Overview:
Bombay, which obliterated its own history by changing its name and surgically altering its face, is the hero or heroin of this story.
Set in Old Bombay and spread across a timespan of thirty years, Narcopolis explores the seedy underbelly of Indian life in the 1970’s, painting a colourful if frightening picture of the hidden, black-market transactions – of drugs, human beings, and other illicit goods – that occur everywhere and yet remain unaddressed and unacknowledged. A multi-faceted story, this novel is an amalgam of emotion and event, a rollercoaster ride along black alleyways.
Six stories. Six big blocks of text, with a gamut of emotion between their covers. All eloquently written and all worthy of their place in the shortlist. Who will win? Who shall prevail?
Shuklaji Street, in Old Bombay. In Rashid's opium room the air is thick and potent. A beautiful young woman leans to hold a long-stemmed pipe over a flame, her hair falling across her dark eyes. Around her, men sprawl and mutter in the gloom, each one drifting with his own tide. Here, people say that you introduce only your worst enemy to opium.
Shortlisted for the Man Booker PrizeOutside, stray dogs lope in packs. Street vendors hustle. Hookers call for custom through the bars of their cages as their pimps slouch in doorways in the half-light. There is an underworld whisper of a new terror: the Pathar Maar, the stone killer, whose victims are the nameless, invisible poor. There are too many of them to count in this broken city.
Narcopolis is a rich, chaotic, hallucinatory dream of a novel that captures the Bombay of the 1970s in all its compelling squalor. With a cast of pimps, pushers, poets, gangsters and eunuchs, it is a journey into a sprawling underworld written in electric and utterly original prose.
ENJOYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!
Sincerelyours
And Blessed Are The Ones Who Care For Their Fellow Men!
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