ABSTRACT
In choosing to be set in the dregs of Bombay in the 1970s, Narcopolis is already inclined to be filled to the brim with noise, chaos, squalor, sex, and opium. The narrative is certainly a product of its spatio-temporal setting. Possessing almost Coleridge-sque origins, the narrative takes (what the author deems) a Russian digression into China, while possessing the qualities of San Francisco-based new narrative form, to speak of the spatial history of Bombay. The novel dives into the messy lives of Shuklaji Street and makes it a representative unit of the change that was Mumbai. It (quite jarringly) captures the nation’s process of re-appropriating the pre-colonial and parallels that change with microcosmic shifts from opium to heroin, Dimple to Zeenat, boy to woman. Each character and experience serves to depict a network - either spatial or temporal - parallel to each other, and connected by the same thread: narcotics. In this chapter, the author places the text in conversation with theories of network and urban spatiality to understand Narcopolis as a treatment of space that configures its characters as networked subjects and subject networks, while presenting this configuration as inescapably post-colonial. C
