One of the highlights of the work is its marvellous and haunting prose. When sketching the life cycle of Dimple and people who walk in and out of her life (pimps, clerks, doctors, painters, students, wastrels), the narrative teems with a markedly persuasive texture so much so that after a while, the professions of the characters fall asunder like dried leaves at end of a trying season, leaving bare the inner recesses of their hearts that contain the color of vigour and vulnerability, like any person we might know in our daily lives. Narcopolis is a stirring and disturbing account of that underbelly of Bombay that sniffs, smells, consumes and surrenders to drugs – a dark side which permeates into our skins as we delve deep into the protagonist’s life, her adeptness in fixing opium pipes by the day, her strangely coherent beliefs, her platonic bonds, her aggression under violation, her hope-drilled eyes. But does life change? Does the things worth remembering pile up and those worth forgetting, diminish?

Come an unusually besotted patron one day and she switches her address in his favour. Wallowing silently in the memory of her departed lover, she wilfully insulates herself from her present state and instead falls back on books for sweet mental chaos. The prima donna of a famed whore house, Dimple regales her customers with her melancholic eyes and business-like primness and efficiency. In the war of remembering and forgetting, what side do we choose? Or do we choose at all? Isn’t life that, which happens when we are busy planning it? In the seductively opiated heavens of narrow-alleyed Bombay, a membrane-like life of a eunuch is stretched between her dreams and reality. Forgetfulness was a gift, a talent to be nurtured.

Narcopolis novel