There's no question of existential anxiety. 'With opiates, when you're addicted, your day is pretty much taken care of. On the perceptions of addiction in society And to know those things and to continue to do it is actually an example of free will at its strongest.' And as the Dimple character says later, after her transformation, she says, it's possible the addict is actually the freest of men because everybody knows what addiction does, how it can destroy your life. 'Every character in this book is an addict of some sort - addicted to drugs or to violence or to religion or to sex. Jeet Thayil is the author of four poetry collections including These Errors Are Correct and English. 'And these are all things that are impossible to find in the Bombay of today.' 'Anybody who knew Bombay in those years, there's no way you cannot feel nostalgia for that city because it was a beautiful, laid back, liberated, liberal place,' he tells NPR's Rachel Martin. Thayil explains that he struggles to reconcile the Bombay of his painful past with the booming city it has become. As time passes, Thayil reveals how all of Bombay is transformed by the brutal underworld culture. Readers are introduced to a desperate set of characters - including an opium dealer named Rashid and one of his clients Dimple, a eunuch and prostitute who grew up in a brothel.

The novel begins in the 1970s, with its narrator mesmerized with a grimy opium den. He spent two decades of his life as an opium addict, immersed in the dark underbelly of Bombay - now known as Mumbai.Ī celebrated poet and a journalist, Thayil has just published his first novel, Narcopolis. How?Īuthor Jeet Thayil looks at today's Indian society and culture from an unusual perspective. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Narcopolis Author Jeet Thayil

Narcopolis novel