Jeet Thayil - Narcopolis

He said, ‘My father is busy, he isn’t meeting anyone.’

‘He’ll want to see me. I was a friend.’

‘You were a customer. He had many customers and they all thought they were his friends. It was business, but he wasn’t good at it.’

‘Jamal, you don’t like it, I know, but your father is my friend. Can I see him?’

‘Sit down and have tea. We’ll discuss, then we’ll see.’

*

He said, ‘You’re Dom Ullis. We used to call you Doom or Dum, for “Dum Maro Dum,”’ and he sang the line from the movie. ‘Sometimes I called you Damned Ullis because of the things you said. I’m older now. People my age don’t take our culture lightly. We’re not as tolerant as our fathers. But do you remember? You said religion wasn’t important.’ It surprised me that he remembered a conversation from so many years ago, remembered it as clearly as if it had just occurred. He recalled the exact words Rashid and I had exchanged and forgotten. It was as if he was still hearing them in his head. He said, ‘Do you know what my father told me when I was a child? He said we were descended from the Mughals. I should never forget it and I should carry myself with pride. I did some reading: I studied what the Mughals brought to India, their inventions, the ice and running water and planned gardens to soothe eye and spirit. But what do Indians remember? Only the pyramid of skulls. They say, "See how bloodthirsty the Muslims were: even then they liked to kill."’ I told Jamal there was a difference between him and the Mughals, because the Mughals loved life and poetry and beauty. I said, ‘What do you love except death?’ For some reason, my words pleased him. We moved to his desk, where he took his seat and stared at the computer. The room was full of moisture. I sat in the visitor’s chair and wiped my neck with my hands.

‘You see what they’re doing in Afghanistan?’

‘Who doesn’t? It’s on the news every day.’

‘But do you see? And Iraq? They take ancient Babylon and they fortify it, they make it a restricted area and all the time they are excavating, excavating. They find things that belong to history and they destroy them or steal them.’

‘Yes.’

‘Think if someone did it in Washington DC or Chicago or New York, burned down the libraries, stole antiques, bombed cities and towns. What would happen?’

‘We’d never hear the end of it.’

‘In two years there would be twenty books and movies about it; that is what would happen.’

*

He was silent for a time. On a board near the computer was a picture of Jamal and a young woman in a burkha. Farheen, my fiancée, he said, when he saw me looking at the picture. Love marriage. She’s older than me by two years. Then he said, One minute, and shouted across the room to a man who was playing a game of bridge on his computer terminal. The man left the game and came over.

‘This is Kumar, Hindu Brahmin. Many of my friends are Brahmins. Kumar has never touched meat in his life.’

Kumar said, ‘Oh don’t talk about meat. I always say animals have more right to exist on the planet than we do.’

Jamal asked Kumar to order more tea for us, dismissing him. Now that he’d shown off his girlfriend, his Brahmin, his urbanity, he could return to his subject.

‘Anybody can become a suicide bomber if they are pushed far enough. Some of my radical friends say they could easily go in that direction. We, I mean, they,’ he paused to smile, to let me know he was joking, ‘they would do it only if they had no other option. You know what they say? There’s always something to look forward to if you become a CP.’ Again he smiled, and said, ‘Citizen of Paradise.’

‘What are the attractions of paradise for a man like you? You’re not powerless and angry.’

*

He said, I went to a Christian college and my friends are Hindu but I’m Muslim through and through. My father wanted me to get a good education. He chose the best college he could afford, he didn’t care which community ran it. I was one of only four Muslim students. The professors were Hindus and Catholics. One day the mathematics professor found me reading a magazine during his lecture. He slapped me in front of the whole class. He said, ‘Who do you people think you are? Why are you in India? You should be carrying out jihad in Afghanistan.’ Then, during the riots, a mob pulled me off my cycle. I wasn’t wearing a skullcap. I spoke in Marathi, but still they didn’t let me go. I was very young. I broke down. I saw the hijra woman, my father’s kaamvali. She was wearing a dress like a Christian. I pointed at her and called her ma.

I said, Dimple.

He said: How do you think these things made me feel? Powerful? My father made us read the holy book every night. Do you know that about him? Every night: one or two suras. He’d come home stoned out of his head and make me read some verses while his eyes were drooping and drool fell out of his mouth. Jamal stopped, as if he’d run out of words. There was silence for a time. Then he looked at his watch and stood up. He said, My father was an addict. He was addicted to everything. He’s become himself now. Go up. He’s on the first floor.

*

New beige paint coated the walls but the staircase and the banisters were scuffed wood. I went up, past a locked door on the half landing. The door on the first floor was open and a light was burning in the hall but otherwise the house was dim. Rashid sat in an armchair by an open window and the only noises in the room came from the courtyard below, where children were playing. Their voices echoed against the walls, high voices ringing with fury. He stared out the window but there was no sign that he saw or heard anything. There was a crocheted white skullcap on his head and he was counting prayer beads. I was surprised by his thinness, the expression of unreachability on his face, and by the clothes he was wearing, a blue shirt and new black trousers, Rashid, whose colour had always been white.

Rashidbhai? I said. He flinched and looked wildly around the room. I introduced myself. I said I had been away for many years and had returned only recently. I said it was a pleasure to see him and introduced myself again and the stiffness left his posture.

‘All that was a long time ago.’

He had given up drugs and become a thin man. But he’d lost more than weight. There was nothing about him that was recognizable to me. He’d gotten thin and his charisma was gone.

‘How are you?’

He nodded. Then, changing his mind, he shook his head to indicate he wasn’t well, or that he didn’t know how he was, or that he didn’t care. A girl came in with tea.

‘I often think of those days, when your khana was the best in the city. Some people said in the country.’

‘Useless. It was my mistake, that stupid business.’

‘Not such a big mistake. At least you’re still here.’

‘I’m not here.’

‘Dimple?’ I asked.

‘Dead.’

‘Bengali?’

‘Dead.’

‘Rumi?’

‘Dead.’

‘And yourself?’ I said. ‘Alive?’

He was already drained by the conversation. He blinked at me, meeting my eyes for a moment. Then he shook his thin white-bearded cheeks.

‘Worse each day. And alive.’

The girl came back with a plate of grapes, washed and peeled and set on a white plate. Too much, he said to her. But he reached out his fingers and took some and pushed the plate to me. I took some too. There was silence in the room.

I said, ‘What happened to Dimple?’

The girl offered more grapes.

‘No, no, no,’ he said.

*

He locked up the office. He picked up his phone and keys and went up. His father was sitting in his room with the fan off and the window open, doing, as far as he could see, absolutely nothing. The old man sat all day in the same position, staring out the window. Sometimes Jamal heard him talking to himself, very softly, as if he didn’t want to be overheard. His father left the room only occasionally, sometimes for a walk, sometimes to the apartment on the half landing where the kaamvali used to live. What he did in the apartment Jamal couldn’t imagine. The place was full of junk and mould and things that needed to be thrown away. Jamal went into his own room and washed his face and neck at the sink. He picked up a towel and thought of Farheen, of her tummy fat, which never failed to excite him. She wore burkhas that she designed herself, patterned burkhas cut like a lab coat, tight around the hips and belly. She reminded him of his father’s kaamvali. Once, in a guest house in Lonavla, he came so many times that he wanted to keep count. Number seven, he said, what do you think of that? I wish you also thought of pleasuring me a little, Farheen replied. Sometimes I wish you were older, or that you acted older. To this he said nothing, because he was the age he was, younger than her by two years, and there was nothing he could do to change it. When he thought about it, about her calm appraisal of him as they fucked, the way she kissed him, the way nothing he did surprised her, as if she’d been fucked many times by many men, and the fact that she never talked about marriage though she was a spinster of twenty-five, already older than his sisters when they’d been married, and when he brought it up all she would say was that he wasn’t ready — it maddened him, it made him want to own her. He ran his fingers through his hair and checked his shave and then he turned off the lights and went out.