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A friend from Hong Kong had turned up in Bombay and took me to an opium den in Crawford Market. I walked in and saw this room with three pipes. Every… - Jeet Thayil
" "A friend from Hong Kong had turned up in Bombay and took me to an opium den in Crawford Market. I walked in and saw this room with three pipes. Everything happened at floor level. It was like a bubble: Bombay noise and heat out there, 19th-century people lying and smoking in here, absolutely self-contained. I couldn’t look at that and not think of it as a piece of literary installation art. I walked in the door and I was hooked. I smoked that day, and loved it and went back. A month or so later I got an aerogramme from my friend saying, “Jeet, get your ass out of that den.”
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About Jeet Thayil
Jeet Thayil (born October 13, 1959) is an Indian poet, novelist, librettist and musician. He is most famous as a poet and is the author of four collections. His first novel, Narcopolis, which won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, was also shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize and the Hindu Literary Prize.
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Additional quotes by Jeet Thayil
Indian reviewers don’t read books. They have two days to produce 800 words. They read the prologue and then skim a few pages, then they read all the other reviews. If the first two are negative, you can be sure they will all be negative. If the first two are good, the rest will be good. It’s that low-level, that pathetic. It takes a kind of confidence for a reviewer to have their own opinion about a book. And a lot of people here just don’t care about literary novels.
Jeet Thayil: Confessions of an Indian Opium-Eater
A lot of people misspelt the title of the book and called it Necropolis, but I’m fine with that, because the title is a play on that and it is a city of the dead. Narcopolis is a necropolis. Bombay disappears and a lot of the characters die with it. Throughout the book, opium disappears and heroin arrives and the last few chapters point at the future, to what Bombay will be. You can make an accurate educated guess as to what it will be in the future.
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