"My life hadn’t fallen apart. I kept my jobs going, I had girlfriends, I had money, I had a house, I had a car, I had all those things. But I got Hepatitis C from injecting government morphine. I started injecting in 1982, but it took 25 years for the symptoms to show. That was a complete wake-up call. As soon as I found out, I quit everything, including my job in New York, and came to India to be a writer. I started working on the book, and lived very cleanly. I even quit drinking for nine years. It wasn’t easy to do. But just knowing that my time was limited was enough. Hepatitis C will eventually turn into liver cancer. Everybody is dying, by the way. The difference is that I know it, and you don’t. We live in that kind of world. And knowing it has focused me and made me do things that I would probably have put off for another ten years."
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Jeet Thayil
Jeet Thayil (born October 13, 1959) is an Indian poet, novelist, librettist and musician. He is most famous as a poet and is the author of four collections. His first novel, Narcopolis, which won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, was also shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize and the Hindu Literary Prize.
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