Shantaram (39 page)

"Khaderbhai told it-_you come, please-like that, Khaderbhai told it-Please come see me, Mr. Lin."

The word please didn't sit well with him. It was clear that, in his view, lord Abdel Khader Khan gave orders that others quickly and gratefully obeyed. But he'd been told to request my company, rather than command it, and the English words he'd just spoken with such visible effort had been carefully memorised. I pictured him driving across the city and repeating the incantation of the foreign words to himself, as uncomfortable and unhappy with them as if they were fragments of prayer from another man's religion.

Alien to him or not, the words had their effect on me, and he looked relieved when I smiled a surrender.

"Okay, Nazeer, okay," I sighed. "We'll go to see Khaderbhai."

He began to open the back door of the car, but I insisted on sitting in the front. As soon as we pulled away from the kerb, he switched on the radio and turned the volume to high, perhaps to prevent conversation. The envelope that Rajan had given me was still in my hands, and I turned it over to examine both sides. It was hand-made paper, pink, and about the size of a magazine cover. There was nothing written on the outside. I tore the corner and opened it to find a black-and-white photograph. It was an interior shot of a room, half-lit, and filled with expensive ornaments from a variety of ages and cultures. In the midst of that self-conscious clutter, a woman sat on a throne-like chair.

She was dressed in an evening gown of extravagant length that spilled to the floor and concealed her feet. One hand rested on an arm of the chair.

The other was poised in a regal wave or an elegant gesture of dismissal. The hair was dark and elaborately coifed, falling in ringlets that framed her round and somewhat plump face. The almond-shaped eyes stared straight into the camera. They wore a faintly neurotic look of startled indignation. The lips of her tiny mouth were pinched in a determined pout that pulled at her weak chin.

A beautiful woman? I didn't think so. And a range of less than lovely impressions stared from that face-haughty, spiteful, frightened, spoiled, self-obsessed. The photograph said she was all of those things, and more. And worse. But there was something else on the photograph, something more repugnant and chilling than the unlovely face. It was the message she'd chosen to stamp in red, block letters, across the bottom. It said: MADAME ZHOU IS

HAPPY NOW.

____________________

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

"Come in, come in, Mr. Lin. No, please, sit here. We have been expecting you." Abdel Khader waved me to a place at his left hand. I kicked off my shoes at the doorway, where several other pairs of sandals and shoes had been discarded, and sat down on the plush, brocade cushion he'd indicated. It was a large room- nine of us, seated in a circle about a low marble table, occupied no more than a corner of it. The floor was surfaced with smooth, cream, pentagonal tiles. A square of Isfahan carpet covered the tiles in our part of the room. The walls and vaulted ceiling featured a mosaic of pale blue and white miniatures, presenting the effect of a sky with drifts of cloud. Two open arches connected the room to wide passageways. Three picture-seat windows overlooked a palm-filled courtyard. They were all framed with sculptured pillars and topped with minaret-shaped domes inscribed with Arabic lettering. The spill, splash, and stir of water in a cascade fountain came to us from beyond those windows, somewhere in the courtyard.

It was a room of diligently austere splendour. The only furniture was the low marble table and our nine cushions evenly arranged around the carpet. The only decoration was a framed black and gold-leaf depiction of the Kaaba at Mecca. The eight men who sat or reclined there seemed comfortable in that inornate simplicity, however, and certainly they were free to choose any style that they wanted, for there was the wealth and power of a small empire between them: an empire of crime.

"Are you feeling quite refreshed, Mr. Lin?" Khaderbhai asked.

When I'd arrived at the building beside the Nabila Mosque, in Dongri, Nazeer had shown me at once to a large, well-appointed bathroom, where I'd used the toilet and then washed my face and hands. Bombay, in those years, was the most voluptuously dirty city in the world. It wasn't only hot and cloyingly humid: in the eight rainless months of the year it was constantly aswirl with grimy dust clouds that settled on and smeared every exposed surface with a catholic variety of filths.

If I wiped my face with a handkerchief after only half an hour's walk along any street, the cloth was streaked with black.

"Thank you, yes. I felt tired, when I arrived, but now I'm revived by a combination of politeness and plumbing." I was speaking in Hindi, and it was a struggle to carry the humour, sense, and good intentions in the small phrase. We can't really know what a pleasure it is to run in our own language until we're forced to stumble in someone else's. It was a great relief when Khaderbhai spoke in English.

"Please speak English, Mr. Lin. I am very happy that you are learning our languages, but today we would like to practise yours. Each of us here can speak and read and write English, to some extent. In my own case, I have been educated in English, as well as in Hindi and Urdu. In fact, I often find myself thinking first in English, before other languages. My dear friend, Abdul, sitting near you, would call English his first language, I think.

And all of us, no matter what our level of learning, are enthusiastic about the study of English. It is a critical thing for us. One of the reasons why I asked you to come here, this evening, was so that we might enjoy the speaking of English with you, a native of the language. This is our monthly discussion night, you see, and our little group talks about-but wait, let me first introduce you."

He reached over to lay an affectionate hand on the bulky forearm of the heavy-set, elderly man who sat on his right. He was dressed in the green pantaloons and long tunic of Afghan traditional dress.

"This is Sobhan Mahmoud-let us use first names, after our introductions, Lin, for we are all friends here, yes?"

Sobhan wagged his grizzled, grey head at me in greeting, fixing me with a look of steely enquiry, perhaps to make sure that I understood the honour implied in the use of first names.

"The very ample and smiling gentleman next to him is my old friend from Peshawar, Abdul Ghani. Next to him is Khaled Ansari, originally from Palestine. Rajubhai, next to him, is from the holy city of Varanasi-have you seen it? No? Well, you must make the time to do so before too long."

Rajubhai, a bald, thick-set man with a neat, grey moustache, smiled in response to Khaderbhai's introduction, and turned to me with his hands joined together in a silent greeting. His eyes, above the gentle steeple of his fingers, were hard and wary.

"Next to our dear Raju," Khaderbhai continued, "is Keki Dorabjee, who came to Bombay from Zanzibar, with other Indian Parsees, twenty years ago, when they were driven from the island by the nationalist movement."

Dorabjee, a very tall, thin man in his middle fifties, turned his dark eyes on me. His expression seemed fixed in such distressing melancholy that I felt compelled to offer him a small, comforting smile in return.

"Next to our brother Keki is Farid. He is the youngest of our group, and the only one of us who is a native Maharashtrian, by virtue of being born in Bombay, although his family came here from Gujarat. Sitting next to you is Madjid, who was born in Teheran, but has lived here, in our city, for more than twenty years."

A young servant entered with a tray of glasses and a silver pot of black tea. He served us, beginning with Khaderbhai and ending with me. He left the room, returned momentarily to place two bowls of ladoo and barfi sweets on the table, and then left us once more.

Immediately afterward, three men joined us in the room, making a place for themselves on another patch of carpet that was near, but a little apart from us. They were introduced to me-Andrew Ferreira, a Goan, and Salman Mustaan and Sanjay Kumar, both from Bombay-but from that moment they never spoke again. They were, it seemed, young gangsters on the next rung below council membership: invited to listen at the meetings, but not to speak.

And they did listen, very attentively, while watching us closely.

I turned, often, to find their eyes on me, staring out from the kind of grave appraisal I'd come to know too well in prison. They were deciding whether to trust me or not, and how hard it would be-as a purely professional speculation-to kill me, without a gun.

"Lin, we usually talk about some themes, at our discussion nights," Abdul Ghani said in a clipped, BBC-accented English, "but first we would like to ask you what you make of this."

He reached across, pushing toward me a rolled poster that was lying on the table. I opened it out and read through the four paragraphs of large, bold typeface.

SAPNA

People of Bombay, listen to the voice of your King. Your dream is come to you and I am he, Sapna, King of Dreams, King of Blood. Your time is come, my children, and your chains of suffering will be lifted from you.

I am come. I am the law. My first commandment is to open your eyes. I want you to see your hunger while they waste food. I want you to see your rags while they wear silk. See that you live in the gutter while they live in palaces of marble and gold. My second commandment is to kill them all. Do this with cruel violence.

Do this in memory of me, Sapna. I am the law.

There was more, a lot more, all of it in the same vein. It struck me as absurd at first, and I started to smile. The silence in the room and the stares of tense concentration they turned on me stifled the smile to a grimace. They took it very seriously, I realised. Stalling for time, because I didn't know what Ghani wanted from me, I read through the ranting, insane tract again.

While I read the words, I remembered that someone had painted the name Sapna on the wall at the Village in the Sky, twenty-three floors off the ground. I remembered what Prabaker and Johnny Cigar had said about brutal murders done in Sapna's name. The continuing silence and expectant seriousness in the room filled me with a chill of menace. The hairs on my arms tingled with it, and a caterpillar of sweat inched down the groove of my spine.

"Well, Lin?"

"Sorry?"

"What do you make of it?"

The stillness was so complete that I could hear myself swallowing. They wanted me to give them something, and they expected it to be good.

"I don't know what to say. I mean, it's so ridiculous, so fatuous, it's hard to take it seriously."

Madjid grunted, and cleared his throat loudly. He drew his thick black eyebrows down over a thick black scowl.

"If you call cutting a man from the groin to the throat, and then leaving his organs and his life's blood all around his house serious, then it is a serious matter."

"Sapna did that?"

"His followers did it, Lin," Abdul Ghani answered for him. "That, and at least six more murders like it, in the last month. Some were even more hideous killings."

"I've heard people talking about Sapna, but I thought it was just a story, like an urban legend. I haven't read anything about it in any of the newspapers, and I read them every day."

"This matter is being handled in the most careful way,"

Khaderbhai explained. "The government and the police have asked for co-operation from the newspapers. They have been reported as unrelated things, as deaths that happened during simple, unconnected robberies. But we know that Sapna's followers have committed them, because the blood of the victims was used to write the word Sapna on the walls and the floors. And despite the terrible violence of the attacks, not much of any real value was stolen from the victims. For now, this Sapna does not officially exist. But it is only a matter of time before everyone knows of him, and of what has been done in his name."

"And you... you don't know who he is?"

"We are very interested in him, Lin," Khaderbhai answered. "What do you think about this poster? It has been seen in many markets and hutments, and it is written in English, as you see. Your language."

I sensed a vague hint of accusation in those last two words.

Although I had nothing whatsoever to do with Sapna and knew almost nothing about him, my face reddened with that special guilty blush of the completely innocent man.

"I don't know. I don't think I can help you with this."

"Come now, Lin," Abdul Ghani chided. "There must be some impressions, some thoughts, that occur to you. There is no commitment here. Don't be shy. Just say the first things that come to your mind."

"Well," I began reluctantly, "the first thing is, I think that this Sapna-or whoever wrote this poster-may be a Christian."

"A Christian!" Khaled laughed. He was a young man, perhaps thirty-five, with short dark hair and soft green eyes. A thick scar swept in a " smooth curve from his left ear to the corner of his mouth, stiffening that side of his face. His dark hair was streaked with premature white and grey. It was an intelligent, sensitive face, more scarred by its anger and hatreds than it was by the knife-wound on his cheek. "They're supposed to _love their enemies, not disembowel them!"

"Let him finish," Khaderbhai smiled. "Go on, Lin. What makes you think Sapna is a Christian fellow?"

"I didn't say Sapna is a Christian-just that whoever wrote this stuff is using Christian words and phrases. See, here, in the first part, where he says I am come... and...Do this in memory of me-those words can be found in the Bible. And here, in the third paragraph... I am the truth in their world of lies, I am the light in their darkness of greed, my way of blood is your freedom-he's paraphrasing something...
I
am the Way and the Truth and the _Light... and it's also in the Bible. Then in the last lines, he says...

Blessed are the killers, for they shall steal lives in my name- that's from the Sermon on the Mount. It's all been taken from the Bible, and there's probably more in here that I don't recognise.

But it's all been changed around, it's as though this guy, whoever wrote this stuff, has taken bits of the Bible, and written it upside down."

"Upside down? Explain please?" Madjid asked.

"I mean, it's against the ideas of the words in the Bible, but uses the same kind of language. He's written it to have exactly the opposite meaning and intention of the original. He's kind of turned the Bible on its head."

I might've said more, but Abdul Ghani ended the discussion abruptly.

"Thank you, Lin. You've been a big help. But let's change the subject. I, for one, do sincerely dislike talking about such unpleasantness as this Sapna lunatic. I only brought it up because Khader asked me to-and Khader Khan's wish is my command.

But we really should move on now. If we don't get started on our theme for tonight, we'll miss out altogether. So, let's have a smoke, and talk of other things. It's our custom for the guest to start, so will you be so kind?"

Farid rose and placed a huge, ornate hookah, with six snaking lines, on the floor between us next to the table. He passed the smoking tubes out, and squatted next to the hookah with several matches held ready to strike. The others closed off their smoking tubes with their thumbs and, as Farid played a flame over the tulip-shaped bowl, I puffed it alight. It was the mix of hashish and marijuana known as
ganga-jamuna,
named after the two holy rivers, Ganges and Jamner. It was so potent, and came with such force from the water-pipe, that almost at once my bloodshot eyes failed in focus and I experienced a mild, hallucinatory effect: the blurring at the edges of other people's faces, and a minuscule time-delay in their movements. The Lewis Carrolls, Karla called it. I'm so stoned, she used to say, I'm getting the Lewis Carrolls. So much smoke passed from the tube that I swallowed it and belched it out again. I closed off the pipe, and watched in slow motion as the others smoked, one after another.

I'd just begun to master the sloppy grin that dumped itself on the plasticine muscles of my face when it was my turn to smoke again. It was a serious business. There was no laughing or smiling.

There was no conversation, and no man met another's eye. The men smoked with the same mirthless, earnest impassiveness I might've found on a long ride in an elevator full of strangers.

"Now, Mr. Lin," Khaderbhai said, smiling graciously as Farid removed the hookah and set about cleaning the ash-filled bowl.

"It is also our custom for the guest to give us the theme for discussion. This is usually a religious theme, but it need not be so. What would you like to talk about?"

"I... I... I'm not sure what you mean?" I stammered, my brain soundlessly exploding in fractal repetitions of the pattern in the carpet beneath my feet.

"Give us a subject, Lin. Life and death, love and hate, loyalty and betrayal," Abdul Ghani explained, waving a plump hand in effete little circles with each couplet. "We are like a debating society here, you see. We meet every month, at least one time, and when our business and private matters are finished, we talk about philosophical subjects and the such-like. It's our amusement. And now we have you, an Englishman, to give us a subject to discuss, in your language."

"I'm not English, actually."

"Not English? Then what are you?" Madjid demanded to know. Deep suspicions were planted in the furrows of his frown.

It was a good question. The false passport in my backpack in the slum said that I was a New Zealand citizen. The business card in my pocket said that I was an American named Gilbert Parker.

People in the village at Sunder had re-named me Shantaram. In the slum they knew me as Linbaba. A lot of people in my own country knew me as a face on a wanted poster. But is it my own country, I asked myself. Do I have a country?

It wasn't until I'd asked myself the question that I realised I already had the answer. If I did have a country, a nation of the heart, it was India. I knew that I was as much a refugee, a displaced and stateless person, as the thousands of Afghans, Iranians, and others who'd come to Bombay across the burning bridge; those exiles who'd taken shovels of hope, and set about burying the past in the earth of their own lives.

"I'm an Australian," I said, admitting it for the first time since I'd arrived in India, and obeying an instinct that warned me to tell Khaderbhai the truth. Strangely, I felt it to be more of a lie than any alias I'd ever used. "How very interesting," Abdul Ghani remarked, lifting one eyebrow in a sage nod to Khaderbhai. "And what will you have as a subject, Lin?"

"Any subject?" I asked, stalling for time.

"Yes, your choice. Last week we discussed patriotism-the obligations of a man to God, and what he owes to the state. A most engaging theme. What will you have us discuss this week?"

"Well, there's a line in that poster of Sapna's... our suffering is our religion-something like that. It made me think of something else. The cops came again, a few days ago, and smashed down a lot of houses in the zhopadpatti, and while we were watching it one of the women near me said... our duty is to work, and to suffer-or as near to that as I can make out. She said it very calmly and simply, as if she accepted it, and was resigned to it, and understood it completely. But I don't understand it, and I don't think I ever will. So, maybe the question could be about that. Why do people suffer? Why do bad people suffer so little? And why do good people suffer so much? I mean, I'm not talking about me-all the suffering I've gone through, I brought most of it on myself. And God knows, I've caused a lot of it to other people. But I still don't understand it-especially not the suffering that the people in the slum go through. So... suffering. We could talk about that... do you think?"

I trailed off a little lamely into the silence that greeted my suggestion, but moments later I was rewarded with a warmly approving smile from Khaderbhai.

"It is a good theme, Lin. I knew that you would not disappoint us. Majidbhai, I will call on you to start us on this talk."

Madjid cleared his throat and turned a gruff smile on his host.

He scratched at his bushy eyebrows with thumb and forefinger, and then plunged into the discussion with the confident air of a man much used to expressing his opinions.

"Suffering, let me see. I think that suffering is a matter of choice. I think that we do not have to suffer anything in this life, if we are strong enough to deny it. The strong man can master his feelings so completely that it is almost impossible to make him suffer. When we do suffer things, like pain and so, it means that we have lost control. So I will say that suffering is a human weakness."

"Achaa-cha," Khaderbhai murmured, using the repetitive form of the Hindi word for good, which translates as Yes, yes, or Fine, fine. "Your interesting idea makes me ask the question, where does strength come from?"

"Strength?" Madjid grunted. "Everyone knows that it... well... what are you saying?"

"Nothing, my old friend. Only, is it not true that some of our strength comes from suffering? That suffering hardship makes us stronger? That those of us who have never known a real hardship, and true suffering, cannot have the same strength as others, who have suffered much? And if that is true, does that not mean that your argument is the same thing as saying that we have to be weak to suffer, and we have to suffer to be strong, so we have to be weak to be strong?"

"Yes," Madjid conceded, smiling. "Maybe a little bit is true, maybe a little bit of what you say. But I still think it is a matter of strength and weakness."

"I don't accept everything that our brother Madjid said," Abdul Ghani put in, "but I do agree that there is an element of control that we have over suffering. I don't think you can deny that."

"Where do we get this control, and how?" Khaderbhai asked.

"I would say that it is different for all of us, but that it happens when we grow up, when we mature and pass from the childishness of our youthful tears, and become adults. I think that it is a part of growing up, learning to control our suffering. I think that when we grow up, and learn that happiness is rare, and passes quickly, we become disillusioned and hurt.

And how much we suffer is a mark of how much we have been hurt by this realisation. Suffering, you see, is a kind of anger. We rage against the unfairness, the injustice of our sad and sorry lot.

And this boiling resentment, you see, this anger, is what we call suffering. It is also what leads us to the hero curse, I might add."

"Hero curse! Enough of your hero curses! You bring every subject back to this," Madjid growled, scowling to match the smug smile of his portly friend.

"Abdul has a pet theory, Lin," said Khaled, the dour Palestinian.

"He believes that certain men are cursed with qualities, such as great courage, that make them commit desperate acts. He calls it the hero curse, the thing that compels them to lead other men to bloodshed and chaos. He might be right, I think, but he goes on about it so much he drives us all crazy." "Leaving that aside, Abdul," Khaderbhai persisted, "let me ask you one question about what you have said. Is there a difference, would you say, between suffering that we experience, and suffering that we cause for others?"