Narcopolis (21 page)

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.

Bull didn’t realize the new guy was missing until they were seated and he had a chance to do a head count. He did a second count but the result was the same, ten turkeys, where was number eleven? He looked around at the congregation, the usual collection of users and losers and old people, aunties in house dresses, sickly parishioners, and at the very back a group of boys in camos and basketball shoes, looking severely out of place. He asked Charlie, We lost the new turkey, what’s his name, Ramesh? Charlie also did a head count. He’ll be back, he said. Where’s he going to go? Bull shook his head because the room was filling up and they couldn’t talk without being overheard. But the front row was made up entirely of Safer inmates, all of whom seemed to know that the newest turkey had flown, was out there right now getting wasted, and though no one said anything, some looked to the exit and wished they were on the street, free to do what they pleased, including fuck themselves up, because that was the real meaning of freedom, wasn’t it, choice, the perfect adult liberation of being able to decide for yourself as to right and wrong and to choose wrong if that was what you wanted? Bull experienced it himself when he imagined throwing it away, all the months of odd sobriety, for one last stab at craziness, and he knew Charlie felt it too: a rush of blood that felt like happiness. Is there time for a quick smoke? Jean-Luc asked, and Bull would normally have said yes, but they’d just had a runner and who knew what kind of impulses that had set off in the Frenchman? He hesitated and the hesitation was enough for Jean-Luc to know exactly what was passing through the bulldog’s head. Just then Father Fo cleared his throat.

He walked with a group of people who were headed to a coffee shop on the corner. It was part of a new chain, with big windows and a burned-orange colour scheme designed to make patrons feel warm and fuzzy, and filled him instead with rage. He crossed the street to Nikita Ladies & Gents Beauty Salon, and went in quickly and shut the door behind him and bolted it before the girl had a chance to protest. There was no one else in the shop. He drew the curtains and told her to take off her blouse and she didn’t argue. She was young and dark and her breasts were heavy and she lifted them inexpertly from the cups. He pulled down her slacks and let them fall around her ankles and he told her to stay where she was and look at her reflection in the mirror and to touch her nipples and cunt and do nothing else. Don’t move, he said. Don’t move anything except your fingers. Then he went around the small room, opening drawers and taking out herbal massage oils and towels and hair dye and waxing utensils, and dropping them on the floor. A jar of henna shattered, though the bottles of massage oil did not, and Rumi continued his rampage, opening and shutting, throwing shit around. There was a sudden smell, sharp body odour mixed with the unmistakable stink of fear. Ooh, he thought, when he saw that the girl’s eyes had filled with tears and a fingernail-sized scar on her forehead had turned dark. She was not pretty: when teary-eyed she was ugly. Tell me where it is, he said. But the girl’s eyes rolled up in her head and her hands fell to her sides. Don’t stop touching yourself, he told her, and hit her on the ass with his open hand. She was too frightened to speak but she was trying to tell him something, the rolling of the eyes was a message, not a prelude to a fainting fit. He looked to the side and found a shrine. Behind a portrait of Ganesh and a stick of incense was a box with three thousand six hundred rupees. Is this all? There’s nothing more, said the girl in Hindi. What about in your pockets? She shook her head. He found a hundred and ninety rupees in the back pocket of her slacks, which he transferred to his wallet. Maybe I’ll give you a good-luck tip, he said, but first I want a full-body massage. Put a fresh towel on the cot for me. The order cleared her head because it put his presence in the parlour on a professional footing: he was a client and she the masseuse. She felt she knew what was expected of her, though the knowledge did nothing to lessen her fear. She asked him to change and averted her head as he stripped to his underwear.

She said, ‘Aapka naam, sir?’

‘Rumi, I mean Ramesh.’

‘Aap Mohammedan hai?’

‘No.’

‘My name is Zoya.’

‘Zoya.’

‘Zoya Shaukat Ali, Mohammedan.’

‘One minute, Zoya, I asked for your name?’

‘Ji, nahi.’

‘Then why tell me? You think I care? Why you asked if I’m Mohammedan?’

‘Aapka naam, sir. Sorry.’

‘My name is Ramesh. Understand?’

‘Haan, ji.’

‘You have coconut oil?’

‘Ji, sir.’

‘Take this off, and this, put oil. Go on, put more, more.’

‘Ji, sir.’

‘You smell bad.’

‘Ji?’

‘Your sweat smells bad, in fact it’s horrible. Why is that?’

‘Nahi, sir.’

‘Tell me why.’

‘Nahi.’

‘Because you eat too much meat.’

‘I, no, sir, I don’t eat too much.’

‘Not no, sir. Yes, sir.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Smell me. Go on. You see? No bad odour. Why? Because I eat only pure vegetarian. Use both hands. Don’t touch my nipples,’ said Rumi.

The girl said, ‘Handshake left hand se hotha hai, right se khana katha hai, sir.’

‘Right, left, you think you’re Hindu? Use the other hand, use both hands.’

He stared at her in disbelief and when he finger-fucked her she cried, ma, ma, ma, like a small goat.

The Annexe was a big room with a high ceiling and folding chairs instead of pews. NA meetings were held there and so was the weekly old people’s meeting. It was a large space with nothing in it except faded red matting and a cross on the wall, just the cross, no figure. First there was an introduction by Father Fo, the man who had allowed Safer to open a centre in his church. He appeared in the press and on TV because of his work with addicts and the elderly. Each year, during the fair, his name appeared in letters that were only slightly smaller than the letters that announced the festivities. First, Father Fo got up to sing ‘Lead, Kindly Light’ in an unexpected baritone. The boys in camo joined him on harmony. When the hymn came to an end, Father Fo thanked the singers who went back to their seats. Then he said, It gives me great pleasure to introduce a young man who will grace us I hope with more occasions such as this. Soporo took his time going up to the stage. He waited until there was complete silence. Then he looked around at his audience and said, I have a question for you and a confession and, to end, a lament. There was some scattered applause from the row of Safer boys but Soporo looked down at his hands and it stopped.

He said he had come to the meeting with an outline in his head of a talk concerning music and time, but, as he looked around the room, he realized it was an irrelevant topic that would interest no one, or not for more than five minutes, and later, if they remembered it at all they would remember it as a kind of silly puzzle. Again he stopped and looked at his hands as if he’d forgotten something. I think we have more important things to talk about today, he said. And then he talked about what freedom meant, that is, the play of free will as opposed to habits of the body, like smoking or injecting heroin. At the word heroin there was a slight change in the room, as if each member of the audience had taken a deep breath or shifted in their seats. I want to start with a question. Is it true that taking heroin is an example of free will at its most powerful? I believe there is a good case for this argument. All users know how addictive the drug is, and dangerous. OD, infection, crime, we know we’re risking our lives and yet we choose to do it. Here Soporo paused and stared at the boys of Safer, or at a point just behind them, as if he was reading from a teleprompter, and his argument took a sidelong tangent. He mentioned a commentator who said it was the painkilling nature of the drug that made it so addictive, that if scientists were to isolate and neutralize its painkilling element it could be taken with no fear of addiction. But why hasn’t a scientist already done this thing, synthesize a version of the drug that would provide only pleasure, that is to say, pleasure with no payback? Because then the scientist would be entering into the realm of ethics, into God’s realm, he would remove evil and leave only good, or, to put it another way, he’d remove the devil and leave only God, and this is something no government or religious institution will condone, much less pay for. The system depends on the idea of consequences for one’s actions, and consequences, as most of us know, is simply another word for the devil. But I want to talk a little bit about God. I want to remind you of the shock and fear that God felt when he realized he was not the only God of the world. How do we know he knew? ‘I am a jealous God and there is no other God beside me,’ he told the angels, and by so doing indicated that there were indeed other gods, or why would he be jealous? And as long as there is jealousy, how can there be freedom? And if God is not free how can man expect to be? Excuse me, Soporo said, and walked slowly to his chair. He took a bottle of water out of his satchel and came back to the stage, which was a clear area in front of the room. There was no pulpit or microphone. He took a drink of water and swallowed carefully and placed the bottle on the ground by his feet. He said it was possible that some day a scientist would take up the good work, but until then heroin would remain utterly addictive. Then he said, The interesting thing is that we choose it, despite everything we choose it and continue to choose it. Is this an example of free will in action? That’s my question. And, secondly: are addicts free? Are they in fact the freest of men?

He took a cab to Rajesh Khanna Park and kept it waiting while he went into the Tamil slum known as Murugan Chawl and bought a five-gram pack. The woman who sold him the smack had a baby at her breast and he sat on the floor and snorted a quick line off his wrist and then he made a joint. His ass immediately tightened and he felt better, or better than better, best, infinitely best. The woman was telling him about her brother who used to run the family’s heroin trade but had died from TB and drugs. Two of her brothers-in-law were dead from mysterious illnesses that she attributed to garad heroin, and her husband, also a garaduli, had fallen off a train earlier that year, leaving her with two kids, etc. etc. etc. The lament slid from his head like rain and he stared at her breasts, or breast, since only the single one was visible, one pathetic tit being suckled by the vampire baby leech that was fattening as he watched. It was less than a year old and its greasy black hair was plastered to its forehead and it had the face of an old sow, and its future was written on its forehead: fatherless childhood, adolescence of petty crime, garad or alcohol in his late teens, more crime, illness, the usual ending. Why did you have another baby? he asked the woman. You have no money, your husband was a garaduli, and you already have one mouth to feed, why another? The woman’s face was oily and her oily black hair was tied with a rubber band. She took the baby from her breast and held it to him. Hold him and you’ll know, she said. He saw a drop of off-white milk on her black nipple. She smiled shyly and pulled the blouse down to cover herself and only then did he look at the thing in his hands. When the baby’s eyes met his, it began to cry. He wanted to shake its misshapen dwarf hand, because the reaction was the first sign of intelligence he’d seen all day. He held it away from his body and examined it, the colour, untouchable, and the smell, ripe, a nauseating mix of talcum powder and Parachute coconut oil. He wanted to take it with him, but how? And what would be a fitting reward to the mother in lieu of her blighted offspring, how many rupees, a thousand, two? Something of what he was feeling must have communicated itself to the woman by a kind of aboriginal voodoo. Give it to me, she said. Give, give. The baby was crying in earnest now, its mouth wide and its eyes closed tight, and he was impressed by the amount of noise it produced. He knew the mother was moments away from shouting for help and then, in an instant, the male members of her criminal clan would be at the door. He gave the baby back and stepped out of the room and walked along the open gutter to the street. In each of the hovels he passed a woman was cooking while her husband drank country liquor and their children puked or pissed in the approximate vicinity of the gutter. He negotiated small piles of watery shit and imagined a great firebomb that would end the poverty and desolation of Murugan Chawl, a big beautiful explosion that would engulf the entire slum and blow its inhabitants straight into the next world. Smiling now, he felt ready to take on the fuckers at the rehab, but first he had to make one last stop and he’d forgotten all about the cabbie, who was still waiting, pacing near his fucked-up piece-of-kaka Fiat. Chalo, he told the man, who got in the car without whining, and he directed him to Bandra East, to the slum near the station, so poor it didn’t have a name, where he picked up a gram of Charlie and treated himself to a quick equalizing line – or three.

Soporo said he wanted to make a confession. He took a few steps around the stage, distractedly, like a sick man, then he picked up the bottle and took another careful sip. Instead of a confession he made a joke. He said when he looked around the room at the sinners and the saints, the young and the old, he knew that as far as confessions went his was no big one. But here it is anyway, he said, because after all I’m in the right place for it. Then he explained that he was an uneducated man, or, if not exactly uneducated, certainly unschooled. When he was growing up in China he had every opportunity to study but he chose instead to work and eventually came to India with the intention of solving the mystery of what had happened during the last days of his ancestor, a Muslim Chinese admiral who died here. Instead of solving one problem he found another, he became an addict and he got lost in Bombay. But even in the lost years, or decades, he was reading. What did he read? Whatever came his way, he was unsystematic. He had no discipline and he could afford not to, after all he was not aiming to be a scholar. He read because it gave him instant gratification in a way nothing else did, and, as was the case with all addicts, gratification was the important thing. He liked history, travel, anthropology, cookbooks (which he read in the same way he read other books, for pleasure): he liked books with specialized information. At the moment, he was reading about a thirteenth-century poet who invented a particular poetic form, a form that was so difficult, so fiendish, that subsequent poets rarely attempted more than one example in their entire lifetimes, and almost no one wrote three or more, and this was still the case some seven hundred years after it was invented. The poem consisted of five stanzas of twelve lines each and a last stanza of five lines, with a strict, tremendously intricate rhyming scheme in which the rhyme wasn’t the sound of a word’s ending but the word in its entirety. In each stanza the rhyme words were repeated a certain number of times in a pattern that varied (though even the variations were strict) over the course of the poem. And though there were sixty-five lines there were only five rhyme words, imagine, which meant the poet had to be as inventive as possible beneath the strict framework of the form. For example, said Soporo, writing with his finger on an imaginary blackboard, this is how the rhymes occur in the first stanza: