Narcopolis Read Free Page A

or deliberately placed out of order. Bottles clinked and a door creaked open. A shot rang out. A child whispered, Is he here? Where is he? A woman wept and said, Nahi, nahi. There was the sound of water falling from a great height. A door creaked shut and a bottle smashed on a tiled floor. A woman’s high voice fell deeply through the octaves and a shot rang out. A man panted like a dog. A child wept and water lapped against the side of a boat or a body. A bottle of champagne popped and a doorbell rang. James Bond guitars played against cowboy string orchestration. The child said, Here he is. Where is here? The woman’s voice, soaked in reverb and whisky, executed another perfect fall and I experienced a sudden drop in my head like a vertigo rush. I heard the sound of water and Dimple handed me the pipe. I put it against my lips and heard a man shout, Monica, my darling, and I felt so dizzy that I had to close my eyes. Then a woman said, Is he here? and a child whispered, Nahi, and a shot rang out and everything went silent. I took the headphones off and gave them back to Rumi.
    He said, ‘Bombay blues.’

Chapter Three
A Painter Visits
    I saw in the Free Press Journal that Newton Xavier was to make an appearance in the city. He would read poems and answer questions about his new Bombay show, the first in a dozen years, opening that week at the Jehangir Art Gallery in Kala Ghoda. I was excited at the chance to see him up close. I wanted to see what he looked like. I remembered the work I’d seen and the articles I’d read, which described him in lurid phrases that sounded like terms of endearment. Most writers agreed that he was an enfant terrible and brilliant; a postmodern subversive who rejected the label ‘postmodern’; a drunk whose epic binges were likened to those of illustrious alcoholic predecessors such as Dylan Thomas, Verlaine and J. Swaminathan , though he had lately sworn off the booze after a violent blackout that landed him in hospital; a wild child now in early middle age who ‘outdid the Romantics’ antics, at least in terms of tenderness and rage’, this according to the London Review of Books . The Daily Mail put it in plainer terms: he was ‘permanently drunk on booze, broads and beauty’ and he was ‘art-obsessed, self-absorbed’ and ‘mad, bad and slanderous to know’. He was worldly, acerbic, photogenic, precocious, and he wrote poetry. The TLS said his two collections of poetry, reissued under the title Songs for the Tin-Eared , were more chaotic than his paintings, though they explored the same themes, i.e. the world as a manifestation of the estranged mind, and the three major religions – Islam, Hinduism, Christianity – as evidence of estrangement. I pored over the reproductions of the paintings that I found in the magazines, especially the Hindu Christ series. These are the paintings he will be remembered for, I thought, the pictures of Christ with blue skin, with doe eyes, kaajal and a caste mark. Christ playing the flute or stealing the clothes of bathing village nymphets or meditating in a cave: strange portraits in vivid Indian reds and yellows.
    Xavier was speaking at the PEN Centre in New Marine Lines. I took a train from Grant Road to Churchgate, and then I walked to the Theosophy Hall. There were about a dozen people waiting. Ceiling fans on long stalks circulated hot air and dust around a large room. The walls were filled with antique volumes locked away in glass-fronted cupboards. You couldn’t touch the books, which looked as if they’d fall apart at the slightest breath. All three volumes of The Secret Doctrine were there, arranged on long tables, small leather-bound editions that had disintegrated in Bombay’s humidity. I opened one and flipped through it quickly and read the biographical note at the end. As befitted a famous author, Madame Blavatsky divided her time between the world’s great capitals: her ashes were interred on three continents. Her portrait,