He has big black glasses and a shining bald head and speaks in the softest and most beautiful voice that you can imagine, maybe it is the voice that is so luring, maybe it is the voice that is coming to get you, maybe it is this what he meant the opium is like a massage from the inside out, like all your blood and your cells rubbing and shoving and twisting in the most gratifying way – Jeet Thayil, the writer of Narcopolis, was sitting at a desk in Berlin, invited by the Internationales Literaturfestival, and he was not reading the following passage, so here it is: “something calmed me in the unhurried way she made the pipe, the way she dipped the cooking needle into a tiny brass pyali with a flat raised edge, the pyali the size of a thimble, filled to the brim with treacle, a liquid with the colour and consistency of oil, and she was rolling the tip of the neelde in the opium, then lifting it to the lamp where it sputtered and hardened, repeating the procedure until she had a lump the size and colour of a walnut, which she mixed against the bowl until it was done, then tapped the needle against the pipe*s stem, indicating to me that my smoke was ready, it was, but the pipe was too long, I couldn*t manage the heaviness of it, and though I sucked when she held the bowl to the flame, the mouthpiece was too large, the taste too harsh, and when the pipe clogged she took it briskly away to apply the needle once more, saying in English, “Smoke, pull hard” – there is not a day, Jeet said, that I don*t miss smoking opium.