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Jeet Thayil -
Months
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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
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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.
Jeet Thayil
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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
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The thing about opium is that it makes you vomit. You cook the original raw sticky pellet against the bowl of the pipe. And for the first three or four
months
, you puke. But it's a clean very easy puke, not like alcohol. You could be walking down the street talking to a friend, turn, puke and keep going. But you do that a lot for the first few
months
. It takes devotion to become an addict to opium and heroin. You have to keep doing it to get through it. I lost a lot of weight. But the payback is huge. It is pure pleasure. There is a reason why opiates are used as a painkiller: they make you feel better. They're designed to make you feel better.
Jeet Thayil
Quote of the day
There are periods in history when change is necessary, and other periods when it is better to keep everything for the time as it is. The art of life is to be in the rhythm of your age.
Oswald Mosley
Jeet Thayil
Creative Commons
Born:
October 13, 1959
(age 65)
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