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).