She said, ‘I don’t want tea, Mr Rashid, thank you.’
‘Okay, no problem, no problem. What can I do for you?’
‘Actually, I’ve brought something for you.’
She unwrapped the pipes and placed them on the floor and picked up the longer one, three feet something from tip to tip.
‘At least five hundred years old. Made by a Chinese pipe master, much superior to our local pipes because of the quality of the wood and the seasoning.’
‘Is it too long?’
‘No, sir; it’s constructed on the same principle as a hookah. The length is very important, it cools the smoke as it travels from the bowl to the mouthpiece.’
‘You’ve been practising this speech.’
‘Yes, sir, a little.’
He liked her manner, her conservative clothes, the way she spoke Hindi mixed with English. He watched her as she assembled the lamp and oil and chandu and he liked that too, the sight of a woman calmly making a pipe, because an Indian woman in a chandu khana was a rare sighting. She tapped the stem when the pipe was ready and it took him a moment, an awkward moment of grapple, to adjust to the big mouthpiece. But she was right: the pipe was a work of art. The wood was stained reddish brown and there was old brasswork at the mouthpiece and bowl. Maybe he was imagining it, but the smoke tasted better and you could take deeper drags and a single pyali went a long way.
‘How much do you want for it? Maybe I’ll take both.’
‘I don’t want to sell the pipes, Mr Rashid.’
‘You call me Rashidbhai or Bhai, not Mr Rashid, this is not America.’
‘Bhai, let me work for you. I can make pyalis and take care of the pipes.’
He said he would not be able to pay her. She would get three pyalis a day and tips. She could eat in the khana but she couldn’t sleep there.
‘I have a place to sleep, but I smoke four pyalis a day — of good opium.’
‘Mine is the best on the street. Where do you smoke?’
He was surprised to learn that Mr Lee was real. Like everyone else, he’d heard the story about a Chinese khana somewhere on Shuklaji Street and he’d dismissed it as fiction. But he knew the value of old stories and he incorporated Mr Lee’s into his own. Rashid told everyone he bought the pipes from the old Chini himself. He told the story so many times that eventually he came to believe it and with each telling he added new details. Mr Lee was on his deathbed when he sent for Rashid; it was the second last thing he did before he died, he handed over the pipes; the last thing he did was to smoke; he didn’t want anyone else to have the pipes, only Rashid, because he wanted them to go where they would be best used; the pipes had originally belonged to the emperor of China and had fallen into the hands of the Nationalist army; and so on.
*
To match the quality of Mr Lee’s pipes he put less water in the cooking mix. Soon the place was packed with regulars and tourists and all kinds of unlikely people who came just to visit. He raised the price of a pyali to three rupees from two but the opium was so much better than anywhere else that no one complained; if anything, business improved. A tall Australian turned up. He smoked all day and drew pictures in a small notebook and spent a lot of money. He was generous: he bought pyalis for everyone. He came back the next day and the next and for a week he was a regular at the khana. He communicated mostly with his hands, because no one could understand him though he was speaking English. Months after he left, after he’d taken off for Sydney or Melbourne or wherever, someone said he was a famous musician whose tunes were played on the radio in the West, and that he’d written a song about his experience at Rashid’s, that there was something in it about ‘lying in a den in Bombay,’ though it might have been a coincidence. Then the son of a well-known director came around. He was making his first movie and he wanted to get the atmosphere right for a scene set in an opium den. He sat at the entrance near the washing area and he didn’t try a pipe. He dropped the names of actors and directors, all of whom were close family friends, or so he said. It wasn’t his patter that irritated Rashid, but his laughter, high-pitched and smelling of insanity. He wore a straw hat that he held in his lap. He took notes. He took a photograph of Dimple that would appear many years later in a book about Bombay’s opium dens (in the picture, a young woman holds a pipe to a lamp, her face intent, and in a corner of the frame is a book, the title partly obscured, ii). After much deliberation he decided to try a pyali, smoked half and ran down the stairs to vomit. But it was his smoking technique that was most remarked on. He wiped the mouthpiece with a handkerchief soaked in Dettol, wiped it each time he took a drag and the pipe smelled for days of antiseptic. When he returned from the toilet he asked if he could take more pictures and Rashid said yes, of course he could, but then he would have to break the director’s son’s legs and cut off his hands to ensure he never left the khana, which riposte Rashid delivered with a smile, as if he were sharing a joke.
*
The brothel-keeper, Dimple’s tai, paid Rashid a formal visit. She was full of complaints. She said Dimple was spending too much time at the khana, she’d become a full-time professional drug addict, she was no longer earning her keep. The other girls brought in more money, said the tai, addressing only Rashid. Not once during the visit did the tai and Dimple speak or look at each other. Dimple made Rashid’s pipe the way she always did, calm and silent, her hands steady, while the tai drank her tea, made her speech and left. That afternoon, Rashid took Dimple to a room on a half landing between the khana and the first floor where his family lived. There was a wooden cot, a chair and washstand, a window with a soiled curtain. She knew what he wanted. She took off her salvaar and folded it on the back of the chair. She lay on the cot and pulled her kameez up to her shoulders to show him her breasts. Her legs were open, the ridged skin stretched like a ghost vagina.
He said, You’re like a woman. She said: I am a woman, see for yourself. She didn’t want him on top of her because he was too heavy for her back. She told him to sit on the cot while she faced him, her arms around his neck and her ankles locked on his hips. It took a long time, the drugs working in opposition to his blood; but she didn’t stop until he was finished, shuddering with effort, his hands angled on the bed, his eyes looking into hers.
He said, ‘What about you, what do you feel?’
‘Fine.’
‘No. What I want to know, do you feel pleasure or not?’
‘Not like you do and not the way a woman does.’
‘You don’t feel anything.’
‘Oh, bilkul, I do. I feel pleasure but not, what’s the word, relief.’
He studied her face as she arranged her kameez and tidied her hair. He said: I want you to move here, into this room. I’ll send someone with you to collect your things.
*
Her life at the brothel was coming to an end, she knew. She was treated better than some of the others but she worked three or four giraks a day. She was in her late twenties and already she felt middle-aged. She’d lived and worked at Number 007 for more than fifteen years. The work was fast. The giraks didn’t take off their clothes. They unzipped, they finished in minutes and they were gone. Their desire for her, for sex, was theoretical. It had no reality. It was the idea of a eunuch in a filthy brothel in Shuklaji Street, this was what they paid for. Dimple thought: They like the dirtiness of it. Nothing else gets their dicks so hard. They don’t think of themselves as homosexuals. They have wives and children and they’re always making jokes about gandus and chakkas. It’s all about money: they think eunuchs give better value than women. Eunuchs know what men want in a way other randis don’t, they know men like it dirty.