‘The pipe has told a story and what a story it is’ – Narcopolis by Jeet Thayil

‘Bombay, which obliterated its own history by changing its name and surgically altering its face’

With a first line like that, Jeet Thayil’s Narcopolis was undoubtably going to draw comparisons with Salman Rushdie’s Midnights Children. There are certainly some similarities: both are concerned with a newly emancipated India, both feature unreliable narrators and both favour a verbosity of language and a playful approach to form. However, whilst Midnight’s Children went some way to raising the reader to the stars with its use of magic realism, Narcopolis insists on keeping our eyes on the gutter, fixed on a Bombay that is rife with drugs and criminal activity.

This is not to say that Narcopolis is some kind of ultra-realist kitchen sink drama; ghosts, elements of mysticism and symbolic dreams ripe for Freudian analysis, infuse the entire novel with a persistence and an urgency. But every dream, every ghost, serves to underline the dark themes of the novel: the corruption and power of addiction, the problem of remaining undefined, whether eunuch or nation and a Bombay of squalor and deprivation. Drug addiction is portrayed with both unflinching honesty and philosophical power. One of the main characters, Dimple, describes addiction as a reciprocal relationship which will surely ring true for anyone who has ever been any kind of addict:

‘and the main thing nobody mentions is the comfort of it, how good it is to be a slave to something, the regularity and habit of addiction, the fact that it’s an antidote to loneliness and the way it becomes your family’

Narcopolis is fearless in expressing the love affair with drugs its characters enjoy, the way it gives their life shape and meaning. After all,very little else in the novel does.

Perhaps because of this, Thayil’s characters sometimes come across as elusive. Our unnamed narrator, for example, remains somewhat distant to us, instead acting as a conduit for ‘the lovely stories’ of the city and its murky underclass. He says as much in the stunningly  beautiful stream-of-conciousness opening chapter which brings to mind Penelope’s chapter in Ulysses : ‘I’m not human, I’m a pipe of O telling this story’.

Indeed, he is at his best and most interesting when he is speaking the words of others, especially when he enters the skin and mind of Dimple, who works in Rashid’s opium room. Dimple is also a eunuch and a prostitute and acts as a metaphor for Thayil’s India; she is ambiguous and undefined, both drug taker and drug enabler, both man and women, both sexual and sexless. But she is also far more than a metaphor, she is a compelling and fascinating character who articulates clearly the various power struggles which crisscross Bombay, whether between man and chemical or man and woman. Her liminal position affords her a perspective which reaches right into the depths of the novel itself. In the way, she becomes the heart and soul beating underneath the novel’s gritty subject matter. Thayil’s sense of compassion is certainly not limited to Dimple but for me, she is his most fully realised character.

With Narcopolis, Thayil has somehow managed to utilise his poetry background to create a work which avoids becoming overly stylised, too sentimental or cliched (let’s be honest, novels about drugs have been done to death). His evocative language brings a beauty to the darkness within the text and within his characters. Narcopolis is also a genuine page-turner, the kind of novel that you can get comfortably lost in. Hopefully, this means that Narcopolis will receive all the critical acclaim that it absolutely deserves.

Any Cop?: Comparisons to Midnight’s Children there may be, but Narcopolis is truly its own kind of unique experience. The pipe has told a story and what a story it is.

Emma Mould