Jeet Thayil - Narcopolis

*

She said, Tell me about your life upstairs, what is it like to have a family and never be lonely? But Rashid only shook his head. He was smoking a joint loaded with Chemical. He was happy, he said, why complicate things? Besides, talking about something is a way of jinxing it. She said, In fact talking about something is a way of not jinxing it, because if you say it, it won’t happen. He didn’t know this basic fact because he was still an amateur when it came to superstitions and she on the other hand was a master of the science, and that was were they left it. She went to the door to see him out and it seemed to her then, as she watched him climb the stairs, that he was her only contact with the living. She had seen no one else that day. The khana was closed and there was a curfew in the city and if she looked out at the empty streets she felt as if she was the only survivor of a terrible planetary mishap. She stood on the landing after Rashid’s footsteps had faded. There was a film of perspiration on her face and she let the air cool her. She sniffed herself and thought: I smell of sex. And then she became aware of someone crouched in the dark of the stairwell leading to the street below. She took a few steps forward but saw nothing. The Chemical, she thought, it’s rotting my mind. I have conversations with a dead man and I think I’m being spied on.

*

She sat on the floor and opened the book she’d found at the raddiwallah’s. She was sure it was the author she’d read a long time ago, S. T. Pande, but previously he’d described himself as a professor of history, not theology and symmetry, and he’d been affiliated to some other university. How could there be two professors with identical names writing textbooks for school children? It had to be the same man, and yet, how was he an expert in so many disciplines? Was symmetry a discipline at all? She opened a page at random, which was the way she liked to read, and started from the first line:

. . what use, then, the machinations of desire? Since God created each felicity of body with a concomitant object of gratification, the desire for immortality is in itself the evidence of immortality, as is the existence of its sister state, immutability. Cf. the Katha Upanishad: ‘When that self who dwells in the body is torn away and freed from the body, what remains? This is that.’

She flipped back to the beginning of the book and it struck her that Some Uses of Reincarnation was not part of the school examination syllabus. The title page, page iii, had only the name of the book and the author’s name: it said nothing about being a textbook. Facing it, on page ii, were printing details, This edition published 1987 by STP Enterprises. New Delhi * Madras * Bhubaneshwar . Page iv gave a Haryana address for STP Enterprises and at the bottom of the page India Educational Services was listed as the publisher. On the facing page were the title and author’s name, this time in an old-fashioned woodcut design, and overleaf, the Contents. Pande had divided the book into two sections, ‘An Introduction to Aggressive Reincarnation’ and ‘The Algebra of Being’. The first section listed ‘active reincarnation practices’ in the case of those who died strange, violent or painful deaths and it began with a prologue, which had a précis of each of the sections to follow:

Immortality

Guilt & Consequence

[sections 3–6 are omitted]

Premonition

Revenge

Tonguelessness

She started at the beginning and read slowly all the way through.

IMMORTALITY. In which the author posits the idea that reincarnation, as a way of prolonging indefinitely an entity’s earthly existence, is nothing short of a curse. The author contends that only intoxicated entities, forgetful of God, wish for unlimited lifetimes in which to prolong their pleasures. The author suggests that such entities should actively take their afterlife into their own hands and seek out the shape in which they wish to return. If they want to eat and drink to their hearts’ content, they should ask to be given the body of a pig; if they wish to lie in the sun and move very little, they should ask for the body of a lizard; and if they wish to copulate all day and all night, they should ask for the body of a monkey. The author is by no means contending that these three body types are the limits of the intoxicated entity’s available choices, certainly not, as there are manifold conditions, for example: inward envy, sleepiness, prideful urination, aversion to heights, devotion to heights, aversion to water, devotion to water, & etc. (See Fig. 8).

GUILT & CONSEQUENCE. In which the author posits the idea that there are no innocents and no bystanders, because all living things play an active role in their incarnations, reincarnations and subsequent existences; that each entity is born carrying sins and memories from its previous existence, and the stronger the memories, the more dynamic the play of hope and power in its early life; that these memories fade as we grow into adolescence, a loss that occurs despite our own best efforts, because we are encouraged to do so by our families and the society we find ourselves struggling to fit into; that those who die painfully, through no apparent fault of their own, are in fact paying for past errors; that the question therefore of God’s cruelty is moot, for God has no hand in the way we conduct our births on our upward or downward trajectories, as is our course and our curse; and that there is no action without its immediate or delayed consequence.

PREMONITION: In which the author provides an example from his own life. Days before her death, his dear wife was engaged in a strenuous discussion with the author, the details of which he is unable to recall at the present moment. It had something to do with the author’s work habits, which his wife termed obsessive and isolating. She said she felt lonely and cut off both from her husband and the world. The author, irate at the intrusion and the time he was wasting, time that could profitably have been spent at his desk, was about to tell his wife in the strongest language that she had to find her own obsession and could not look to him for happiness, harsh words he had flung at her before, when he became aware of a figure standing immediately behind her. The figure, dressed in stereotypical loose white cotton, told the author, or he didn’t speak exactly, but managed somehow to communicate very clearly that the author should not say the words that were already positioned in his mouth, aimed and ready for launching. The figure said his wife was not long for the world, and that he, the author, should be as kind to her as possible or he would be guilty for the rest of his life. At this moment, his wife moved to the window, where she lit a cigarette, and her invisible companion moved too, so he was always immediately behind and above her, like some kind of broken shadow. As the reader has correctly anticipated, the author did not follow the white-robed figure’s advice. The author uses this anecdote to consider the question of premonition in reincarnative episodes.

REVENGE: In which the author provides a procedural for thwarted entities who wish to exact satisfaction from those who tormented them during their most recent lifetimes. The author makes special mention of brides set on fire by their husbands’ families as a punishment for bringing inadequate dowries. The author enumerates the steps by which such women can be reincarnated within the very families that destroyed them, so as to decimate said family from within its own bosom. First, the author recommends that reincarnation is delayed until such time as the husband’s new wife is pregnant, usually a period of around nine or ten months, because the husband’s remarriage most often occurs immediately after the death of his previous wife; second, the reincarnating entity enters the womb in question and assumes the foetal shape, a process that requires deft manoeuvring and practice; third, she must focus on her task throughout her subsequent childhood, as there will be many forces working to undermine her resolve; and last, she must take pains to disguise any physical signs, for example scorched birthmarks on the skin and a marked aversion to fire, that may signal to an astute enemy that she is the prodigal wife returned. The author contends that will is the paramount faculty to ensure successful reincarnation, particularly when the purpose is revenge. The techniques described in this section can be applied by any entity, i.e. it is not the sole prerogative of murdered housewives.