Narcopolis

The door of the khana was open when she walked in, late, the cake held in front of her. Mr Lee was on the floor with his eyes open, his knee bent under him. She took him to the hospital where they operated on his leg. The doctor told her he’d had a stroke, a minor one, but he would need to be looked after. He came home with his leg in a cast and fear in his eyes. His mind skipped years, slipping backward or forward without regard for chronology. He lost faith in linear time. He told her his autobiography by describing the rooms he had lived in: the house he’d taken as an officer, the mud-floored house he grew up in, hotels he’d lived in for weeks on end, rooms in Rangoon, Chittagong, Delhi and cities he’d forgotten the names of. His first place in Bombay was a shared room in a hostel near Grant Road and he ate in an ashram kitchen, the food vegetarian, heavy, hard to digest. Disgust, he said, meaning: it was disgusting. He said, I enjoy return to my room at night because I speak Cantonese to myself in mirror. I like to hear sound of my language. He carried on long interrupted conversations with the mirror about the city’s terrible food, the dirtiness and bad manners and the sharp body odour that all Indians shared, because spicy food smells were exiting through the pores. As he spoke, he became the person in the stories he told her, a young officer in the army, a student, a refugee driving from town to town, a child. He spoke of bicycles and books, a fur cap he received when he turned eight and a village of people named Lee. He spoke of a woman with rope burns around her neck and a man who froze to death in the summer. His voice rarely rose above a whisper and it regained its authority only when he uttered the word ‘China’.

Chapter Two White Lotus, White Clouds

His mother wore glasses with heavy black frames. When the frames broke she fixed them with tape. The glasses were not correctly aligned and they made her look cockeyed but she continued to wear them. He went with her to exchange their ration coupons for rice and he walked ahead and pretended not to know the woman with the bandaged spectacles. On the street a group of boys imitated her walk and crooked eyes. When they laughed at her the woman with the bandaged spectacles laughed too. She laughed shyly, covering her mouth with her hands like a child. The state of her spectacles did not stop the woman from reading the Red Flag every day. She refused to read anything else. She denounced the People’s Daily and other publications as reactionary organs, or revisionist, or feudal, decadent and counter-revolutionary. The woman worked in a factory and she complained to the bosses that her fellow workers were indulging in pornography. The seriousness of the charge brought the Deputy Secretary to the floor to investigate. When he discovered that the workers had been discussing a foreign news magazine, in particular the skimpy dresses worn by the models in the advertisements, the deputy secretary chided the woman, but it went no further than that, because after all she was an example of revolutionary fervour. She believed in herbal medicine and acupuncture. She carried a bottle of eucalyptus oil, which she used to treat everything from headaches, period pains, upset stomachs and inflammations, to more serious maladies such as burns and cuts. She wore black or blue tunics all year round and black canvas shoes. On her head was a green peaked cap, a man’s cap. Despite the lecture she received from the Deputy Secretary, she continued to denounce her fellow factory workers as decadent or reactionary, and she refused to have anything to do with them because they discussed frivolous matters such as clothes and monetary troubles. She had a hatred for money. She handed her wages back to the supervisor and said, I don’t want to be contaminated by filth. Then she told him: Be careful, be very careful or it will corrupt you without your knowledge. When the workers were given a bonus she refused to accept it, because, she said, a bonus was revisionism in its ugliest form. At the same time, his father looked after the expenses of the household, including food, clothes and medicines for the three of them, and for this service he received only contempt from the woman.