A Sense of the Story: Jeet Thayil
“The objects of the Poet’s thoughts are everywhere; though the eyes and senses of man are his favorite guides, yet he will follow wheresoever he can find an atmosphere of sensation in which to move his wings” – William Wordsworth
Jeet Thayil shares what piqued his five senses while writing, and how this inspired his debut novel, Narcopolis
Sight:
While writing Narcopolis I lived in New Delhi, Bangalore and Bombay. I rewrote the book in Bombay over a fairly intense period of a year and a half. I moved into a small apartment in Bandra and put my writing desk by the only window, which faced the sea, though there was only a sliver of sea that was visible. Even then it was a lovely and distracting view. Eventually I turned my desk towards the wall, which was bare and yellow. This helped, I think.
Sound:
As anyone who lives in an Indian city knows, there is a lot of ambient and other noise around you at all times, a kind of constant aural blur to which you must acclimatize, made up of the sound of drills and pumps and cars and voices blended hellishly together. In Bombay I found I was unable to adjust to the constant sound of auto-rickshaw horns. I stuffed cotton wool in my ears, but it didn’t help. Eventually I found a brand of industrial grade earplugs, dB Safe, and I’ve used them ever since.
Smell:
Narcopolis is a book about Bombay in the 70s and 80s, a book about sex, drugs, death and god. It helped a lot to be living in Bombay during the final stages of writing the book. Much about Bombay has changed in the last two or three decades but one thing has stayed the same, the smell of it. It still smells like defecation and putrefaction, and it is a smell people who live in Bombay do not notice because they are surrounded by it. You don’t really notice it when you fly into Bombay, because it seeps into the airplane and gets you all at once. It’s only when you take a train into the city that you become fully aware of it, the way the smell hits you in waves until you are enveloped and submerged.
Taste:
Opium has a taste unlike anything else in the world. I still taste it sometimes in dreams.
Touch:
What can you say about the touch of a human hand after the touch of plastic keyboard? What can be said about the first kiss, the first cigarette, the first cup of coffee on a winter morning? Without touch, what would be the point?
Jeet Thayil’s Narcopolis is published by Faber and is released in the UK today
Share this article
