One Grain Amongst the Storm

A Mélange of memoirs, fiction, short stories, verses, book reviews and uncorked angst.

Narcopolis by Jeet Thayil – A Review

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“I don’t miss you. I don’t miss you when 
I open a window and light fills the room
like water pouring into a paper cup,
or when I hear a woman’s white dress shine
like new coins and I know I could follow
my feet to the river and let my life go
away from me.” 

—Jeet Thayil, “To Baudelaire”

Jeet Thayil is a compelling raconteur of sensory perceptions. A poet and musician, with several collections of poetry to his credit, he has a particular gift for capturing life at the cusps of dream and consciousness, memory and yearning, reality and nothingness, life and death.

Drawing partly upon his own years of substance abuse, Thayil sets out to document the ‘secret history’ of Bombay in his first novel, Narcopolis. It is a saga that traces the city through its narcotic dens and whorehouses, and through a motley crew of addicts, pimps, prostitutes, eunuchs, drug lords, murderers and religious fanatics. He knows the blue smoke inside out and is familiar with the valleys and plateaus of intoxication like the back of his hand. He observes the chandulis and garadulis in close detail, their wretched lives, their despair and the many tiers of death they undergo.

The story is told in the voice of Dom Ullis, who returns to Bombay in the 1970s and quickly finds his way to Rashid’s khana, where opium and opium-smoking are a cult. There he meets Dimple, a eunuch who has mastered the preparation of the perfect opium pipe. She also initiates newcomers into the fine art of smoking: “a slow pull to start with, to draw the smoke low into the lungs…” Around them gather Rashid, the proprietor of the den, Bengali, his bookkeeper, and the other regulars of the place.

Buried in Dimple’s memories are an unloved childhood, her abandonment and sale by her widowed mother to a priest, and the events that eventually bring her to Bombay’s brothels. There is also her relationship with Lee, a deeply troubled Chinese exile who has escaped his country in a stolen jeep. Lee soon discovers that he has driven himself out of the frying pan into what, to him, is the hellfire of India, filthy, chaotic and bewildering. Like his father before him, he turns to opium to dull his pain. He takes Dimple under his wing and introduces her to the drug, setting her on a journey that will eventually bring her from the whorehouse to a room above Rashid’s den.

Much more than Dimple, however, it is “Bombay, which obliterated its own history by changing its name and surgically altering its face,” that is the “hero or heroin of this story.” The pun on ‘heroin’ in the novel’s opening sentence points both to a protagonist and a drug. It also signals a transition in the city’s culture of intoxication as heroin displaces opium, the age-old queen of delirium. The transition unfolds against a city increasingly possessed by communal hatred, crime and violence. Innocent street dwellers are crushed by a psychopath. Hindus and Muslims butcher one another. Dens offer chemical compounds and cocaine laced with rat poison. And instead of smoking exotic opium pipes, transfixed in somnambulant postures, addicts now wait in queues while Nigerian couriers pass cocaine vials concealed in their excrement.

For such disturbing subject matter, Thayil has fashioned a novel of considerable beauty and sensitivity in Narcopolis. It opens with a hypnotic sentence that runs for six and a half pages, effectively vapourising chronological time and space between dreams, conversations and “visitations from absent friends”, and setting the mood for what follows. His own experiences lend authority to his evocation of hallucinations, suspended states, mutable nightmares and bubbling despair. His language is lyrical and intricate, unfolding layer by layer; the narrative turns languorous with the blue smoke, leaden with nightmares and grisly with depravity.

However, the strains that give Narcopolis its narcotic pull sometimes work against it. The lyricism sometimes becomes self-conscious, while the succession of damaged lives, hallucinations and degradation can numb rather than move. Its drifting, episodic structure is integral to the world Thayil creates, but not every digression carries the same weight, and at times atmosphere seems to matter more than narrative momentum.

Thayil may have commemorated a way of life in the pages of the book, but Narcopolis never quite becomes a glorification of drug addiction. Its saddest characters, Dimple, Lee and Lee’s father, suffer many deaths in their lives. There is the first death of being born unloved or abandoned by one’s family; then bodily death; and finally the death that comes when the living cease to remember you. Addiction becomes yet another layer of death, quietly but determinedly eating away at the space between life and oblivion. The transformation of Lee’s father into an insect in the days preceding his death inevitably recalls Kafka’s Metamorphosis.

Newton Xavier, the legless painter-poet of Narcopolis, gives the addict an almost mystical dimension: “An addict, if you don’t mind me saying so, is like a saint. What is a saint but someone who has cut himself off, voluntarily, from the world’s traffic and currency?” The comparison is unsettling but apt, for both saint and addict seek a withdrawal from the ordinary transactions of life. But where the saint turns away from the world in pursuit of something beyond it, the addict’s retreat is towards the obliteration of time and, ultimately, the self. As Xavier puts it, “He wants to die, or at the very least, to not live.” The saint seeks transcendence; the addict, Xavier suggests, seeks erasure.

40 comments

  2. I am awed at the number of books you manage to read and review. This one sounds good. The storyline seems similar to Shantaram even though that is more about the Mumbai underworld. Im going to pick it up. I loved the first three fourths of Shantaram but not the end. If this book has a good end Im sure it will be a treat to read. In fact I think any book about Mumbai is great. It is the city that embraces everyone but tells each person a different secret about itself. Intruiging and exciting!

    1. Narcopolis is a work of breathtaking content and style and definitely a notch above Shantaram. A well written book is always a treat to read regardless of the city it talks about; and every city has a soul. That said, Mumbai is mysterious indeed!

      PS: I am an old book worm. Remove me from a book and I start gasping! 😀

    1. It will leave you a lot richer for experience. And you will not easily forget it. More than the alien world, it is a linguistic delight too!

  4. In the past one month, I have been introduced to so many Indian authors that I have around 107 books in my Flipkart wishlist. 🙂 Adding this one too.

    1. Amit, if you move this one to your wishlist, the score moves to 108 and that is such an auspicious number! I strongly recommend you transfer it to your cart! 😀

      1. Haha! I have! 🙂 The irony is that I am not reading any of those 108 books at the moment. I have gone on a tangent and started the Malazan book of the Fallen. There are 10 books in that series. Once they are over, I will be back to the auspicious 108 list. 🙂

  5. I am more an aficionado of books with a much lighter emotional tone as you may well have understood, Uma! It is a tribute to your writing and reviewing skills that you can make me want to read books like this which I would not even be considering otherwise!

    1. Thank you for the golden words, Suresh! Tribute is due to Jeet Thayil who has managed to capture a grisly theme with such lyricism and intensity.

  6. Uma, just when I had decided I would not read this book, you come up with such an excellently written review. Now my hands are trembling like an addicts as i guide them with great difficulty to flipkarts home page. I have henceforth decided to start a ‘USP’ account to keep track of the amount of money you are going to make me spend on books, all thanks to your reviews! Keep going!

    1. Hola, Kindred spirit! You have virtually described my own condition: I am a compulsive book buyer myself! As for that book account, I feel privileged to extend the line of credit to you….

  8. I read a review of Jeet Thayil’s NARCOPOLIS in Hindustan Times some time back… And today, I read yours— can’t wait to lay my hands on it :))

    Thanks for this wonderful book review!

    1. I will be happy if my review provokes you into ready a highly deserving book. It should go well with the sensitive writer that you are. Thanks for the stamp of approval. 🙂

  11. You may place your trust in Jeet Thayil without the fear of getting shortchanged. The simile invoked by those words are striking indeed. Many thanks for stopping by.

  12. if i continue to read your reviews i might just start reading books. as far as your writing is concerned, well, the master doesn’t need to be praised. you write like a dream.

  13. Sounds like a really intense novel. I usually go for a ‘lighter’ type of novel, but your review has made me want to read this one!

  15. Nice review! Even nicer is to meet a fellow reviewer, who gives so much thought and puts in so much expression while penning the review of a book. I hope to be a regular follower of your blog now. Keep the reviews coming!

    1. Books are complex works. I really don’t know the extent to which I am able to do justice to the books through my sparse passages, but I do try my best. Thank you for your kind words; welcome to the blog.

  16. Nice review, you certainly manage to read a lot of books and review them in vivid detail. This one sounds like a powerfully disturbing novel, though it seems to be written beautifully.

    Once again, another wonderfully written post!

  18. Another beautiful review. You make the books sound so charming. I am amazed how you manage to read so many of these heavy books. I usually need to read 2-3 lighter books (children’s fantasy) for every heavy book I read.

    1. TF, its is the charm of the books that shines across my posts. Books with heavier themes have a spell of their own that traps the readers deep within. Narcopolis has an amazing section on life in China in the 1940s, which makes for an engrossing read, apart from its stunning story. But I have been planning to read some fantasy and science fiction too. Thank you for appreciating.

  19. Another brilliant review! This seems like a very potent, deep and layered book that delves into the dark side of Bombay and its intoxicated characters. And the way you have given us a glimpse of the story’s multi-layered characters and the crests and troughs of their lives is simply superb. As I have said time and again, you are a master of reviews. And this book is unique and I will surely check it out.

    1. Thank you for your confidence in my writing, and the generous praise. It is indeed a deeply layered book, a delight to a sensitive reader. I am sure you will enjoy living in its pages.

      Wish a Happy Diwali to you and your loved ones.

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