Jeet Thayil - Narcopolis

*

Soporo said he was tired. He would have liked to talk for longer but he got tired quickly these days. He said there was just one last thing he wanted to do before they called the meeting to an end. He wanted to say something about planned obsolescence. The first English movie he saw was in 1979 or 1980 at Eros, which at the time was Bombay’s grandest movie theatre, located near Churchgate Station, as they all knew, and if they didn’t they certainly should. The movie was set in Los Angeles in the not-distant future, in fact, in the near future. As far as he could remember, it was about a corporation that made highly intelligent fighting machines, human-looking creatures built to self-destruct after a few years, five years, or four, because the corporation, being a corporation, was run by paranoid bureaucrats who didn’t want a race of super beings running around the planet. As the time grows closer to their annihilation, the brilliant killer machines, blessed or cursed with human sweetness and human rage, become desperate. They decide to find the head of the corporation, their creator, the god who made them in his imagined image, though in reality he is nothing like them, he is unbeautiful, intellectual, distant. They dream up a way to enter the fortress in which he lives and persuade him to reverse the death sentence embedded in their cells, the sentence of accelerated decrepitude, as they call it. This is defiance and the viewer sitting in his seat feels some of their exhilaration as the humanoids call their god to task. But even god cannot change their fate: once written it is irreversible. The leader of the renegades speaks softly to his maker. I want more life, father, he says. Then he kisses him and crushes his skull, as sons tend to do to their fathers. The group of beautiful machines dies one by one until only the leader is left, the most beautiful and dangerous of them all, and when it’s his time to die he makes an unexpected gesture of mercy. He allows the detective who has been hunting him to live, the venal human detective who has killed his lover and his friends, who has pursued them and shown no mercy, he allows this killer to live, saves him in fact, because at the last moment, as he sees his own life come to a close, he gives in to sentimentality. And which viewer does not feel a little of his torment? Here Soporo paused and his gaze wandered around the room and settled on the cross, as if he had never before seen such a strange object, and he repeated the words planned obsolescence . I wonder, said Soporo, if you’ve heard the phrase before, because I saw it recently and now I don’t remember where. But the idea is that companies design products with a short life, like the pretty computers I see these days, with the shiny logos, the biblical half-eaten fruit and so on, pretty objects that are built to self-destruct, so you buy another in a few years, and another and another, and in that way you feed the insect empire, the insects in their insect suits, thinking insect thoughts with their sexed-up insect brains. Yes, and finally, Soporo said, to end, he would make two points. First, nothing he’d said that day was original or new, they were ideas he picked up from the air, from things people said or didn’t say, from shreds collected long ago or a moment earlier, collective, shared notions or emotions. Second, he wanted to suggest an antidote to obsolescence, planned or not, and to decrepitude, accelerated or otherwise. His idea was a group lament, a gong, which, in China, meant something collective or shared. The lament he had in mind was a short one, and how could it be otherwise, since no lament could be long enough to express the grief of the world? His suggestion was that each person spend a few minutes thinking about the people they’d lost, those boys and girls and men and women who had been taken by garad heroin, and that they say the names of their dead ones, say them quietly or aloud, it didn’t matter, but say the whole name, because that was the way to do it, say the whole name and remember, that was the way to honour the dead.

*

There was a time, even after he’d moved into two small rooms at the rectory, when he was at Safer almost every day. Now he went only three times a week, for meetings and for housekeeping, to settle accounts, buy provisions, medicine, clothes and linen, and to fix problems when they arose. He was a kind of liaison between Father Fo and whoever was in charge of the day-to-day, which would be Bull. The arrangement left him free to do whatever he felt like, which, lately, wasn’t much. He was on the terrace talking to Charlotte the cook, telling her the same things he’d been saying for months, repeating them as if she was a child, which she most decidedly was not. Use less oil, he told her. Don’t overcook. When you’re cooking prawns put them in last and turn off the flame. Do what the Chinese do, high heat, bite-size pieces, a couple of minutes of cooking and, Charlotte, are you hearing any of this? And that was when Bull asked to see him. They took a stroll around the terrace while Charlotte chopped the veggies and marinated the meat and washed rice. It’s about the new turkey, said Bull. He’d run away the day before, taken off while they were on their way to Soporo’s lecture, and now he was back asking to be let in. The guy was a hard case, an asshole, part of the prison rehab experiment, Bull said, and he should be taught a lesson. Bull thought they should let him stew, let him spend a couple of days on the street and he’d return a changed man. Otherwise, he was going to be a lot of trouble, he was going to be more trouble than he was worth, Bull could smell it. Soporo grinned suddenly. He said, Suppose I’d said that about you when you first turned up here? Do you remember what an asshole you were? Bull said, You can’t save everybody, you know. Some souls are beyond saving. They went down to the third floor where Rumi was waiting on the other side of the staircase gate. He was nodding out on the steps. He opened his eyes when he heard Soporo and Bull, but he didn’t get up. I would let you in, said Soporo, but I’m told that it may not be a good idea. Rumi looked Soporo in the eyes and said: Please let me in. I give you my word it won’t happen again. I don’t believe you, said Bull. You’re not making the decisions here, said Rumi. You see? Bull told Soporo. You see what I mean? The guy’s beyond rehab, we’re wasting our time. Rumi said: Mr Soporo, I give you my word, sir. It won’t happen again. This time I won’t let you down. Soporo told Bull to open the gate, which was unlocked, and Rumi went up without another word. That day he didn’t say much. He ate his meals, did his share of work, slept well. In the following days, too, he seemed changed, as if he’d reconciled to the sober life. Later, after the terrible events that followed had been analysed and analysed some more, the inmates remembered how different he’d seemed in those days, how interested he was in everything, in the running of the centre, in its history, and in Soporo’s personal story. It was inspiring, he said, so inspiring that he wanted to know everything about the man. Then, three days later, he did it again, disappeared for a night and a day and returned just as dinner was being served.

*

Bull called Soporo at the rectory saying Ramesh was back and demanding to be let in, but this time they couldn’t do it. There were rules. A prison intake was only allowed the single slip; two, and they were within their rights to send him back to Arthur Road or Yerawada or Tihar or wherever it was he belonged, because one thing was certain, he had no place at Safer. Also, he’d been asking to see Soporo in person, not asking, demanding, as if he was in a restaurant and he wanted to complain to the manager. Bull hadn’t allowed him in and he’d gone to the abandoned yards across the street where he’d walked into one of those drainage pipes and no doubt was getting high at that very moment. Bull suggested they wait until morning, then call the authorities and let them take the guy away. We’ll see, Soporo replied, and he put down the phone. His back was acting up, had been acting up for days, and he felt like he was coming down with something, a cold maybe, and he put aside the book he was looking at and went into the kitchen to make a cup of tea. He put water on to boil and cut ginger into long strips and put half a lemon into the squeezer. He poured the hot water into a big cup, dunked and removed a bag of Ceylon tea, added the ginger and lemon and took the cup with him into the living room, where he measured a teaspoon of honey from a small bottle on the dining table. He sat in his chair by the window and looked for the moon above the rooftops and though he couldn’t see it he thought he saw its reflection in a building window. He looked around the room as he took a sip of the tea. It was small and unpretentious: on the floor were books stacked against the wall, because he had never gotten around to having shelves made, and there were postcards taped to the mirror and money plants in glass bottles and plenty of light (the apartment faced east) and some air. It was a quiet place; in Father Fo’s words, ‘serene and modest’. He took another sip and winced a little: there was too much lemon. He thought, I’ll be sorry to leave here.