Jeet Thayil, a published poet and sometime musician, had enough time to bask in the attention in the heady few weeks after making it to the Booker shortlist for 2012. By the time I managed to obtain a copy of the book, Hilary Mantel had already won the Booker for Bring up the Bodies, the sequel to Wolf Hall. The copy I received was printed after the shortlist announcement and the odious, obvious and superfluous comparisons, blurbs, reviews on the cover and inside pages seemed a bit dated already. There were comparisons to Denis Johnson, Robert Bolano, William Burroughs, and Salman Rushdie mainly because Narcopolis is 'about drugs and Bombay'. One applauds the publisher for trying to latch Thayil to a corpus of writers and work that is already familiar with readers, but that does Narcopolis a grave disservice since those blurbs 'only go skin-deep'. Booker or no-Booker this book is a winner.

One the unwritten rules for writing a novel is: 'Write an arresting first line'. Jeet Thayil seems to have taken this rather seriously. With breathless excitement, Dom Ullis, the former druggie and purported narrator of the piece starts Narcopolis with:

Bombay, which obliterated its own history by changing its name and surgically altering its face, is the hero or heroin of this story, and since I'm the one who's telling it and you don't know who I am, let me say that we'll get to the who of it,  but not right now, ..." 

and this Holden Caulfield-esque monologue continues for a few more pages before the sentence (and the entire prologue) rests with a tired full stop. If the rest of the novel continued in a similar vein where the writer was more interested in showing his chops than telling a story then it would get rather tiresome. Thankfully, it does not. If one reads past the self-conscious bravado of the opening lines, there are rich rewards awaiting.

The novel bravely tackles and wrestles with much larger themes than the popular four-word summary offered. The principal thread that runs through this multi-layered novel is the theme of 'exile'.  There is the exotic kind of being banished from one's country as in the case of  the 'chini' Mr. Lee who flees Canton and then wanders into Bombay, the self-conscious artistic exile of  Mr. Newton Xavier, the self-selected exile from society as in the case of Dom Ullis and Rumi, and the exile of one exiled by definition - Dimple the eunuch. The great beauty of this novel is that while the themes are large there is an extraordinary focus on where the action occurs - on Shuklaji street, a side-street in Bombay's red-light district on Grant Road. Barring a few scenes, all the actors are described doing and thinking on Shuklaji Street. It's not a microcosm of Bombay, but a world into itself that sleeps, wakes up,  lives and dies on it's own timetable - slower than the maddening pace of Bombay.

Salman Rushdie in The Ground Beneath Her Feet called the mish-mash of languages that is spoken in Bombay as HUG-ME (Hindi, Urdu, Gujarati, Marathi, English). A nice acronym if you are into that sort of clever post-facto verbal gymnastics. Thayil prefers to call it Bambayya and there is a lot of it and gratifyingly without much in-line translation. Maybe this is satisfying to my post-colonial self that an Indian is claiming the English language for a country that has more English speakers than England without making too many excuses or being self-conscious about it. I like it because it does not patronize readers who are not from the sub-continent - they will figure it out, or look it up. A similar strain is heard in Junot Diaz's work which I maddeningly hear being called 'Spanglish'. It's just as irksome as 'Hinglish'.
While the real menace and violence of Bombay stays on the periphery, its human embodiment is writ large on the pages in the form of  Rumi (short for Ramesh which we learn much later). Living a boring, square life with his Gujarati wife after his return from the States, Rumi finds meaning in drugs and violence. As he lies in an opium daze in the khana at Rashid's (who is a Muslim), he tells Dom that he's 'okay' because he is  Syrian Catholic. Their (Shiv Sainiks?) target is the 'Mozzies' - or Muslims. The irony is inescapable. Religious violence always erupts in Bombay and then again people go about their business. One of the many aspects of India Jeet Thayil confronts, via Rumi in this case, is that Indians can be pretty tribalistic, and not always in terms of religion. Take for instance this "chooth" dialogue that Dom narrates as Rumi and he wait in line for a Nigerian drug mule to shit out the contents of his intestine so they all can get high on the heroin he has brought:

This chooth country, cunt country, how the fuck are you supposed to live here without drugs? Look at the Gujaratis, chooths, we all know this, kem cho chootiyas. Human calculators, you can't even talk to them without giving them cash, they're such accomplished chooths. And the Kashmiris, complete chooths, offer them your hand, they take your ass. It's their nature; they can't help it. And what about the Madrasis, all those Keralites and Kannadigas and so on? Chooths, undu gundu choothiyas, idli dosa chootiyas, nothing personal, it's true, you know it and I know it. And Punjabis, do I even have to mention Punjabis? Number one chooths, the Punjus. They'll eat and drink with you and all they while they're measuring you for a coffin. Bengalis? Bengalis are beyond your average category of choothiyadoom, they're the chooths of the highest order, first-quality bhadralok choothiyas, who invent new levels of choothiyaness daily..."

Rumi then goes on for a while in this fashion, calling every Indian community he can think of a 'bunch of chooths'. His diatribe ends:

The only non-chooths in the entire country are Maharashtrians. I grant you there's been some degrading of the the rule in recent times but at least with the Maharashtrians what you see is what you get: islands of sanity in a sea of chooths. But even here, in the only non-choothiya place in the whole choothiya country, I challenge you to live here without trying to grade-A narcotics, said Rumi, leaning across the staircase to knock on the door in rapid frustrated bursts. 

The passage above is both hilarious, mock ironic and also a serious comment on widely held beliefs (one just replaces the names). The novel dazzles with such examples of acute observations and honesty in confronting difficult topics. Elsewhere, he writes that men who preferred to have sex with a hijra or eunuch do not see themselves, or would ever describe themselves as homosexuals.

The work was fast. The giraks didn't take off their clothes. They unzipped, they finished in minutes, and they were gone. Their desire for her, for sex, was theoretical. It had no reality. It was the idea of a eunuch in a filthy brothel in Shuklaji Street, this was what they paid for. Dimple thought: they like the dirtiness of it. Nothing else gets their dick so hard. They don't think of themselves as homosexuals. They have wives and children and they're always making jokes about gandus and chakkas. It's all about money: they think eunuchs give better value than women. Eunuchs know what men want in a way other randis don't, they know men like it dirty.

Sometimes one gets more clarity not from looking too closely, but from a distance. From that distant, hidden twilight world of the pimps, prostitutes and drug-dens of Shuklaji Street Thayil sheds more light on Bombay and India than over-saturated colorful pictures of Incredible! India. Even a cesspool can be an accurate mirror.