Narcopolis

The following day I resolved to stay home, but that evening I was back at the khana; I arrived to find, on the floor, smoking a pipe with Pagal Kutta, the painter Xavier. His white kurta had turned the colour of sawdust but his beard was trimmed and he’d had a haircut. In fact, he was looking fresher than he had any right to. Dimple was nowhere to be seen. I told him that Iskai had been to see me, that people were worried about him. Where had he been?

‘Sampling the wares of Shuklaji Street. No reason for Akash to upset himself. My show opens tomorrow. I’ll be there in a suit, charming the press. Tell him to stay calm.’

I asked again where he’d disappeared to. He said, May I buy you a pyali of Mr Rashid’s excellent product? If Baudelaire had extended his survey of paradise to opium, and this opium in particular, I think it would have won hands down. And I am making no idle speculation. As you may have gathered, I am a wino, and it is as a wino that I aver, this opium is superior, uniformly consistently superior. Xavier was drunk, but not so drunk he needed a wheelchair. He thanked me for my help, paid for my pyalis and left the khana in a respectable fashion.

A day or so later I asked Dimple if she knew where Xavier had been. She said he’d been with her at the hijra’s brothel. But she didn’t want to talk about him. In our language the word for evil and chaos is the same, she said. To speak of evil is to invite it into your life. She never mentioned Xavier again, not even to me.

*

Dimple kept her word when she said she would not speak of what happened. But she did not forget the man with the pop eyes whose bloody gums and whisky sweat gave her the superstitious feeling that a devil had entered the room. After I left and Bengali went out to buy food, they were alone in the khana for about half an hour. She busied herself setting out a pyali, but he prepared the opium himself. He did it expertly, tapping the pipe when it was ready, offering her the first smoke. She felt as if she were the customer and he the pipewallah. She would have enjoyed it, too, if she hadn’t felt so controlled by him. While she was still smoking, he took the pipe from her and put the mouthpiece, still wet from her lips, to his, his eyes locked on her belly. Then, looking her in the eyes, he sucked slowly at the pipe and she felt as if he was penetrating her through her clothes, or as if she had fallen asleep in an unfamiliar town and had been slapped awake by a stranger, a man whose face she could not see, who fucked her without mercy and paid no heed to her pleas for lubrication. She had never felt so naked, not even in the brothel.

As soon as Bengali returned, she went home. She walked quickly to the corner and turned into Hijde ki Gully where she walked past 007 and stopped as if to buy paan and checked to see if she was being followed. Only then did she go into the building. She ate dinner and washed herself. She exchanged her salvaar for a sari and was touching up her lipstick and face powder when Xavier entered. He chose the most uncomfortable chair in the house, a pink plastic armchair built for a child. Lakshmi brought him a beer and before he’d taken a sip he ordered another. He asked the tai how much it would cost to spend the night in one of the cubicles. With or without a girl? the tai asked. Without, he said, and the tai gave him the first figure that came into her head: three hundred for the night. How much with a girl? he asked. The tai said six hundred. So a room costs the same as a girl? The tai laughed at him. He pointed at Dimple and said, I’ll take that one. But ask her to put on a burkha for me. You should make them all wear burkhas, you’ll make more money. The tai laughed again. Xavier told her, Put half the girls in burkhas and half in saris and see what the customers prefer. Not once in his exchange with the tai did he look at Dimple.