Each encounter randomly drifts to the next, connected only by Dominic’s dogged quest for substances. So begins a string of interactions with the streets of Bombay and the other pleasure-seekers that fill it. The narrator, Dominic Ullis, arrives in the city he grew up in after time away in New York and Delhi, clutching his wife’s ashes, determined to numb his grief in “the city he knew best, where oblivion was purchased cheaply and without consequence.” Low is a document of one long drug-addled weekend, a tireless search for pleasure. Thayil has always been the embodiment of this Bombay for me alongside him, I came of age in a Bombay where I believed every action had to bring immediate pleasure, or pain, or satisfaction, any feeling at all.

Low, Jeet Thayil’s new novel, is an experiment in the yes game. I followed the instruction into all sorts of trouble, but it didn’t strike me at the time of that conversation that we were already, in a sense, living the yes game-that it already defined the hunger and the carelessness that hung over our entire existence in Bombay, our lack of interest in planning for a future we couldn’t be sure of. It turned my feeling of powerlessness into something thrilling in its anger, and its joy. It was my only conviction I was in the midst of a broken relationship and an unstable career. Over the next few weeks, I dutifully played this game. “No matter how crazy or scary the idea is, you don’t say no. One of us had suggested going into our tiny ramshackle nonprofit office a little late, or just whenever we felt like it. In my memory, this conversation happened over rum and cokes at Yacht, a greasy bar by the sea, around eleven in the morning. room and a twin bed with a flatmate in Bombay, she taught me the yes game.

Narcopolis novel