Then there are the addicts, the hunger addicts, the rage addicts, the poverty addicts , and power addicts, and the pure addicts who are addicted not … - Jeet Thayil

Opium use is a quick way of showing a person’s character. Within months some people would be stealing from family and friends, but there were people who never did that kind of thing. I used my salary to finance my habit.

I could feel my colour. I could feel racism...in the way people looked at you, and the way they talked to you. Now, though, because of the mixing of cultures, it seems like some kind of brilliant social experiment...In some ways it seems to me the city of the future.

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.”