Jeet Thayil - Bombay Quotes

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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. 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.

Jeet Thayil
I found Bombay and opium, the drug and the city, the city of opium and the drug Bombay

Jeet Thayil
I should have done my novel before this, but I was a journalist and a junkie for 20 years and unlike the junkie cliché, I had good jobs all over the world. I was a books editor, I did financial journalism for Asia Week for five years, I was Bombay correspondent for the South China Morning Post for 18 months, I worked for every newspaper in India doing arts journalism. I was a hardworking junkie.

Jeet Thayil
I was born in the south of India but I've never lived there. I went to school in Bombay, and in Hong Kong and in New York. But the place I've lived in the most is Bombay, because I've been there at various stages of my life.

Jeet Thayil
When you hear the name Babur, both sides – Hindus and Muslims – get excited. In Bombay you will get a Hindu backlash, in Hyderabad a Muslim backlash. We live in an insane country. We wouldn't have to worry about the Christians or the Parsis and probably not the Buddhists. Very, very depressing.

Jeet Thayil
It had people from all over the country and the world. The great thing about Bombay as a city was it was a magnet for anybody with talent, or ambition or hunger, or beauty, or intelligence. If you had any of these things and you wanted to make something of yourself, you went to Bombay and the city would reward you. I think all of that changed in 1992, when the last big riots happened in Bombay between Hindus and Muslims. Now when I go back to the city and I look at it, I can see the kind of profound impact that those riots had, and how it's changed the character of the city, and in such a profound way that I don't think it will ever change back to what it was before '92.

Jeet Thayil
It would be nice if things changed in the sense that they became more cosmopolitan, more inclusive, wider rather than narrower, with a kind of a view towards the future and a view towards many different kinds of people and people from different cultures living together. Because that's what a city really is about... That's the beauty of a great city. And the sad thing is, there was a time when you thought Bombay had it.

Jeet Thayil
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.

Jeet Thayil
All I did was write it down, one word after the other, beginning and ending with the same one, Bombay.

Jeet Thayil