Jeet Thayil for the Booker?

Jeet Thayil’s Narcopolis makes its way to the 2012 Man Booker Prize Longlist. The only Indian and a debutant, Jeet Thayil’s very gripping, and intriguing tale set in the underworld of Mumbai, amidst opium dens and brothels has been published by Faber & Faber and has garnered tremendous praise and curiosity. Here is an excerpt from an interview that we featured earlier this year…

Jeet Thayil Speaks…

Narcopolis: the intoxicated years, stolen dreams & a book deal…
I was addicted on and off for about twenty years. I tried to kick it many times – if you want a number, 32 times. It was in New York in 2002 that I finally cleaned up. I joined a methadone program and stayed with it for two years. I don’t know what connection it has to the artist I am, except for the fact that it’s put me in a bit of a hurry. I want to make up for the lost years. And Narcopolis, my first novel, grew out of those decades of embedded research. There’s information in there no amount of investigative journalism could uncover. Many of the people I knew in Bombay during the intoxicated years, they died. I wanted to find a way of honouring them, the addicts, prostitutes, poets and petty criminals, in other words, the disenfranchised and marginalized, those who have no place in polite society. I thought one way of doing this was to tell their story, particularly since it was a story that hadn’t been told before, or not in the context of Indian fiction.

My agent, David Godwin, took the book to Faber. My editor at Faber, Lee Brackstone, took it to Frankfurt and became its champion. That was the first and best thing that happened to Narcopolis. Everything else followed. I worked on the book for about five years. It went through many changes. For one thing, I cut it down from a manuscript of about 600 pages to 300 pages. The most productive period was during the last year or so. I was living in Bombay at the time, but the Bombay I was living in had nothing to do with the Bombay I was writing about, which was a city that had existed thirty years earlier. It was like being in a dream. And there are a lot of dreams in the book, and books within the book, and many strange and driven characters. During that time, I asked everybody I knew about their dreams and I stole dreams if they interested me. I fell into a routine. I would work until late, then wake and go straight back to work when I was still in a bit of a dream state. This helped me make connections and associations that would not have occurred later in the day.

Excerpt taken from platform_’s Arts Special Jan/Feb 2012

Front page photograph by: Tejal Shah