THE prologue to Narcopolis is but one sentence, that runs for seven pages. Ostensibly, this is to create a sense of the manic rush that comes with both anticipating and smoking opium, to really bring us as readers into the world of addiction. It has a narcotic effect, certainly, but it’s one that’s somewhere between opium and LSD: a lazy, slow, hallucinatory haze that leaves you both befuddled and confused.

Jeet Thayil, the author of Narcopolis, is a former drug addict, and his vision of Bombay is clearly that of someone who has experienced the city’s seedy (oh, so seedy) underbelly. In an interview he admits that Narcopolis is less about the city’s “official” history (“of money and glamour”) than it is about sex and drugs, or as he puts it, “Bombay’s secret history”, which “you can sanitise… as much as you like, but... can’t get rid of the grime.” This is a stark admission, and one that actually acknowledges the truth behind the transformation of Bombay into a metropolis, rather than the septet of malaria-ridden islands as which it originally started. The East India Company leveraged Bombay as its export hub for both cotton and opium to China, so it is not unfair to visualise the city as a centre of corruption and turmoil.

Best known for his poetry, Thayil is adept with wordplay — even the title of this book, Narcopolis, is almost a homonym for “necropolis” (a city of the dead: truer than one would think, as the book progresses). The novel opens and closes with the same word, “Bombay”, a trope that blurs the line between poetry and prose, and is — frankly — the sort of stuff that sends avid Orientalists scrambling for their word-processors, all the better to bang out a thesis on the South Asian subcontinent and its colonial past.

Set in 1970s and 1980s Bombay, Narcopolis is peppered with Ambassador automobiles and Amitabh Bachchan posters, all details given to us by an anonymous narrator whose only defining trait is his job as a proof-reader for the in-house newsletter published by — surprise, surprise — a pharmaceutical company. It’s a clever little touch, further serving to help readers dissociate themselves from an individual and instead be subjected — in full — to the composite that is Bombay.

The “action”, as it were, takes place on Shuklaji Street, the location of an opium den run by Rashid who has exchanged religion for opium (again, Thayil is clever, but the constant “wink, wink, nudge nudge” of cultural references gets a bit much). Stumbling in and out of the doors of this den is a set of the most literarily aware reprobates one could hope to encounter: deeply degenerate individuals with specious — at best — educations, who are nonetheless highly conversant with Baudelaire and Tagore, and miss no opportunity to loudly and noticeably articulate their opinions.

Each character who passes through Rashid’s den of sin, whether it’s Salim (the pickpocket-cum-prostitute-cum-bootlegger); Dimple/Zeenat (the highly well-read hijra); or Rumi (the Iago of this story, whose greatest defining trait is his collection of Pink Floyd t-shirts) remains safely cocooned within a miasma of addiction that lets time flow past and around them. Whether Bombay is ruled by opium or ecstasy, hash or heroin, these characters somehow continue to exist without any particular shift: they are the perfect inhabitants of Narcopolis, a city of addiction and suspension. Like its semi-homonym of a necropolis, this novel seems to be telling the stories of people who are already dead... they just don’t know it yet.

In spite of its subject matter, Narcopolis is not a languid sort of story. Thayil is clearly interested in explaining the story of Bombay more than he is the story of his individual characters, a sense that only increases as the book progresses. As we move from the seventies and eighties into 2004, huge amounts of time and space are compressed into brief paragraphs, and characters suffer. In fact, it is the Indian characters in particular who suffer: erudite and traumatised, their moral and ethical ambiguity seems to be put on the back-burner. After creating interest in them, Thayil scampers off to explore other things — there is almost an excess of ambition, both in terms of style and content, at play here — and in the interests of juggling as many balls as possible, he occasionally fumbles.

This is particularly evident in two instances. The first is in the lyricism of the book itself. Thayil’s deftness with language suffers from contextual excess. There are too many South Asian writers, Indian and Pakistani both, who toy with the “Hinglish” that is such a signature trait of Rushdie; rather than being playful, Thayil’s incessant linguistic mischief can verge towards being abrasive and annoying. The second is in the back-story of Lee, the Chinese opium addict who teaches Dimple/Zeenat everything she knows. Thayil’s imaginative descriptions of China seem firmly rooted in Orientalist fantasies involving Fu Manchu, chopsticks, wingless dragons and foot-binding, and while not exactly patronising, seem at best to be ill-considered. And frankly, Lee isn’t all that interesting; you may find yourself more eager to find out what’s going on with Salim and his “Lala”, than you are in the intricacies of how Lee got to India or why he’s even there in the first place.

As a first novel though, Narcopolis is in equal parts disturbing and beautiful. There is something remarkable about the human condition, even if it is subsumed into the nature and character of human civilisation. Of course, in this sense, Bombay — Maximum City or not — comes across as no different from any other major world capital. In fact, Thayil’s Bombay is a hybrid of sorts, bridging the Lahore of Mohsin Hamid’s Moth Smoke and the Canton of Amitav Ghosh’s River of Smoke in its haze of hash and (sub)textual brutality. For all it’s examination of shadow-Bombay, not the Mumbai of “Incredible !ndia”, there is a curious sterility to Thayil’s writing, almost a teenaged sense of shock value for the sake of itself, rather than because it uncovers anything especially new or meaningful. That said, it is certainly superior to the fairly prosaic Last Man in Tower, which attempted the same feats of revelation with only marginal success. Thayil’s writing doesn’t give the sense that he is pandering to a globalised audience — he may be self-indulgent, but he isn’t excessively concerned with writing to or for an audience per se.

Narcopolis (NOVEL) By Jeet Thayil Penguin Books, USA ISBN 9781594203305 304pp. $25.95