I am not sure why I picked Narcopolis to read. I don't recall being recommended or reading about it. Nor was it a free download on my kindle. Whatever the reason was, I am glad I picked it. I loved it for the fact that it does nothing while and after you read it. It's like soft music played in some bars. You don't notice it and chat away...Only while you are leaving, you may appreciate how pleasant and natural it was and how well it blended with everything.
So is Narcopolis a great book that gets on the list of books that will change your life? It's not. Infact it is one of the most ordinary book I have read. It accounts for lives of people-simple people you can relate to or identify within the set of people you know. I would say that is indeed the best part. Narcopolis accounts for real things so indifferently that everything feels alright. Lost dreams, desires, addiction, riots- name it and seems it's all just one small part of the big picture.
The account of impulsive reactions, future regrets, hunches of wrong decisions and pleasures of small things- all appear matter of factly...
Somewhere, along the book, you will stop and wonder where it started and how smoothly it hopped from one character to the other to completely change the protagonist. From beginning to end, as the writer insists and alludes often, Narcopolis is the story of Bombay- a mesh of love, narcotics, sex, violence, generations, expats, inherited dreams and much more.
It is noteworthy that Jeet Thayil was himself an addict for twenty years and so his account is fairly vivid, and certainly natural. One might very well be writing this book in a trance or feel like they are reading it in one. The narrator of the story is either not defined or is comfortably changed during the course of book. Prologue mentions that narrator is not the one telling the story but the one who is being told the story....only to reveal that the book was, as you may feel obvious later, narrated to an opium pipe. Obvious, considering that it was present in all the mini stories, or stories that it leads to.
Pipe mentions, rather summarized in between about the story saying
'That city (Bombay) was a large accumulation of small defeats, nothing more, and each new arrival to the city brought his own miniscule contribution to the inexhaustible pile...'
The book is in four chapters which abruptly change the characters only to converse back to a main story, or theme- which is Narcopolis (A cemetery, esp.. a large one belonging to an ancient city) or is it really Narcotics. There is a play of words and both fit perfectly.
Book starts with Chapter one: The story of O.
It mentions the arrival of narrator in Bombay and amongst other characters, a beautiful eunuch who is castrated young. She is the pipe maker and moves from one frame to another, meeting people, reading people. Her perspective is often cited...
On asking her why she takes drugs later, she says:
" Oh, who knows, there are so many good reasons and nobody mentions them 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..."
Also,
" It isn't the heroin that we're addicted to, it's the drama of life, the chaos of it, that's the real addiction and we never get over it; and because, when you come down to it, the high life, that is, the intoxicated life, is the best limited option we are offered"
Book Two is 'The story of Pipe' based on a Chinese who settled in Bombay and his account of life and learning and journey with Opium.
Book Three is 'The Intoxication' which narrates rise of heroin, fall of opium and and crumble of dens and brothels in the city. It makes a base of downfall- of characters, places, habits, rehabilitation-everything.
Final chapter is 'Some uses of reincarnation' - this is mostly about revisiting places- seeing what has become of the already ruin. How opium that moved to heroine had now moved to cocaine....'Dance or die'
There are nuances worth noticing throughout the book and beautiful perspectives. Only a damn clear mind can think of them, or one that is completely stoned..
There is owner of the common 'adda' for all characters who come and smoke pipe there-Rashidbhai. He sees phases- from opium to heroin and addiction to state of absolving. He spends the ultimate days in trance of memories, after giving up the trance of drugs. He notices the changes around him and hallucinates about people from past.
Below is the perspective of Rashidbhai in his old days on his son and younger generation in general-
' It was as if they didn't care whether they were understood, or they took pleasure in being misunderstood, or they'd decided that the rewards of obscurity outweighed the rewards of clarity'
He concludes beautifully-
" Now is the time to learn something from the young, in this case the usefulness of indifference.'
Also, there is melancholy sprayed with wisdom when Dimple, the eunuch says- For every happiness there is an equal and opposite unhappiness
And to end, there is mention of dreams leaking- from one person to other or from one moment to other- as if the sane days in between never existed... Those who have felt the parallel world of addiction, or escapism-chose your adjective- will understand.
Dreams leak from head to head; they travel between those who face in the same direction, that is to say lovers, and those who share the bonds of intoxication and death...
In totality its a book where each character, as Thayil would say, was a 'misfit in a company of misfits'
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