Is Narcopolis Thayil’s antidote after all the decades spent smashed? Yes, it probably is

AN ALCOHOLIC and an substance abuser for over two decades, firsttime author and long-time poetcum- musician, Jeet Thayil perhaps found his antidote in writing. It is not surprising that Thayil found his cure in prose and verse after all, as he has the DNA makeup. Jeet Thayil has the fortune of calling Thayil Jacob Sony George, better known as T.J.S. George, an Indian writer, biographer and a Padma Bhushan awardee, his father. However, pedigree can be both a boon and a bane. Legacy can be daunting. And living up to it, a challenge. But legacy could not have been Thayil’s singular challenge—his biggest one lay in one detail; how was he to make his book authentic enough for his readers? Will they not immediately sniff a foreign-educated writer who lived a substantial bit of his life away from the city that he describes with such obvious pleasure. Thayil’s first attempt garnered mixed reviews from Indian reviewers and critics. However, it has been a sweeping success overseas. He is not far from joining the league of Arundhati Roy, Salman Rushdie and Kiran Desai, as his debut novel Narcopolis is next in the race to winning this year’s Man Booker Prize 2012, the winner of which will be declared on October 16, 2012, at London’s Guildhall. So does the Indian author succeed after all? In bits, he does. Thayil creates a melange of characters successfully. However, it is difficult to emotionally connect with most of them. The main protagonist is the city of Bombay—its transition from the old-world Bombay to the newage Mumbai. And living in the city’s underbelly are the so-called dregs of the society—Rashid the opium den owner. Dimple, an eunuch who makes pipes in Rashid’s opium den. Mr Lee, a Chinese refugee who manages to drive a stolen vehicle out of China and into Bombay. Then there is the vast supporting cast of pimps, prostitutes, and criminals who drop in and out. The variety is Thayil’s attempt at “honouring the people I knew in the opium dens, the marginalised, the addicted and deranged, people who are routinely called the lowest of the low; and I wanted to make some record of a world that no longer exists, except within the pages of a book”. The story opens in Rashid’s opium house on Shuklaji Street sometime in the 1970s. We meet the owner himself, his clients, and Dimple. Thayil is no stranger to the written word as he has been an accomplished poet. That strength serves him well as he takes the readers in and out of his characters’ lives, emerging occasionally inside a vivid drug-induced recollection. The story, which begins in the 1970s, jump cuts to a few years. This is where Thayil emerges victorious, while exposing the contrarian nation—one that seems to be in an opium-induced, dream-like state, wrapped up in ideals of simplicity and unaware of the sweeping changes that would strike soon with the economic liberalisation in the 1990s. For Rashid and Dimple change arrives in the form of heroin, a drug that heralds a new world order. Their regular customers switch while their city disintegrates into communal riots and mayhem. The degeneration does not limit itself to the city but drags all the individual players along with it. All things end. The end sadly does come and it is written with empathy. It is well understood through a scene which unfolds in a shiny nightclub, with Rashid’s. The story finally ends at 2004 (incidently also the year when Thayil returned to India). It ends at Shuklaji Street, the same spot it started: with the ‘I’ narrator and a pipe: “All I did was write it down, one word after the other, beginning and ending with the same one, Bombay.” Language is the clear focus of the book which is an highly-intertextual one, containing references to invented texts, stories within stories from a broad mix of genres and repetitions of key phrases and narratives. Layers of reality mingle and swirl so that it’s not always evident what is dream, what is not. Thayil apparently felt that he lost almost 20 years of his life to addiction. But reading Narcopolis, it seems that perhaps that it was not much of a waste after all.