Shuklaji Street, in Old
Bombay. In Rashid's opium room the air is thick and potent. A beautiful
young woman leans to hold a long-stemmed pipe over a flame, her hair
falling across her dark eyes. Around her, men sprawl and mutter in the
gloom, each one drifting with his own tide. Here, people say that you
introduce only your worst enemy to opium.Outside, stray dogs
lope in packs. Street vendors hustle. Hookers call for customers through
the bars of their cages as their pimps slouch in doorways in the
half-light. There is an underworld whisper of a new terror: the Pathar
Maar, the stone killer, whose victims are the nameless, invisible poor.
There are too many of them to count in this broken city.
Jeet, he wins, and convincingly
at that.
He succeeds in conveying the lost, untold
history of Mumbai’s underbelly squalor of drugs and prostitution. One has to say though, that the
book has an oriental feel to it, and at times it seems to have been
force-fit into the city of Mumbai, as if an afterthought. Ethnic identity and its conflict,
seems to be the underlying theme that the author has attempted to convey in his writing.
Jeet has kept the ethnic personality of each character distinct by using
variations of religion, sex, regional roots and economic strata to create a tension of human divide that
runs throughout the book.
The story itself is molded around
the drug habit of its characters. Each is from a unique background and the
author leaves out details, often building characters halfway and moving on to
other things that he wants to relate. It works and eventually the reader is
filled with an entire social milieu that makes up this novel. The central
character of the novel is a prostitute eunuch who mans the stall of an opium
den run by Rashid. All characters seem to be eventually glued to this eunuch, Dimple. The
story itself is a simple one, a biography of a few drug-addict souls whose
lives are somehow tied together. What attracts and often enthralls, are the events that bring this
book to life, like a window to a world that most of us will never know, since
it is now obscured by the advent of modernity, destroying the ancientness of a Bombay. The raw
parts of the story, like crime and acts of sexual violence are left uncooked
and often tough and harsh to consume for a softer audience which looks for smooth well
rounded writing.
His writing is new dawn for Indian writing. It has been compared with the all the great drug novels of the
west, but the one book that belongs right next door to it is probably Suketu Mehta’s – Maximum City. Both the
books feed off the persona of a unique city, Bombay. The writing is also
reminiscent of a cruder more masculine form of Arundhati Roy. Large parts of
the book dwell upon the process of writing and this to a writer is interesting.
Other bits, where you expect details and further build ups, seem to be missing,
left for the reader to fill up in their own minds. He is at his best in extremes, when he is supremely succinct
and economical with words, or, meandering in prose, becoming fastidious with words at the
other extreme. All through the book, it is a combination of these two styles
that keeps the pages un-putdownable. There are obvious flaws in the book, like
the lack of structured dialogue, to which, large chunky prose stretching often to pages is
preferred, or, the gaps in narrative that are like empty spaces in an otherwise
complete tale.
All in, the imperfection is what
works, since the author has been able to take the same old themes of religious
strife, substance abuse, family decay, poverty, urban decrepitude and put it
across in a twisted yet delightful dim new light.
In the end, Jeet, he wins.
