*
In his first days at the centre, Rumi met only the two inmates who had been told to stay up with him during his withdrawals. The Parsi gave his name as Bull and was the tougher of the two. The Catholic’s name was Charlie and he claimed to be an electrician and knife-fighter. They took turns sleeping so one of them could keep an eye on Rumi at all times. On his second night, when the drugs they gave him seemed to have little or no effect and he began to pound the wall, first with his fist and then with his head, the Parsi and the Catholic moved his bed to the centre of the room and tied him down with nylon rope and cotton wool. He kept asking for stronger drugs but the best they could do was Diazepam in useless five-milligram capsules. Bad timing, man, said the Catholic. Since Soporo took over things have changed, otherwise they would have given you the best medication, full-on hallucinations. Soporo thinks cold turkey is the best turkey. Fuck Soporo, said Rumi. The Parsi laughed and hit him in the stomach and the pain was such a relief from the withdrawals that Rumi said it again, Fuck Soporo. This time the Parsi only laughed and said, If you had a razor you’d be cutting yourself, wouldn’t you? Rumi said, Fuck you too, and vomited in his direction. Bull the Parsi danced easily out of the way. He said, At least you have the right attitude.
*
He felt like he’d joined a cult, because all they talked about all day long was Soporo this and Soporo that, stories he didn’t want to hear, much less hear again and again: how Soporo exposed the guy who’d been in charge of the centre, a cross addict (sex, alcohol and heroin), who’d been using right under their noses, nodding off during Sharing Sessions and nobody the wiser because after all this was the session leader; how Soporo went after him at an NA meeting and made him admit it; how, three months after taking over, he persuaded the trustees to put up more funding and leased another floor from the church to build a gym and meeting rooms; how all kinds of people turned up at his talks, including those who’d never done drugs in their lives; and how, if Rumi made a good recovery, he’d be able to attend the talk on Wednesday night, which was titled ‘The End of Time’. I heard a rumour, said Jean-Luc, a French junkie who’d been living in India since the seventies and had graduated from opium to heroin to Tidigesic, a synthetic opiate. You want to hear? The rumour is he will talk about how heroin annihilates the idée of time as a logical or chronological imperative, and he will talk about the Miles Davis album Kind of Blue, which he says is an example of heroin time, not musical time, and he’s going to prove it by playing some of the tracks. Where’s the talk going to be held? Rumi asked. Down the road at the Church Annexe, said Jean-Luc. We need a bigger room than this one because a crowd will turn up, I don’t know why. How do we get there? asked Rumi. We walk, what else? Hey, turkey, said Bull the Parsi from across the room, you want to be carried? Is that it? It was Rumi’s first time at the lunch table, sitting with everybody, trying to eat. His hands shook so much he couldn’t hold a glass and he felt weak and nauseous; the sight of food, in particular, the tongue served for lunch on Sunday, only made him sicker. The tongue had the exact shape and rough texture of a human tongue, except it was four or five times the size, and pinker and thicker and difficult to chew or swallow. He watched the others gobble it down and it seemed to him that they were attempting to swallow their own tongues, to commit suicide in this most ferocious of ways, and he was carried by a wave of white nausea mixed with disgust. He thought: You don’t deserve to eat, not with so much appetite, and you don’t deserve your good teeth and excellent digestion. You don’t deserve to live, he thought, touching his neck surreptitiously to feel for the fever steaming under the skin. Down the road suddenly seemed like an impossible distance and he barely made it from the table to the turkey mattress without assistance.
He got better, or he pretended to get better, and on Wednesday when he saw them showering and shaving he did the same, and when they put on their best clothes, he did too, put on the only clothes he owned, a check shirt and jeans that he’d hand-washed once in prison and once at the centre, and when a dozen turkeys and non-turkeys went out, chaperoned by the Parsi and the Catholic, he was among them, walking with a convalescent’s hesitant step, a misfit in a company of misfits, stumbling or walking placidly among the normals, while Jean-Luc combed his dirty blond hair with his hands and Walter the obese chain-smoker talked to himself in Oriya and all of them eyed the women on the street. They stopped for tea and cakes, then made another stop for beedis and cigarettes, and between the cigarette shop and the Annexe where Soporo Onar’s talk was to be held, a distance of twenty metres or less, Rumi walked backwards into a crowd of pedestrians and vanished.
*
Bull didn’t realize the new guy was missing until they were seated and he had a chance to do a head count. He did a second count but the result was the same, ten turkeys, where was number eleven? He looked around at the congregation, the usual collection of users and losers and old people, aunties in house dresses, sickly parishioners, and at the very back a group of boys in camos and basketball shoes, looking severely out of place. He asked Charlie, We lost the new turkey, what’s his name, Ramesh? Charlie also did a head count. He’ll be back, he said. Where’s he going to go? Bull shook his head because the room was filling up and they couldn’t talk without being overheard. But the front row was made up entirely of Safer inmates, all of whom seemed to know that the newest turkey had flown, was out there right now getting wasted, and though no one said anything, some looked to the exit and wished they were on the street, free to do what they pleased, including fuck themselves up, because that was the real meaning of freedom, wasn’t it, choice, the perfect adult liberation of being able to decide for yourself as to right and wrong and to choose wrong if that was what you wanted? Bull experienced it himself when he imagined throwing it away, all the months of odd sobriety, for one last stab at craziness, and he knew Charlie felt it too: a rush of blood that felt like happiness. Is there time for a quick smoke? Jean-Luc asked, and Bull would normally have said yes, but they’d just had a runner and who knew what kind of impulses that had set off in the Frenchman? He hesitated and the hesitation was enough for Jean-Luc to know exactly what was passing through the bulldog’s head. Just then Father Fo cleared his throat.
*
He walked with a group of people who were headed to a coffee shop on the corner. It was part of a new chain, with big windows and a burned-orange colour scheme designed to make patrons feel warm and fuzzy, and filled him instead with rage. He crossed the street to Nikita Ladies & Gents Beauty Salon, and went in quickly and shut the door behind him and bolted it before the girl had a chance to protest. There was no one else in the shop. He drew the curtains and told her to take off her blouse and she didn’t argue. She was young and dark and her breasts were heavy and she lifted them inexpertly from the cups. He pulled down her slacks and let them fall around her ankles and he told her to stay where she was and look at her reflection in the mirror and to touch her nipples and cunt and do nothing else. Don’t move, he said. Don’t move anything except your fingers. Then he went around the small room, opening drawers and taking out herbal massage oils and towels and hair dye and waxing utensils, and dropping them on the floor. A jar of henna shattered, though the bottles of massage oil did not, and Rumi continued his rampage, opening and shutting, throwing shit around. There was a sudden smell, sharp body odour mixed with the unmistakable stink of fear. Ooh, he thought, when he saw that the girl’s eyes had filled with tears and a fingernail-sized scar on her forehead had turned dark. She was not pretty: when teary-eyed she was ugly. Tell me where it is, he said. But the girl’s eyes rolled up in her head and her hands fell to her sides. Don’t stop touching yourself, he told her, and hit her on the ass with his open hand. She was too frightened to speak but she was trying to tell him something, the rolling of the eyes was a message, not a prelude to a fainting fit. He looked to the side and found a shrine. Behind a portrait of Ganesh and a stick of incense was a box with three thousand six hundred rupees. Is this all? There’s nothing more, said the girl in Hindi. What about in your pockets? She shook her head. He found a hundred and ninety rupees in the back pocket of her slacks, which he transferred to his wallet. Maybe I’ll give you a good-luck tip, he said, but first I want a full-body massage. Put a fresh towel on the cot for me. The order cleared her head because it put his presence in the parlour on a professional footing: he was a client and she the masseuse. She felt she knew what was expected of her, though the knowledge did nothing to lessen her fear. She asked him to change and averted her head as he stripped to his underwear.