Free All Kinds of Magic: One Man's Search for Meaning Across the Material World by Piers Moore Ede

squinting his eyes at the blue smoke. ‘Then I fell back into it. Down the rabbit hole, yes. More re’ab. But since then . . . three years, I ’ave this habit still. I cannot shake it. Perhaps I don’t want to . . .’ He gave an involuntary shiver.
    ‘Why the hell not?’
    ‘I like it too much. I mean, perhaps it’s stating the obvious, no, but when you’ve felt that good, one wants to again. Nothing else in this . . . world can really compare.’
    We talked on. Between cigarettes he rolled himself hefty joints and smoked them down to the nub. He was the kind of character a writer dreams of: charismatic, highly eloquent, possibly doomed. His inner life flowed out in jump cuts and memories. He spoke of chess players as if they were movie stars: Bobby Fischer, Mikhail Tal. He knew their legends and their quirks. Not being much of a chess player, I struggled to follow as he replayed the games which had inspired him, relating the winning moves K X 5 as if mere mortals could hope to share the genius he so clearly saw in them.
    ‘Fischer always said that chess is war. You’re trying to crush the opponent’s mind. I think at one stage I felt invincible. My mind was so strong no one could touch me. But the heroin has taken the edge away. As much as it delivers me to a plane that not even chess can touch, it lessens my ability to think in that super space – that magical space, you know – where the most serious chess happens. If I ’ave a regret, it’s that.’
    ‘Magical space,’ I said. ‘Yes, I understand that. But you’ll kill yourself if you carry on, won’t you? Do you want to kill yourself?’
    Honoré pushed a lock of oily black hair off his brow. He had a craggy butcher’s face, but with a pair of eyes that radiated intelligence. ‘No, I don’t want to die,’ he said frankly, ‘but I don’t want to live enough to stop doing it. Comprenez? Chess was always a path for me, a way of getting somewhere that life could not take me. Heroin takes me so high. One floats above all of it.’
    I saw him again the next morning as I walked down to the Burning Ghat. He was wearing the same clothes as the day before, but he seemed upbeat, more lucid.
    ‘Come, we walk together,’ he said. ‘I am going to see Baba Sananda, who is a sadhu I know. He is Niranji Akhara . . . quite senior. He has a great energy about him. Maybe good for your research, no?’
    We lowered our voices as we crossed the funeral ground, then started up again on the far side. ‘How do you know him?’ I asked.
    ‘We met here,’ he said. ‘Eight years ago. I come here every year, so I see him. He is always in the same place. He makes me laugh.’
    And why India? I asked Honoré. What was it about this place that drew him?
    The answer was partly an obvious one, partly intriguing. Drugs were cheap here, he said. He could live the whole winter on what he earned in France. Heroin came overland from Pakistan and Afghanistan. And India itself was the world’s largest legitimate producer of opium poppies for medical uses. Part of that got illegally siphoned off for refinement into brown and white, and it was just getting cheaper.
    ‘Economy ’ere is exploding,’ he said. ‘So the syndicates began to realise that instead of smuggling through India, from the Golden Crescent, there was an ’uge potential market on their doorstep. I think there are more than fifty million addicts already, and growing very fast. My God! I’ve been to dealers where you’ve got kids – maybe six years old – chasing the dragon in the corner.’
    ‘Why is it growing so fast?’
    ‘Oof !’ He gave that most quintessential French exclamation, a kind of overstated sigh that seems to suggest that what follows is the most obvious thing in the world. ‘Opium has always been an Indian drug. You British once had them growing it in ’uge amounts to export to China. And it’s important in many religious ceremonies. But that India is gone now. India wants to be