Lin relapses into heroin use

Lin’s relapse into heroin use comes after the deaths of his closest friends, Prabaker and Abdullah, and marks a turn from grief that he had kept contained toward deliberate self-numbing. He leaves his apartment for an opium den with forged passports and money put aside, then injects heroin after an hour of hesitation. As the drug blunts his grief, he searches the room’s rafters for an answer to the deaths and to his entanglement with those he has lost; instead, he returns to the syringe, deepening the dependence that Nazeer eventually interrupts.

Grief and isolation

Abdullah has died without a body for his friends to bury. Prabaker’s body, by contrast, is carried through the streets to a ghat and burned. Lin runs with those bearing the body, chanting the names of God, and later sees friends and relatives gathered near the place where Prabaker had married only weeks earlier. Streamers from the wedding still hang over the huts. The contrast between the recent celebration and the mourning that follows makes the loss immediate, while the absence of Abdullah’s body leaves another death without a customary farewell.

After speaking with Qasim Ali, Johnny, Jeetendra, and Kishan Mango, Lin leaves the slum to seek answers from Abdel Khader Khan. He finds the house near Nabila Mosque locked and silent. Abdel Khader Khan’s associates, including Abdul Ghani and Khaled Ansari, are also unavailable, and much of the mafia council appears to have left the city. The organization’s business continues through its ordinary contacts, and Lin is still expected at its depots and exchange points, but no one has explained the absences to him. This combination of continued responsibility and withheld reassurance intensifies his sense of being alone.

Lin’s anger settles on Abdel Khader Khan. He blames him for not protecting Abdullah and suspects that he may have a connection to Sapna and the killings. He also experiences the council’s absence as abandonment, even while recognizing that this interpretation is self-centred and that the organization’s work has not stopped. His suspicion does not erase his love for Abdel Khader Khan; instead, doubt and fear begin to unsettle that attachment. The deaths of Prabaker and Abdullah have already deprived Lin of the relationships through which he understood himself, and the apparent withdrawal of the council leaves him feeling unmoored from the remaining structure of his life.

Choosing the opium den

Lin leaves without looking back. He pays three months’ rent on his apartment and gives money to the two building watchmen. He keeps one forged passport with him, places his other passports and cash in a satchel, and leaves it, along with his Enfield Bullet motorcycle, in Didier’s care. These preparations preserve the practical means to leave while separating him from the possessions he does not take to the den. He then travels to Gupta-ji’s opium den on Shoklaji Street and enters one of its private rooms.

The room is close to the roof and furnished with a cot, a cabinet, a lamp, water, and a weathered carpet. Its shutters admit only narrow traces of daylight, and exposed rafters cross above the bed. Lin describes the confined room as resembling a prison cell. There, alone with his memories of Prabaker and Abdullah, he begins to cry. Earlier suffering had brought tears, but he had managed to stifle them; in this room, he no longer holds back. The scene makes the relapse more than an impulsive return to a drug: Lin has deliberately placed himself in seclusion at a moment when grief has become difficult to contain.

Gupta-ji brings Lin a spoon, distilled water, disposable syringes, heroin, and cigarettes. A young woman named Shilpa is also introduced as a servant, but Lin sends her and Gupta-ji away. The prepared dose remains unused for almost an hour. Lin repeatedly lifts the syringe and places the needle against a healthy vein, then puts it down again. He understands the drug as the force that helped drive him into crimes and prison, and that cost him his family and loved ones. He also recognizes the appeal of its emptiness: the relief it offers is precisely the absence of feeling he wants.

Return to use and the search for an answer

Lin finally injects the dose. He experiences the effect as the disappearance of pain and thought, with the drug’s numbness quieting the ordinary physical discomforts of a sober day. He later loses track of the time that has passed since the first injection. In the den, the rafters become the focus of his attention: he believes they may contain a message about how his life intersects with Abdel Khader Khan, Karla, and Abdullah, and may explain the connection between them and Abdullah’s death. The setting’s fixed pattern offers the appearance of an answer, but the drug repeatedly interrupts his ability to hold on to it.

When a clearer hour brings Prabaker back to mind, Lin connects his friend’s death to the taxi he had bought for him. Prabaker had been working late because the taxi belonged to him and he was working for himself; Lin turns that gift into a source of self-accusation, imagining that Prabaker would still be alive if he had not bought it. He also recalls Abdullah alone in the moment before his death and blames himself for not being there. His questions about Abdullah sharpen into a more troubling uncertainty: could the friend he loved have been Sapna, the ruthless killer? Lin cannot reconcile the possibility with his affection, but neither can he dismiss it. Rather than resolve the contradiction, he injects heroin again, convinced that more of the drug will let him understand what the rafters seem to promise.

Addiction, interruption, and consequence

The relapse is framed against Lin’s earlier experience of both addiction and emergency care. In his own country, when he was a junkie, he had revived dozens of people after overdoses, sometimes performing CPR fifty or eighty times. Later, he also saved a young man in Bombay by repeatedly performing CPR after an overdose. His practical knowledge can bring other users back from immediate danger; it cannot keep him from seeking the drug himself. That contrast makes his return to heroin part of a recurring pattern in the novel, in which Lin’s experience of addiction enables care for others even as it exposes his own vulnerability.

The drug’s promise of relief has a cost: the narrative describes it as suppressing pain, shame, regret, grief, and desire, while progressively extinguishing the capacity for love. This account gives the relapse a consequence beyond the brief duration of intoxication. Lin is trying to escape sorrow over the dead, but the numbness he chooses also threatens the attachments that make their losses matter. The room’s apparent answers cannot restore those relationships; instead, his repeated injections keep him suspended between remembrance and its erasure.

Nazeer eventually arrives and calls Lin to come with him. The episode moves from the private enclosure of the den to the difficult process of withdrawal. Lin explains that opiate use suppresses the body’s production of endorphins and that, after use stops, their return can lag by five to fourteen days. The ensuing period without heroin is described as an acute confrontation with anxiety, pain, grief, and shame rather than a simple return to ordinary feeling. The relapse therefore forms one stage in a longer cycle: grief drives Lin toward numbness, intoxication magnifies his guilt and uncertainty, and leaving the den exposes him to the suffering the drug had temporarily concealed.