White Magic book review: Heroin Express

In opium: The Illustrated Diary of His Cure, Jean Cocteau writes: “Everything that one achieves in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing towards death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death.” Arjun Nath, a corporate lawyer by profession, jumped off the train nine years ago. White Magic is the story of how he got back on it. His drug of choice? Heroin.

But White Magic is not just Nath’s story; woven in it is the story of Land, the rehab on the outskirts of Mumbai where Nath goes to recover, the troubled souls he meets there, and the man who runs the rehab facility — Yusuf Merchant or Bhai, a true eccentric, who smokes 80 cigarettes a day and has a soft spot for the Beatles.

For all its dark content, the book is also relentlessly funny. Rehab, we learn, is like a boarding school for adults: “HM is Head Monitor. There is an overall HM, and a ciggie HM, a Meds HM, Food HM, Activities HM, Phone HM and, uh, yeah, the Safe HM, that’s like a treasurer.” There’s an interminable list of rules. There has to be six inches of space between the sexes. If you touch, you get “a ten-ciggy-cut the next day.” Not everyone at Land is a drug addict — a third of the population is there for other reasons: “…uncontrollable rage, eating disorders, self-harm.”

Nath’s sentences leap off the page; subtle observations lurk beneath the manic razzmatazz of his Dave Eggers-ish prose: “Self-conscious people don’t usually admit to being self-conscious and it is disarming when they do.” He has a nice turn of phrase: “The steep Napean Sea Road that corkscrewed upward into cobble-stoned lanes.” Or this: “The water comes down in straight, unbroken threads that go on forever…so that there is no way for the naked eye to gauge if it is falling down or rising upward.” In an incredible passage, Nath describes in graphic detail a junkie’s constipation: “The turd — there is only ever one and, almost a month in the making, that one is a bomb — was granite hard and aubergine-shaped.”

It is in the telling of Bhai’s story, from childhood to the present, that White Magic comes into its own: boy Bhai watching his brother getting circumcised with a Mogen clamp, Bhai discovering that his mother lives with another man, his strained relationship with his father, nights spent at the Bombay Central Bus Terminus, while he is studying to be a doctor at the JJ school of medicine, the ups and downs of his loves and divorces.

In certain places, there are gaps in the narrative that can leave the reader confused. On page 84, we abruptly find that Bhai owns a car; it’s only four pages later that we learn how it came to be so.

This is an endearingly honest book that treads the fine line between tragedy and comedy, hope and hopelessness, self-loathing and self-love. Nath writes like a champion, but one wishes he’d dwelt a little more on the ambivalence of doing drugs. Drugs are bad for you but the experience — when you are high — can be, well, bloody marvellous. Clean Cocteau was more insightful about this when he wrote: “I am ashamed to have been expelled from that world, compared with which the world of health resembles those revolting films in which ministers unveil statues.” It’s a trifle disappointing then to find, towards the end, a clean Nath, standing up to sing along to the national anthem when it plays on TV, and actually half digging it.