Shantaram (26 page)

Swarms of bats flying overhead, along the lines of electrical wires, thousands of them, were like musical notes on a strip of sheet music. A very small girl, awake past her bedtime and still selling ribbons of jasmine flowers, came up to us and gave Abdullah a garland. He reached into his pocket to give her some money, but she refused, laughing, and walked away singing the chorus of a song from a popular Hindi movie.

"There is no act of faith more beautiful than the generosity of the very poor," Abdullah said, in his quiet tone. I had the impression that he never raised his voice above that softness.

"You speak English very well," I commented, genuinely impressed by the sophisticated thought and the way he'd expressed it.

"No, I don't speak well. I knew a woman, and she taught me those words," he replied. I waited for more, and he hesitated, looking out over the sea, but when he spoke again it was to change the subject. "Tell me, Mr. Lin, that time at the den of the Standing Babas, when that man was coming for you with a sword-what would you have done if I was not there?"

"I would've fought him."

"I think..." He turned to stare into my eyes, and I felt my scalp tightening with an unaccountable dread. "I think you would have died. You would have been murdered, and you would now be dead."

"No. He had a sword, but he was old, and he was crazy. I would've beaten him."

"Yes," he said, not smiling. "Yes, I think you are right-you would have beaten him. But the others, the girl and your Indian friend, one of them would have been hurt, or even killed, if you had survived. When the sword came down, if it did not strike you, it would have hit one of them, I think it is so. One of you would have died. You or your friends-one of you would be dead."

It was my turn to be silent. The sense of dread I'd felt a moment before was suddenly a full-blown alarm. My heart was thumping a loudness of blood. He was talking about having saved my life, and yet I sensed a threat in his words. I didn't like it. Anger began to rise in me. I tensed, ready to fight him, and stared hard into his eyes.

He smiled, and put a hand on my shoulder, just as he'd done less than an hour before at another sea wall, on Marine Drive. As quickly as the tingling, intuitive sense of alarm arose, it also passed; as powerful as it had been, it was suppressed and gone.

It was months before I thought of it again.

I turned to see the cop saluting and moving away from Khader's car.

"Khaderbhai was very conspicuous about giving that cop a bribe."

Abdullah laughed, and I remembered the first time I'd heard him laugh out loud, in the den of the Standing Babas. It was a good laugh, guileless and completely unselfconscious, and I suddenly liked him because of it.

"We have a saying in Persian-Sometimes the lion must roar, just to remind the horse of his fear. This policeman has been making problems here at Haji Ali. The people do not respect him. For that, he is unhappy. His unhappiness is causing him to make problems. The more problems he makes, the less respect he gets from the people. Now they see such big baksheesh, more than a policeman like him is getting, and they will respect him a little. They will be impressed that the great Khaderbhai pays him so well. With this little respect, he will make less problems for all of us. But still, the message is very clear. He is a horse, but Khader is a lion. And the lion, it has roared."

"Are you Khaderbhai's bodyguard?"

"No, no!" he laughed again. "Lord Abdel Khader needs no protection. But..." He paused, and we both looked at the grey- haired man in the back of the modest limousine. "But I would die for him, if that is what you mean. That, and a lot more would I do for him."

"There's not a lot more you can do for someone than die for them," I replied, grinning at his earnestness as much as the strangeness of his idea.

"Oh yes," he said, putting an arm around my shoulder and leading us back towards the car. "There is a lot more."

"You are making a friendship with our Abdullah, Mr. Lin?"

Khaderbhai said as we climbed back into the car. "This is a good thing. You should be close friends. You look like brothers."

Abdullah and I looked at one another, and laughed gently at the words. My hair was blond, and his was ink black. My eyes were grey, and his were brown. He was Persian, and I was Australian.

At first glance, we couldn't be more dissimilar. But Khaderbhai stared from one to the other of us with such a puzzled frown, and was so genuinely bewildered by our amusement, that we swallowed our laughter in smiles. And as the car headed out along the Bandra road, I thought about what Khader had said. I found myself thinking that, for all the differences between us, there just might be some perceptive truth in the older man's observation.

The car drove on for almost an hour. It slowed, at last, on the outskirts of Bandra, in a street of shops and warehouses, and then bumped into the entrance to a narrow lane. The street was dark and deserted, as was the lane. When the car doors opened, I could hear music and singing.

"Come, Mr. Lin. We go," Khaderbhai said, feeling no compulsion to tell me where we were going or why.

The driver, Nazeer, remained with the car, leaning against the bonnet and finally allowing himself the luxury of unwrapping the paan that Abdullah had bought for him at Haji Ali. As I passed him to walk down the lane, I realised that Nazeer hadn't spoken a single word, and I wondered at the long silences so many Indian people practised in that crowded, noisy city.

We passed through a wide stone arch, along a corridor and, after climbing two flights of stairs, we entered a vast room filled with people, smoke, and clamorous music. It was a rectangular room, hung with green silks and carpets. At the far end there was a small, raised stage where four musicians sat on silk cushions.

Around the walls there were low tables surrounded by comfortable cushions. Pale green, bell-shaped lanterns, suspended from the wooden ceiling, cast trembling hoops of yellow-gold light.

Waiters moved from group to group, serving black tea in long glasses. At some of the tables there were hookah pipes, pearling the air with blue smoke, and the perfume of charras. Several men rose immediately to greet Khaderbhai. Abdullah was also well known there. A number of people acknowledged him with a nod, wave, or spoken greeting. I noticed that the men in that room, unlike those at Haji Ali, embraced him warmly, and lingered as they held his hand between their own. I recognised one man in the crowd. It was Shafiq Gussa, or Shafiq The Angry, the controller of prostitution in the navy barracks area near the slum where I lived. I knew a few other faces-a well-known poet, a famous Sufi holy man, and a minor movie star-from photographs in newspapers.

One of the men near Khaderbhai was the manager of the private club. He was a short man, plumply buttoned into a long Kashmiri vest. The white lace cap of a hajji, one who'd made the pilgrimage to Mecca, covered his bald head. His forehead was discoloured by the dark, circular bruise some Muslims acquire through touching their foreheads to a stone in their devotions.

He shouted instructions, and at once waiters brought a new table and several cushions, setting them up in a corner of the room with a clear view to the stage.

We sat cross-legged, with Khader in the centre, Abdullah at his right hand, and me at his left. A boy, wearing a hajji cap and Afghan pants and vest, brought us a bowl of popped rice, sharply spiced with chilli powders, and a platter of mixed nuts with dried fruits. The chai waiter poured hot, black tea from a narrow-spouted kettle through a metre of air without spilling a drop. He placed the tea before each of us and then offered sugar cubes. I was about to drink the tea without sugar, but Abdullah stopped me.

"Come, Mr. Lin," he smiled, "We are drinking Persian tea, in the real Iranian style, isn't it?"

He took a sugar cube and placed it in his mouth, holding it firmly between his front teeth. He lifted the glass then, and sipped the tea through the cube. I followed suit, imitating the steps. The sugar cube slowly crumbled and melted away and, although the taste was sweeter than I preferred, I enjoyed what was for me the strangeness of a new custom.

Khaderbhai also took a sugar cube and sipped his tea through it, endowing the little custom with a peculiar dignity and solemnity, as in fact he did with every expression and even the most casual gesture. He was the most imperial human being I'd ever met.

Looking at him, then, as he inclined his head to listen to Abdullah's light-hearted conversation, the thought came to me that in any life, and in any world, he would command men, and inspire their obedience.

Three singers joined the musicians, and sat a little in front of them. A gradual silence settled in the room, and then all of a sudden the three men began to sing in powerful, thrilling voices.

It was a luscious sound-a layered and gorgeous music of passionate intensity. The men weren't just singing, they were crying and wailing in song. Real tears ran from their closed eyes and dripped onto their chests. I was elated, listening to it; and yet, somehow, I felt ashamed. It was as if the singers had taken me into their deepest and most intimate love and sorrow.

They sang three songs then quietly left the stage, disappearing through a curtain into another room. No-one had spoken or moved during the performance, but then everyone spoke at once as we forced ourselves to break the spell that had enveloped us.

Abdullah stood up and crossed the room to talk with a group of Afghans at another table.

"How do you like the singing, Mr. Lin?" Khaderbhai asked me.

"I like it very much. It's incredible, amazing. I've never heard anything like it. There was so much sadness in it, but so much power as well. What language was it? Urdu?"

"Yes. Do you understand Urdu?"

"No, I'm afraid I don't. I only speak a little Marathi and Hindi.

I recognised it as Urdu because some of the people speak it around me, where I live."

"Urdu is the language of gazals, and these are the best gazal singers in all Bombay," he replied.

"Are they singing love songs?"

He smiled, and leaned across to rest his hand on my forearm.

Throughout the city, people touched one another often during their conversations, emphasising the points they made with a gentle squeeze of pressure. I knew the gesture well from daily contact with my friends in the slum, and I'd come to like it.

"They are love songs, yes, but the best and most true of all love songs. They are love songs to God. These men are singing about loving God."

I nodded, saying nothing, but my silence prompted him to speak again.

"You are a Christian fellow?" he asked.

"No. I don't believe in God." "There is no believing in God," he declared, smiling again. "We either know God, or we do not."

"Well," I laughed, "I certainly don't know God, and frankly I'm inclined to think that God is impossible to believe in, at least most of the notions of God that I've come across."

"Oh, of course, naturally, God is impossible. That is the first proof that He exists."

He was staring at me intently, his hand still resting warm on my arm. Be careful, I thought. You're getting into a philosophical discussion with a man who's famous for them. He's testing you.

It's a test, and the water's deep.

"Let me get this straight-you're saying that because something is impossible, it exists?" I asked, pushing a canoe of thought out into the uncharted water of his ideas.

"That is correct."

"Well, wouldn't that mean that all the possible things don't exist?"

"Precisely!" he said, smiling more widely. "I am delighted that you understand."

"I can say those words," I answered, laughing to match his smile, "but that doesn't mean I understand them."

"I will explain. Nothing exists as we see it. Nothing we see is really there, as we think we are seeing it. Our eyes are liars.

Everything that seems real, is merely part of the illusion.

Nothing exists, as we think it does. Not you. Not me. Not this room. Nothing."

"I still don't get it. I don't see how possible things don't exist."

"Let me put it another way. The agents of creation, the energy that actually animates the matter and the life that we think we see around us, cannot be measured or weighed or even put into time, as we know it. In one form, that energy is photons of light. The smallest object is a universe of open space to them, and the entire universe is but a speck of dust. What we call the world is just an idea-and not a very good one, yet. From the point of view of the light, the photon of light that animates it, the universe that we know is not real. Nothing is. Do you understand now?"

"Not really. It seems to me that if everything we think we know is wrong, or is an illusion, then none of us can know what to do, or how to live, or how to stay sane."

"We lie," he said with a flash of real humour in the gold-flecked amber of his eyes. "The sane man is simply a better liar than the insane man. You and Abdullah are brothers. I know this. Your eyes lie, and tell you that this is not so. And you believe the lie, because it is easier."

"And that's how we stay sane?"

"Yes. Let me tell you that I can see you as my son. I was not married, and I have no son, but there was a moment of time, yes, when it was possible for me to be married, and to have a son. And that moment of time was-how old are you?"

"I'm thirty."

"Exactly! I knew it. That moment of time, when I could have been a father, was exactly thirty years ago. But if I tell you that I see it clearly, that you are my son, and I am your father, you will think that it is impossible. You will resist it. You will not see the truth, that I see now, and that I saw in the first moments when we met, a few hours ago. You will prefer to make a convenient lie, and to believe it-the lie that we are strangers, and that there is no connection between us. But fate-you know fate? Kismet is the word, in the Urdu language-fate has every power over us, but two. Fate cannot control our free will, and fate cannot lie. Men lie, to themselves more than to others, and to others more often than they tell the truth. But fate does not lie. Do you see?"