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Jeet Thayil's luminous debut novel completely subverts and challenges the literary traditions for which the Indian novel is celebrated. That is a publication about drugs, intimacy, death, perversion, obsession, love, and god, and has more in keeping in its subject material with the work of William S. Burroughs or Baudelaire than with the subcontinent's familiar literary lights. Above all, this is a fantastical family portrait of a beautiful and damned era in a land about to sell its spirit. Written in Thayil's poetic and affecting prose, Narcopolis charts the evolution of a great and damaged metropolis. Narcopolis opens in Bombay in the late 1970s, as its narrator first arrives from NY to find himself entranced with the city's underworld, in particular an opium den and attached brothel. A solid of unforgettably degenerate and magnetic people works in and patronizes the location, including Dimple, the eunuch who makes pipes in the den; Rumi, the salaryman and partner whose dependency is assault; Newton Xavier, the famous painter who both rejects and craves adulation; Mr. Lee, the Chinese language refugee and entrepreneur; and a solid of poets, prostitutes, pimps, and gangsters. Ages pass to uncover a changing Bombay, where opium has given way to heroin from Pakistan and the city's underbelly is becoming ever rawer. Those in their circle still use intimacy for their principal release and recreation, but the assault of the town on the nod and its purveyors have moved from the fringes to the guts of these lives. Yet Dimple, despite the bleakness of her environment, continues to search for beauty - at the films, in pulp publications, at church, and in a new burka-wearing personal information. After an extended lack, the narrator comes back in 2004 to find a very different Bombay. Those he knew are almost all gone, but the passion he feels for them and then for the town is revealed.
