Opium for the literary masses

Booker-shortlisted author Jeet Thayil tells Deepanjana Pal what went into writing his debut novel, Narcopolis.

He’s been described as a poet, a musician and a performer. Now, he’s also a novelist who has the distinction of his debut novel, Narcopolis being included in the shortlist for this year’s Man Booker prize. Thayil describes himself as a writer, “because that’s what I do on a daily basis.” Years ago, Thayil had written mockingly about his own work in a poem titled “Malayalam Ghazal”: “Jeet, such drama with the scraps you know.” The “scraps” in case of Narcopolis are the tales and lives of junkies who gathered at Rashid’s opium den in Mumbai’s Shuklaji Street back in the days when the city was Bombay. It’s a dark world, infested with slippery menace, shifting shadows and long sentences.

Was it a challenge to write Narcopolis? Did your experience of writing poetry help?
It helps because writing poetry is about reticence and compression. It makes you examine every thing you put into a sentence and it makes you take things out.

For me, Narcopolis seemed to be a poet’s novel because the storytelling lingers more on the telling than the tale. Would you talk a little about your use of language and plotting the novel?
I don’t know if I agree that it’s a poet’s novel. For one thing, it does not dismiss conventional logic and chronology. It takes the logical and chronological on, but in an original way, or so I hope. And there is certainly a storyline in Narcopolis, though the line digresses in the manner of a nineteenth century Russian novel. In that way it is absolutely conventional. It’s only unconventional when you think of it in a purely Indian context. It is a novel that makes sense in terms of structure only when you get well into Book Three. It is a challenging book: it expects the reader to put in some work. Which, in today’s context, is a risky thing to do, but there you have it.

You’ve said in past interviews that there are parts of Narcopolis that are based on reality. Do you think knowing there’s a plinth of reality helps to appreciate the novel?
It absolutely does. Even a dream sequence should stand on the reality plinth, otherwise it’s just language, and I don’t think you can sustain a book of 300 pages on just language.

Did you have a reader in mind while writing the novel?
If I have an ideal reader in mind, it’s a reader like myself. I’ve been a reader my whole life and I’m not interested in the easy read, unless I’m on a plane, in which case all I’m interested in is thrillers. I like language with some meat, I like vivid atmosphere and characters, and I want to be able to discover something new when I read a novel again.

Is it satisfying to see Narcopolis getting this kind of appreciation?
Considering the initial, uncomprehending Indian reviews, yes it certainly is.

Are you writing another novel?
I’m almost done. Working title: The Book Of Chocolate Saints.