to worry about being caught: Burma was primitive and India was chaos, nobody asked for papers or explanations. He lived in Dacca, Calcutta, Cuttack, Amritsar. He lived in Delhi. In many places he found people who looked like him, Indians from the country’s north-east provinces. He lived in cities and towns that he never learned the names of. He lived in hostels and guest houses and ramshackle lodgings. He learned to drive like an Indian. He abandoned his jeep and bought an
Ambassador
and he thought he would keep driving until he got tired of it, but he never tired of it. Then why had he chosen to stop in Bombay instead of Delhi or Calcutta? The truth was, he had not chosen. He came to the city with no intention of staying: it was the last of a series of random events set off by his flight from his own country. He got into the habit of taking long walks in his first months, a time of aftermath and distrust, his perils behind him but vivid in his head. It was only when he left his small room and walked by the waterfront that he felt at ease. He discovered the sea by accident, in his first week, on an exploratory walk that began around the neighbourhood of Grant Road and ended at Nariman Point. He walked for three hours and during most of that time the water was either in his sight or just beyond. He began to see it as a gift, the sea, because it was always nearby, wherever you were. It was the only thing about Bombay that did not disgust him.

‘My father was an important man and I.’

‘I know, you told me before. You were in the army, you were important too.’

‘I was, in the old days.’

She said, ‘You should rest, don’t agitate yourself about these things.’

He shook his head. He wanted her to understand. He pointed at the trunk that held his uniform, his identification documents and photos, paid and unpaid electricity and water bills. He said, You. He pointed to the pipes, pointed twice, his hand travelling slowly from cot to cot. He said, Now I not important. I just old man with sickness, not much to give you except pipe. I want you take them. They only valuable thing I own: they your dowry. He nodded at her.

‘Ah Lee, I want you to live for a long time,’ she said.

And Mr Lee made a small sound. She would remember it whenever she thought about him in the years after his death, the involuntary vowel that ascended from deep inside his lungs. It communicated more clearly than words the thing he was trying to say, that it was a humiliation to die and a double humiliation to die in a foreign country. And she remembered the lie she told him. Twenty-two years later, in 1998, when she was diagnosed with the same ailment, she remembered her lie. A man who does not return to his native place is like a man who dresses in finery and sits in the dark, he told her. He had always planned to return to China in his old age, to die there and be buried beside his ancestors. He said, You promise to rebury me in China. However long it take, you rebury me. She wanted to calm him. She said: Ah Lee, don’t worry, I promise. Later, long after he was gone, she would recall all this with terrible clarity; most of all she remembered his last days and the instructions he left. She was to place his ashes in a vase she would find in his trunk. Cremation was quicker than burial, he said, and ashes were easy to transport and easy to store. Beyond these points of business, he hardly spoke or ate; all he wanted was opium. He was willing himself to die.

On a dry morning in April, she took his ashes by taxi to the Chinese graveyard in Sewri. The front seat of the Ambassador was filled with flowers and Dimple sat in the back with Ah Fong, Mr Lee’s old friend and customer, who had to be helped into the car.

‘He always said he is first to die,’ said Ah Fong, ‘I always say, wait, you see, I die first.’

Everybody dies, thought Dimple. Losing your family is like dying, which means I’ve died twice. At the Chinese shop they had shown her a black button she could pin to her sari, the salesman telling her it was the latest thing on the mainland. Instead of an armband you wore a button, silk, very stylish. She wanted the armband, she told him, and she wore it over her sari blouse, an old-fashioned one that Mr Lee had liked, elbow-length red cotton. She found a framed picture of Mr Lee in uniform, which she placed on the shrine, and she poured a splash of red wine on the ground. There was a plate with sliced meat from a rooster. There was fish and sweet egg cakes. She burned bundles of lucky money in red packets embossed with the symbol for double happiness. His clothes were still in good shape and she couldn’t bring herself to burn them, his uniform, the silk padded jackets, the white tunics and black pyjamas, his black canvas walking shoes, the stick with the jade dog’s head. She put them on a shelf and forgot about them. A week after the funeral she found Ah Fong waiting at the khana early one morning. He was agitated, talking before she’d even opened the door, and it was strange to see him on the street in the daylight, and to hear the things he was saying.

‘I had dream. Ah Lee, standing in front of me, shivering in the cold, naked as day he’s born. He said: I have no clothes. Give me your shirt. I wake up, I shout, I was so frighten. Why you don’t burn his clothes? This is message, he is sending you message from grave.’

It spooked her. She gathered Mr Lee’s things and took a taxi to the cemetery. The cotton garments burned quickly, but the shoes sputtered and black smoke poured from the soles. She asked the attendants for help. They piled everything together in a pit and lit a bonfire. It took an hour for the fire to smoulder down to ash and she waited, alone on a bench, and then she felt it, felt his spirit lighten, or was it her own spirit, lifting like a balloon into the sky? She had done as he wanted in every detail except one: she didn’t take his ashes home with her and find a way to return them to China. She left him in Sewri. Years later she would be given the opportunity to correct her mistake, but by then it would be beyond her. And by then she would understand that when she felt his spirit leave the cemetery and ascend into the sky, she had been partially right; what she had gotten wrong was the direction in which Mr Lee moved and the element in which he settled. He went downward, where he waited in water for the chance to speak to her again.

She wrapped the pipes in muslin and took them to Rashid’s. It was early in the day. The screen doors were open to the light and the radio played a song from
Pyaasa
, Geeta Dutt singing of heartache. It made her think of the movies she’d watched growing up, secret excursions to Tardeo Talkies for Raj Kapoor and Guru Dutt, all that sepia longing and Government of India footage of war and industry. The room was from the same black-and-white era. She came in with the pipes and Rashid was reading an Urdu newspaper. He was islanded, barricaded by a bottle and glasses, cigarettes, pipes, dirty dishes, discarded clothing. He didn’t seem surprised to see her. The first thing he did, he asked if she wanted tea. I can call for it from the balcony, he said. I’ll put on a shirt and call for tea.

She said, ‘I don’t want tea, Mr Rashid, thank you.’

‘Okay, no problem, no problem. What can I do for you?’

‘Actually, I’ve brought something for you.’

She unwrapped the pipes and placed them on the floor and picked up the longer one, three feet something from tip to tip.

‘At least five hundred years old. Made by a Chinese pipe master, much superior to our local pipes because of the quality of the wood and the seasoning.’

‘Is it too long?’

‘No, sir; it’s constructed on the same principle as a hookah. The length is very important, it cools the smoke as it travels from the bowl to the mouthpiece.’

‘You’ve been practising this speech.’

‘Yes, sir, a little.’

He liked her manner, her conservative clothes, the way she spoke Hindi mixed with English. He watched her as she assembled the lamp and oil and chandu and he liked that too, the sight of a woman calmly making a pipe, because an Indian woman in a chandu khana was a rare sighting. She tapped the stem when the pipe was ready and it took him a moment, an awkward moment of grapple, to adjust to the big mouthpiece. But she was right: the pipe was a work of art. The wood was stained reddish brown and there was old brasswork at the mouthpiece and bowl. Maybe he was imagining it, but the smoke tasted
better
and you could take deeper drags and a single pyali went a long way.

‘How much do you want for it? Maybe I’ll take both.’

‘I don’t want to sell the pipes, Mr Rashid.’

‘You call me Rashidbhai or Bhai, not Mr Rashid, this is not America.’

‘Bhai, let me work for you. I can make pyalis and take care of the pipes.’

He said he would not be able to pay her. She would get three pyalis a day and tips. She could eat in the khana but she couldn’t sleep there.

‘I have a place to sleep, but I smoke four pyalis a day – of good opium.’

‘Mine is the best on the street. Where do you smoke?’

He was surprised to learn that Mr Lee was real. Like everyone else, he’d heard the story about a Chinese khana somewhere on Shuklaji Street and he’d dismissed it as fiction. But he knew the value of old stories and he incorporated Mr Lee’s into his own. Rashid told everyone he bought the pipes from the old Chini himself. He told the story so many times that eventually he came to believe it and with each telling he added new details. Mr Lee was on his deathbed when he sent for Rashid; it was the second last thing he did before he died, he handed over the pipes; the last thing he did was to smoke; he didn’t want anyone else to have the pipes, only Rashid, because he wanted them to go where they would be best used; the pipes had originally belonged to the emperor of China and had fallen into the hands of the Nationalist army; and so on.

To match the quality of Mr Lee’s pipes he put less water in the cooking mix. Soon the place was packed with regulars and tourists and all kinds of unlikely people who came just to visit. He raised the price of a pyali to three rupees from two but the opium was so much better than anywhere else that no one complained; if anything, business improved. A tall Australian turned up. He smoked all day and drew pictures in a small notebook and spent a lot of money. He was generous: he bought pyalis for everyone. He came back the next day and the next and for a week he was a regular at the khana. He
communicated
mostly with his hands, because no one could understand him though he was speaking English. Months after he left, after he’d taken off for Sydney or Melbourne or wherever, someone said he was a famous musician whose tunes were played on the radio in the West, and that he’d written a song about his experience at Rashid’s, that there was something in it about ‘lying in a den in Bombay,’ though it might have been a coincidence. Then the son of a well-known director came around. He was making his first movie and he wanted to get the atmosphere right for a scene set in an opium den. He sat at the entrance near the washing area and he didn’t try a pipe. He dropped the names of actors and directors, all of whom were close family friends, or so he said. It wasn’t his patter that irritated Rashid, but his laughter, high-pitched and smelling of insanity. He wore a straw hat that he held in his lap. He took notes. He took a photograph of Dimple that would
appear
many years later in a book about Bombay’s opium dens (in the picture, a young woman holds a pipe to a lamp, her face intent, and in a corner of the frame is a book, the title partly obscured,
ii
). After much deliberation he decided to try a pyali, smoked half and ran down the stairs to vomit. But it was his smoking technique that was most remarked on. He wiped the mouthpiece with a handkerchief soaked in Dettol, wiped it each time he took a drag and the pipe smelled for days of antiseptic. When he returned from the toilet he asked if he could take more pictures and Rashid said yes, of course he could, but then he would have to break the director’s son’s legs and cut off his hands to ensure he never left the khana, which riposte Rashid delivered with a smile, as if he were sharing a joke.

The brothel-keeper, Dimple’s tai, paid Rashid a formal visit. She was full of complaints. She said Dimple was spending too much time at the khana, she’d become a full-time professional drug addict, she was no longer earning her keep. The other girls brought in more money, said the tai, addressing only Rashid. Not once during the visit did the tai and Dimple speak or look at each other. Dimple made Rashid’s pipe the way she always did, calm and silent, her hands steady, while the tai drank her tea, made her speech and left. That afternoon, Rashid took Dimple to a room on a half landing between the khana and the first floor where his family lived. There was a wooden cot, a chair and washstand, a window with a soiled curtain. She knew what he wanted. She took off her salvaar and folded it on the back of the chair. She lay on the cot and pulled her kameez up to her shoulders to show him her breasts. Her legs were open, the ridged skin stretched like a ghost vagina.

He said, You’re like a woman. She said: I am a woman, see for yourself. She didn’t want him on top of her because he was too heavy for her back. She told him to sit on the cot while she faced him, her arms around his neck and her ankles locked on his hips. It took a long time, the drugs working in opposition to his blood; but she didn’t stop until he was finished, shuddering with effort, his hands angled on the bed, his eyes looking into hers.

He said, ‘What about you, what do you feel?’

‘Fine.’

‘No. What I want to know, do you feel pleasure or not?’

‘Not like you do and not the way a woman does.’

‘You don’t feel anything.’

‘Oh, bilkul, I do. I feel pleasure but not, what’s the word, relief.’

He studied her face as she arranged her kameez and tidied her hair. He said: I want you to move here, into this room. I’ll send someone with you to collect your things.

Her life at the brothel was coming to an end, she knew. She was treated better than some of the others but she worked three or four giraks a day. She was in her late twenties and already she felt middle-aged. She’d lived and worked at Number 007 for more than fifteen years. The work was fast. The giraks didn’t take off their clothes. They unzipped, they finished in minutes and they were gone. Their desire for her, for sex, was theoretical. It had no reality. It was the idea of a eunuch in a filthy brothel in Shuklaji Street, this was what they paid for. Dimple thought: They like the dirtiness of it. Nothing else gets their dicks so hard. They don’t think of themselves as homosexuals. They have wives and children and they’re always making jokes about gandus and chakkas. It’s all about money: they think eunuchs give better value than women. Eunuchs know what men want in a way other randis don’t, they know men like it dirty.

Lakshmi’s way of putting it: what dogs we are when we are men. Lakshmi worked the street, getting shop owners and pedestrians to part with money, doing this with nothing more than a clap of her man’s hands. She did it now, a gunshot clap designed to cut through heavy Bombay traffic. A customer in the main room turned around in alarm. He was trying to persuade the tai to give him a discount rate for two prostitutes. Lakshmi said, Men are dogs. We know and they know. Only women don’t know. Isn’t that right, darling? she told the customer. Aren’t you a dog sniffing around my ass for a free fuck?

After the customer left in search of a brothel with better rates, Dimple stood on the balcony of 007 and looked down into the street at the cook fires and crowds of pedestrians. Then she put on her sandals and went out. The paanwallah was listening to AIR and he smiled at her when she stepped into his cubicle. She ordered a Calcutta meetha and watched as he assembled it. He was listening to cricket commentary, a match between
India
and the West Indies. They talked for a while about Indian versus West Indian batsmen. The Indians were skilled but they were no match for the blacks, said the paanwallah. Dimple asked him what he thought about Gavaskar. The paanwallah said Gavaskar was okay but he lacked something. No killer instinct, and that was the problem with Indians. Dimple asked if killer instinct was all you needed to play a good game and the paanwallah laughed and said he knew what Dimple was leading up to but he’d been in the game for a while himself and he knew a couple of things. Dimple said she was only passing the time of day and then she asked if he put enough supari in the Calcutta. The paanwallah said there was enough supari to make a horse kick and he told her to come back if she wasn’t satisfied and he would give her a free one. He said Gavaskar was a good man and a technically sound player, but he was not accustomed to the taste of blood. It didn’t excite him. Indians were too mild, said the paanwallah, and it was Gandhi’s fault. The old man had taken a race of bloodthirsty warriors, taught them non-violence and made them into saints and grass eaters. Dimple laughed. She told the paanwallah to take a look around. Indians were as violent and bloodthirsty as ever, and they would always be looking for an excuse to hack or burn or gouge each other. The paanwallah laughed too. Back in her room, she chewed the paan and watched herself in the hand mirror hanging on a nail above the sink. She watched the shape her mouth made and she looked at her eyes and skin and hair and made a critical assessment: not bad. As she got older it took more work to look good. The more difficult it became, the more she smoked. The more she smoked, the more difficult it became. She thought: If I lose my looks I don’t want to live. I don’t want to be like the tai whose only joy in life is money. Dimple was the tai’s chela, the tai-in-waiting. When she was old and no longer able to work, she’d take care of the business and oversee the other randis. She’d handle money all day long. She would know no other life. It was an inevitability that needed correction and she was correcting her life. So she asked Rashid to wait while she moved her things in small consignments, relocating herself a piece at a time. There was no question of taking her earnings with her. The tai would say that Dimple owed her for food and board, and besides, it was probably a fair exchange: she was trading money (her earnings) for pleasure (her freedom). Variations of this transaction occurred on the street a thousand times a day.

She told only one girak that she was leaving, a pocket-maar who always smoked at her station. He’d smoke and talk, softly, so the other customers wouldn’t hear him. Rashid made jokes, calling him her new boyfriend. Then the pocket-maar came to see her at the brothel. He sold cocaine and whisky for one of the Lalas. He was tall and skinny, his thin legs and bony knees out of proportion to his big belly and chest, and he wore his hair long, down to his collar like a hippie. He gave her different amounts each time, two or three or four hundred rupees in small bills, but it was double the amount he was expected to pay and she was always happy to see him. He ordered strong beer, Cannon or Khajuraho, and he sprawled on the bed, drinking from the bottle. He gossiped about the private lives of Raj Kapoor and Nargis, Shashi Kapoor and Shabana Azmi, and his favourite topic, Amitabh Bachchan and Rekha. He kissed Dimple on the lips. She’d wipe her mouth and he’d kiss her again. He took his time, locking the door and staying so long the tai pounded on the partition, shouting, Salim. Finished. Time finished. Dimple, open up, did he die inside you or what?

One night he asked if she would look after a bag for him, a nylon Air India shoulder bag that was zipped but unlocked. He handed it over and disappeared. Inside she found bundles of hundred-rupee notes, and, rolled in a T-shirt, two pistols, large six-guns like the firearms brandished by Clint Eastwood in English movies. She put the bag into a steel Godrej almirah and carried the key on a chain she attached to the waistband of her salvaar. Salim was gone for three weeks. He came back shrunken, with new bruises on the soles of his feet and on his back. He said: Chit-chat with the police, friendly gup-shup, yaar, with the brown crows. She opened a bottle of White Flower Oil from a box that Mr Lee had given her and rubbed it into the discolorations on his skin. The oil’s cold burn helped him heal. After this Salim brought her little gifts: plastic hair clips, a key chain, a tiny handbag, a black leather diary with the phone codes of all the world’s cities and special pockets for business cards and photos. Sometimes he expected not sex but conversation. He wanted her to tell him what was in the book she was reading, and she would try to encapsulate it for him, encapsulate in a few sentences a three-hundred-page novel by a Latin American or European author. He would ask about her health, about her day, and it would irritate her. What was there to say? Her day was always the same. She worked at 007 and she worked at Rashid’s and when she was not working she taught herself to read, there was nothing more to it. His questions were useless but comforting. She wondered if this was what it meant to be married, to be a wife. You were bored and irritated and comforted, all at the same time.