N arcopolis is a trail of ambiguous lives that interconnect in the interminable bylanes of south Bombay, against a backdrop of the thick smoke that seeps out of an opium pipe. Its author Jeet Thayil weaves prose set in the grimy, underbelly of Bombay with familiarity that is first hand. The son of prolific journalist TJS George, Jeet is now settled in Delhi.
“The book is not autobiographic, except for the details like Shuklaji Street in the 1970s and 1980s, the drugs, pipes and addicts and how it all changed. I like to use a trendy term — ‘embedded research', which was the 20 years I spent in and around this world, except at the time I did not know it was research,” says Jeet. He talks slowly and clearly, with a slight lilt in his diction, maybe from the childhood he spent abroad. He continues, “I have been working on the book for a while now. When I started out in 2004 it was non-fiction, but soon the story started to grow heads, limbs and declared itself a novel.”
Until last month, Jeet was a poet and anthologist. Now he is one of the four who read from Satanic Verses at the Jaipur Literature Festival this year. Jeet is now working on his second novel and with that he says comes the usual compulsions and anxieties. “It is not fun. A novel consumes you, you start living with these characters in your head. I put in hours alone with the computer and am cooped up for long stretches of time — it is like a serving a prison sentence.” But he still goes back to it. “Because it's what I do. I don't know what else to do,” he says.
Bombay seems to be the sure shot way to make a best-seller these days. There is something vicarious about juxtaposing a thousand squalid slums with a thousand big dreams and it sells. “When you walk around Bombay, especially around Colaba, Victoria Terminus, Fort and Flora Fountain areas, the buildings there reek of history. There is so much beauty, that the feeling you experience is a kind of love. It is a terrible city as well in many ways, there are too many people, the weather is awful, but there is something about it,” he says.
Narcopolis has all the makings of a best-seller, with maybe even an award in the pipeline. Eye-catching, retro cover art by Jimmy Zombie, long, poetic sentences, with just the right number of pages and a sordid story that comes around in a full circle leaving no loose ends. “An award was not on my mind when I was writing it. This was a 600-page book that I put everything I had into, and then had to go back and change and cut for a leaner, meaner version.”
