Narcopolis

He took a cab to Rajesh Khanna Park and kept it waiting while he went into the Tamil slum known as Murugan Chawl and bought a five-gram pack. The woman who sold him the smack had a baby at her breast and he sat on the floor and snorted a quick line off his wrist and then he made a joint. His ass immediately tightened and he felt better, or better than better, best, infinitely best. The woman was telling him about her brother who used to run the family’s heroin trade but had died from TB and drugs. Two of her brothers-in-law were dead from mysterious illnesses that she attributed to garad heroin, and her husband, also a garaduli, had fallen off a train earlier that year, leaving her with two kids, etc. etc. etc. The lament slid from his head like rain and he stared at her breasts, or breast, since only the single one was visible, one pathetic tit being suckled by the vampire baby leech that was fattening as he watched. It was less than a year old and its greasy black hair was plastered to its forehead and it had the face of an old sow, and its future was written on its forehead: fatherless childhood, adolescence of petty crime, garad or alcohol in his late teens, more crime, illness, the usual ending. Why did you have another baby? he asked the woman. You have no money, your husband was a garaduli, and you already have one mouth to feed, why another? The woman’s face was oily and her oily black hair was tied with a rubber band. She took the baby from her breast and held it to him. Hold him and you’ll know, she said. He saw a drop of off-white milk on her black nipple. She smiled shyly and pulled the blouse down to cover herself and only then did he look at the thing in his hands. When the baby’s eyes met his, it began to cry. He wanted to shake its misshapen dwarf hand, because the reaction was the first sign of intelligence he’d seen all day. He held it away from his body and examined it, the colour, untouchable, and the smell, ripe, a nauseating mix of talcum powder and Parachute coconut oil. He wanted to take it with him, but how? And what would be a fitting reward to the mother in lieu of her blighted offspring, how many rupees, a thousand, two? Something of what he was feeling must have communicated itself to the woman by a kind of aboriginal voodoo. Give it to me, she said. Give, give. The baby was crying in earnest now, its mouth wide and its eyes closed tight, and he was impressed by the amount of noise it produced. He knew the mother was moments away from shouting for help and then, in an instant, the male members of her criminal clan would be at the door. He gave the baby back and stepped out of the room and walked along the open gutter to the street. In each of the hovels he passed a woman was cooking while her husband drank country liquor and their children puked or pissed in the approximate vicinity of the gutter. He negotiated small piles of watery shit and imagined a great firebomb that would end the poverty and desolation of Murugan Chawl, a big beautiful explosion that would engulf the entire slum and blow its inhabitants straight into the next world. Smiling now, he felt ready to take on the fuckers at the rehab, but first he had to make one last stop and he’d forgotten all about the cabbie, who was still waiting, pacing near his fucked-up piece-of-kaka Fiat. Chalo, he told the man, who got in the car without whining, and he directed him to Bandra East, to the slum near the station, so poor it didn’t have a name, where he picked up a gram of Charlie and treated himself to a quick equalizing line — or three.

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