In his first fiction title Narcopolis, poet Jeet Thayil revisits the metropolis of his childhood to uncover the secret history of Mumbai, where drugs and sex counter the sanitised versions of the stories we narrate about it

Jeet Thayil is a performer and a poet. But when he chose to write about Bombay (not Mumbai), he went long form. Narcopolis, which was released recently, deals with what Thayil calls "the secret history" of the city, the bedrock its past and present are based on. The tightly woven narrative never loses its grip on its readers, even as it weaves its way through the opium dens on Shuklaji Road, the kothis in Kamathipura, and for a brief interlude, Communist China.


Pic by Tejal Shah courtesy Jeet Thayil

Excerpts of an interview with the author, who has lived in the city as a young boy, and later and as an older one, intermittently over 15 years.

Narcopolis belongs to an interesting lineage of books on the City, where contemporary history mingles with the narrator's comment on the present. What is it about present Mumbai that you are struck by, and wish to bring out through the narrative? And how well does nostalgia serve as a trope to do so?
Though much of Narcopolis is set in Bombay in the 70s and 80s, it ends with a picture of the city as it is today and it points towards a possible future. The book begins and ends with the same word, 'Bombay', and in some ways the city is the central character. As for nostalgia, I think it's a useful device for a writer.
But I've always been suspicious of the novel that paints India in soft focus, a place of loved children and loving elders, of monsoons and mangoes and spices. To equal Bombay as a subject you would have to go much further than the merely nostalgic will allow. The grotesque may be a more accurate means of carrying out such an enterprise.