Seen Narcos? But have you read ‘Nacropolis’?
‘20 years of lost life,’ as Jeet Thayil puts it, shaped ‘Narcopolis’.
The 2012 Man Booker Prize shortlist, ‘Narcopolis’ as The Guardian puts it, is a
‘blistering debut that can indeed stand proudly on the shelf next to Burroughs and
De Quincey.’ Interestingly, Burroughs and De Quincey struggled with addiction
and have confessional memoirs- ‘Junkie’ and ‘Confessions of an English Opium Eater’.
Perhaps, it is this similarity that makes this Indian author carve a genre in
literature that records the experience of living with addiction and breaking
out of it, if one can. Drawing on his own experience as a drug addict, it took
another five years to record the years immersed in intoxication and substance
abuse. Powerful, gripping, naked in originality- baring the truth of the darkened
phase of his life- the book is set in Old Bombay. The narrator, on his arrival,l
is seduced to the underbelly – Rashid’s opium house. As the story grows,
several other characters emerge.
More than his addiction, Jeet is pulled to Bombay- the city with
its fair share of glamour and gore. In the late 1980s, when he joined Wilson College
before completing his schooling in New York and Hong Kong for a brief period,
he captured the smoky lanes while burying himself in it bit by bit. Nostalgia
grips him when he thinks of the 70s Bombay- now devoured by real estate sharks
and with it several stories. In an interview, he called Bombay ‘seductive.’ He doesn’t
shy away from capturing Bombay in transition- from old and romantic to brutal
and modern. As opposed to his journalist father, Thayil dabbled his ink in
writing long sentences- indulging in the opium that left sentences to linger
but not to run into disarray. When the ‘respectable’ opium held its strong
grasp in Mumbai, it had all the sections of society in it, but as Bombay
transitioned to Mumbai, opium became cheap heroin, the leisure of low lower-born.
Thayil’s masterpiece was a breakthrough; time and again bringing home the fact that the very essence of humans is to feel. The pain of separation, of change and the yearning of the old made him draw a parallel between Mumbai and opium and its seductive allure. With a British and an American example of addiction literature, Jeet Thayil’s Narcopolis is an Indian.