An astonishing work about the other side of midnight

Jeet Thayil’s ‘Narcopolis’ has an astonishing prologue. Titled, ‘Something for the mouth’, it is one long sentence that goes on for six-and-a-half pages. “I was trying to reproduce the effects of an opium-induced dream,” says Thayil.

“It is an open-ended kind of experience. How do you approximate that in language? You cannot do it in a short declarative Hemingwayesque type of sentence. It has to be long, multi-layered and simultaneous.”  ‘Narcopolis’ is about Mumbai in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. Thayil spent several years there, in opium dens and in the shadowy underworld, where all sorts of characters can be found, including Dimple, a eunuch, an acclaimed painter Newton Xavier, and Chinese businessman Mr Lee.

Interestingly, in the novel, the scene suddenly shifts from Mumbai to China, for about 70 pages.

There is a reason why that happens, says Thayil. “The secret history of Bombay is that its fortunes were built on opium. Between 1800 and 1840, about half a dozen Parsi ship owners got together with the British East India Company and shipped thousands of tonnes of opium to China, and turned a generation into addicts. And that money made Bombay the financial capital that it is today.”

All those Parsi ship owners later went on to build highways, roads, hospitals and art colleges. “People have forgotten that, originally, the Parsis made their money by being drug dealers.” 

“People have also forgotten how Mumbai was like earlier. In the 1980s, it was a beautiful, laid-back, liberal and liberating sort of place,” says Thayil. “There was a sense of freedom in the air, but that has gone completely. Today, it is a tense place, and that isn’t because of the traffic, the noise or the huge press of people.”

Thayil blames the Shiv Sena and the Hindu Right Wing for making Mumbai a fraught place, full of anxiety and fear.

They have pitted community against community, he says. “Much of the conversation that people used to have earlier one cannot have now because you have to be aware of the religious community that the person belongs to.”

Thayil admits that ‘Nacropolis’, is semi-autobiographical. “A lot of the information is factual because I was part of that society for many years,” he says. “I fell into it by accident and was seduced by the romance of it. I had never seen anything like it before.” (Incidentally, Thayil grew up in Hongkong, studied in New York and came to India only when he was 18.)

Thayil, of course, paid a price for the access. He was a drug addict and alcoholic for 20 years. “Looking back, it was a colossal waste of my life,” he says. But he is clean now and his writing career is taking off.  ‘Nacropolis’, which took him five years to write, has made waves. Just a few days ago, it was nominated for the Man Booker longlist of 12 books. This list was made from an initial batch of 145 books. In September, a further short-list of six books will be announced.

Meanwhile, Thayil has been on a global tour promoting the book.  He has been to South Africa, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Italy, the United Arab Emirates and all over India. “I am going to Brisbane, Edinburgh, Hongkong, Singapore, The Hague and Dubai in the next few months,” he says.

Next in the line

In between, he has also been working on his next novel, ‘The Lives of the Saints’. “One of the characters in ‘Narcopolis’, Newton Xavier, who dominates a chapter and then disappears, is one of the central points of this book,” says Thayil. “Newton is loosely based on two great Indian artists, Dom Moraes and F N Souza.”