Wait now light me up so we do this right yes hold me steady to the lamp hold it hold good a slow pull to start with to draw the smoke low into the lungs yes oh my... Shuklaji Street in Old Bombay. In Rashids opium room the air is thick with voices & ghosts: Hindu Muslim & Christian. A young woman holds a long-stemmed pipe over a flame her hair falling across her eyes. Men sprawl & mutter in the gloom. Here they say you introduce only your worst enemy to opium. There is an underworld whisper of a new terror: the Pathar Maar the stone killer whose victims are the nameless invisible poor. In the broken city there are too many to count. Stretching across three decades with an interlude in Maos China it portrays a city in collision with itself. With a cast of pimps pushers poets gangsters & eunuchs it is a journey into a sprawling underworld written in electric & utterly original prose.