Shantaram

by Gregory David Roberts

  Just as the contracted lanes seemed, with every twist and turn, to belong to another age, so too did the appearance of the people change as we moved deeper into the maze. I saw less and less of the western-style cotton shirts and trousers, so common everywhere else in the city, until finally those fashions disappeared from all but the youngest children. Instead, the men wore traditional garments of colourful diversity. There were long silk shirts that descended to the knee and were fastened with pearl buttons, from neck to waist; kaftan robes in plain colours or stripes; hooded cloaks that resembled the garb of monks; and an endless variety of skull caps, in white or beaded colours, and turbans in yellow, red, and electric blue. The women were more conspicuously bejewelled, despite the indigence of the quarter, and what those jewels lacked in money’s worth was found in the extravagance of their design. No less prominent were caste mark tattoos on some foreheads, cheeks, hands, and wrists. And every bare feminine foot was graced by anklets of silver bells and coiled brass toe-rings.

  It was as if all of those hundreds of people were costumed for home, for themselves, not for the public promenades. It was as if they were safe, there, to clothe themselves in tradition and display. And the streets were clean. The buildings were cracked and smeared, the constricted passage-ways were crowded with goats, chickens, dogs, and people, and each thin face showed the shade and hollows of penury, but the streets and the people were stainlessly, scrupulously clean.

  We turned then into more ancient alleyways, so narrow that two persons passed one another only with difficulty. People stepped into doorways, waiting for us to walk past before they moved on. The passages had been covered with false ceilings and stretched awnings, and in the darkness it wasn’t possible to see more than a few metres in front or behind. I kept my eyes on Prabaker, fearful that I wouldn’t find my way out alone. The little guide turned often, drawing my attention to a loose stone in the path ahead, or a step, or some obstruction overhead. Concentrating on those perils, I lost my orientation. My mental map of the city turned, blurred, faded, and I couldn’t guess at the direction of the sea, or the major landmarks—Flora Fountain, VT. station, Crawford Market—we’d passed on our way to the quarter. I felt myself to be so deep in the flow and reflux of those narrow lanes, so smothered by the intimacy of open doors and perfumed bodies, that it seemed I was walking inside the buildings, inside the very homes, rather than between them.

  We came upon a stall where a man in a sweat-stained cotton vest stirred battered foods frying in a dish of bubbling oil. The blue flames of his kerosene stove, eerie and claustral, provided the only light. Emotion haunted his face. It was anguish, some kind of anguish, and the dull, stoic anger that hangs in the eyes of repetitive, ill-paid work. Prabaker moved past him and into the darkness beyond. As I approached the man he turned to face me, and his eyes met mine. For a moment, the full-force of his blue-lit anger was directed at me.

  Long years after that day, the Afghan guerrillas I came to know as friends, on a mountain near the siege of Kandahar, talked for hours about Indian films and their favourite Bollywood movie stars. Indian actors are the greatest in the world, one of them said once, because Indian people know how to shout with their eyes. That back-street fried-foods cook stared at me, with shouting eyes, and stopped me as surely as if he’d pushed a hand into my chest. I couldn’t move. In my own eyes, there were words—I’m sorry, I’m sorry that you have to do this work, I’m sorry that your world, your life, is so hot and dark and unremembered, I’m sorry that I’m intruding …

  Still staring at me, he grasped the handles of his dish. For one, two, thudding heartbeats, I was gripped by the ridiculous, terrifying thought that he was going to throw the boiling oil in my face. Fear jerked at my feet and I moved, easing my way past him with my hands flat against the damp surface of the stone wall. Two steps beyond him, my foot struck a crack in the path and I stumbled, and fell, dragging another man down with me. He was an elderly man, thin and frail. I could feel the wicker-basket of his bones through his coarse tunic. We fell heavily, landing near the open entrance to a house, and the old man struck his head. I scrambled to my feet, slipping and sliding on a pile of shifting stones. I tried to help the man to stand, but there was an elderly woman who squatted on her haunches there, in the open doorway, and she slapped at my hands, warning me away. I apologised in English, struggling to find the words for I’m sorry in Hindi—What are they? Prabaker taught me the words … Mujhako afsos hain … that’s it—I said it three, four times. In that dark, quiet corridor between the buildings, the words echoed like a drunkard’s prayer in an empty church.

  The old man moaned quietly, slouching in the doorway. The woman wiped his face with a corner of her headscarf, and held the cloth out for me to see the bright stain of blood. She said nothing, but her wrinkled face was creased with a frown of contempt. With that simple gesture, holding out the bloodstained cloth, she seemed to be saying Look, you stupid oaf, you great clumsy barbarian, look what you’ve done here …

  I felt choked by the heat, smothered by the darkness and the strangeness of the place. The walls seemed to press upon my hands, as if only my arms prevented them from closing in on me altogether. I backed away from the elderly couple, stumbling at first, and then plunging headlong into the shadow-land of the tunnel street. A hand reached out to grab at my shoulder. It was a gentle touch, but I almost shouted out loud.

  ‘This way, baba,’ Prabaker said, laughing quietly. ‘Where are you taking yourself? This way only. Along this passage now, and you must be keeping your two feets to the outside because too much dirty it is, in the middle of the passages, okay?’

  He was standing in the entrance to a narrow gap formed between the blank walls of two buildings. Feeble light gleamed in the teeth and eyes of his smile, but beyond him was only blackness. He turned his back to me, spread his feet out until they touched the walls, braced himself with his hands, and then shuffled off, sliding his feet along the walls in small, dragging steps. He expected me to follow. I hesitated, but when the awkward star of his shuffling form melted in the darkness and vanished, I too put my feet out against the walls and shambled after him.

  I could hear Prabaker ahead of me, but it was so dark that I couldn’t see him. One foot strayed from the edge of the wall, and my boot squelched into a muddy slime that rested in the centre of the path. A foul smell rose up from that viscous ooze, and I kept my feet hard against the walls, sliding them along in short steps. Something squat and heavy slithered past me, rasping its thick body against my boot. Seconds later, another and then a third creature waddled past me in the darkness, rolling heavy flesh over the toes of my boots.

  ‘Prabu!’ I bellowed, not knowing how far ahead of me he was. ‘There are things in here with us!’

  ‘Things, baba?’

  ‘On the ground! Something’s crawling on my feet! Something heavy!’

  ‘Only rats are crawling here, Lin. There are no things.’

  ‘Rats? Are you kidding? These things are as big as bull terriers. Jesus, this is some tour, my friend!’

  ‘No problem big rats, Lin,’ Prabaker answered quietly from the darkness in front of me. ‘Big rats are friendly fellows, not making mischief for the people. If you don’t attack them. Only one thing is making them bite and scratch and such things.’

  ‘What’s that, for God’s sake?’

  ‘Shouting, baba,’ he replied softly. ‘They don’t like the loud voices.’

  ‘Oh, great! Now you tell me,’ I croaked. ‘Is it much further? This is starting to give me the creeps and —’

  He’d stopped, and I bumped into him, pressing him against the panelled surface of a wooden door.

  ‘We are here,’ he whispered, reaching out to knock with a complex series of taps and pauses. There was a scrape and clunk as a heavy bolt slid free, and then the door swung open, dazzling us with sudden bright light. Prabaker grasped my sleeve and dragged me with him. ‘Quickly, Lin. No big rats allowed inside!’

  We steppe
d inside a small chamber, hemmed in by blank walls and lit from high above by a raw silk rectangle of sky. I could hear voices from deeper within the cul-de-sac. A huge man slammed the gate shut. He put his back to it and faced us with a scowl, teeth bared. Prabaker began to talk at once, placating him with soft words and fawning gestures. The man shook his head repeatedly, interjecting regularly to say no, no, no.

  He towered over me. I was standing so close to him that I could feel the breath from his wide nostrils, the sound of it like wind whistling through caves on a rocky shore. His hair was very short, exposing ears as large and nubbled as a boxer’s practice mitts. His square face seemed to be animated by more strong muscle tissue than the average man has in his back. His chest, as wide as I was from shoulder to shoulder, rose and fell with each breath, and rested upon an immense belly. The fine dagger-line of his moustache accentuated his scowl, and he looked at me with such undiluted loathing that a little prayer unfurled itself in my mind. Please God, don’t make me fight this man.

  He raised the palms of his hands to stop Prabaker’s wheedling cajolery. They were huge hands, gnarled and calloused enough to scrape the barnacles off the side of a dry-docked oil tanker.

  ‘He says we are not allowed inside,’ Prabaker explained.

  ‘Well,’ I replied, reaching past the man and attempting with unforced enthusiasm to open the door, ‘you can’t say we didn’t try.’

  ‘No, no, Lin!’ Prabaker stopped me. ‘We must argue with him about this matter.’

  The big man folded his arms, stretching the seams of his khaki shirt with little ripples of sound.

  ‘I don’t think that’s such a good idea,’ I mumbled, under a tight smile.

  ‘Certainly it is!’ Prabaker insisted. ‘Tourists are not allowed here, or to any of the other people-markets, but I have told him that you are not one of these tourist fellows. I have told him that you have learned the Marathi language. He does not believe me. That is our problem only. He doesn’t believe any foreigner will speak Marathi. You must for that reason speak it a little Marathi for him. You will see. He will allow us inside.’

  ‘I only know about twenty words of Marathi, Prabu.’

  ‘No problem twenty words, baba. Just make a begin. You will see. Tell him your name.’

  ‘My name?’

  ‘Yes, like I taught it to you. Not in Hindi, but in Marathi. Okay, just begin …’

  ‘Ah, ah, maza nao Lin ahey,’ I muttered, uncertainly. My name is Lin.

  ‘Baapree!’ the big man gasped, his eyes wide with genuine surprise. Good Lord!

  Encouraged, I tried a few more of the phrases Prabaker had taught me during the last few weeks.

  ‘Maza Desh New Zealand ahey. Ata me Colabala rahella ahey.’ My country is New Zealand. I am living in Colaba now.

  ‘Kaigaram mad’chud!’ he roared, smiling for the first time. The phrase literally means, What a hot motherfucker! It’s so frequently and inventively applied in conversation, however, that it can be loosely translated as Son of a gun!

  The giant grasped my shoulder, squeezing it with amiable severity.

  I ran through the range of my Marathi phrases, beginning with the first words I’d asked Prabaker to teach me—I love your country very much—and concluding with a request I was often forced to make in restaurants, but which must’ve seemed spectacularly inappropriate in the little alcove: Please turn off the fan, while I am eating my soup …

  ‘Enough now, baba,’ Prabaker gurgled through his wide grin. When I fell silent, the big man spoke swiftly and exuberantly. Prabaker translated for him, nodding and gesturing expressively with his hands. ‘He says he is Bombay policeman, and his name is Vinod.’

  ‘He’s a cop?’

  ‘Oh yes, Lin. A police-cop, he is.’

  ‘Do the cops run this place?’

  ‘Oh, no. This is part-time work only. He says he is so very, very happy to meet you …

  ‘He says you are the first gora he ever met who can speak Marathi …

  ‘He says some foreigners speak Hindi, but nobody foreigner can speak Marathi …

  ‘He says Marathi is his language. His native place is Pune …

  ‘He says they speak it a very pure Marathi in Pune, and you must go there to hear it …

  ‘He says he is too happy! You are like a son to him …

  ‘He says you must come to his house, and eat foods and meet his family …

  ‘He says that will be one hundred rupees.’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘Baksheesh, Lin. To go inside. One hundred rupees, it is. Pay him now.’

  ‘Oh, sure.’ I fumbled a few notes from my pocket, peeled off one hundred rupees, and handed it over. There’s a special sleight of hand that’s peculiar to policemen: the conjuring trick that palms and conceals banknotes with a skill that experienced shell-game swindlers envy. The big man collected the money with a two-handed handshake, smeared a palm across his chest as if brushing away crumbs after eating a sandwich, and then scratched at his nose with practised innocence. The money had vanished. He pointed along the narrow corridor. We were free to enter.

  Two sharp turns and a dozen paces beyond the gate and its shaft of bright light, we came upon a kind of courtyard. Several men sat on rough wooden benches, or stood in talking groups of two or three. Some were Arabs, dressed in loose, cotton robes and kaffiyehs. An Indian boy moved among them, serving black tea in long glasses. Some of the men looked at Prabaker and me with frowning curiosity. When Prabaker smiled widely and waved a greeting they turned away, concentrating their attention once more on their conversation. Occasionally, one or another of them looked up to inspect a group of children who sat together on a long wooden bench beneath a ragged canvas awning.

  It was darker there, after the bright light of the entrance chamber. A patchwork of canvas scraps provided an uneven cover that screened out most of the sky. Blank brown and magenta walls rose up all around us. The few windows I could see, through tears in the canvas coverings, were boarded over. Not a real courtyard, the roughly square space seemed unplanned, a kind of mistake, an almost forgotten architectural accident formed by building and rebuilding on the ruins of other structures within the congested block. The ground was paved with haphazard collections of tiles that had once been the floors of kitchens and bathrooms. Two naked bulbs, strange fruit on the withered vines of bare wires, provided the poor light.

  We moved to a quiet corner, accepted tea when it was offered, and sipped it in silence for a while. Then, speaking quietly and slowly, Prabaker told me about the place he called the people-market. The children sitting beneath the tattered canopy were slaves. They’d come from the cyclone in West Bengal, the drought in Orissa, the cholera epidemic in Haryana, the secessionist fighting in Punjab. Sourced in calamity, recruited and purchased by scouts, the children had journeyed to Bombay by train, often alone, through all the many hundreds of kilometres.

  The men gathered in the courtyard were purchasers or agents. Although they seemed to express no great interest, talking amongst themselves and for the most part ignoring the children on the wooden bench, Prabaker assured me that a restrained haggling was taking place, and that bargains were being struck, even as we watched.

  The children were thin, vulnerable, and small. Two of them sat with their four hands bunched together in a beehive-ball. One child embraced another within the huddle of a protective arm. All of them stared out at the well-fed, well-clothed purchasers and agents, following every change of expression or emphatic gesture of their bejewelled hands. And the eyes of those children were like the black gleam at the bottom of a sweetwater well.

  What does it take to harden a man’s heart? How could I see that place, look at those children, and not put a stop to it? Why didn’t I contact the authorities? Why didn’t I get a gun, and put a stop to it myself? The answer to that, like the answers to all the big questions, came in many parts. I was a wanted man, a hunted criminal, living on the run. Contacting police or government authorit
ies wasn’t an option for me. I was a stranger in that strange land: it wasn’t my country, and it wasn’t my culture. I had to know more. I had to know the language that was spoken, at the very least, before I could presume to interfere. And I’d learned, the hard way, that sometimes, even with the purest intentions, we make things worse when we do our best to make things better. If I came back with a gun and stopped the slave market there, in that crooked concrete maze, it would start up again somewhere else. Stranger that I was, I knew that much. And maybe the new slave market, in a different place, would be worse. I was helpless to stop it, and I knew it.

  What I didn’t know then, and what troubled me for a long time after that Day of the Slaves, was how I could be there, and look at the children, and not be crushed by it. I realised, much later, that a part of the answer lay in the Australian prison, and the men I’d met there. Some of those men, too many of them, were serving their fourth or fifth prison sentences. Many of them had begun their imprisonment in reform schools—Boys’ Homes, they were called, and Youth Training Centres—when they were no older than those Indian slave children. Some of them had been beaten, starved, and locked in solitary confinement. Some of them, too many of them, had been sexually abused. Ask any man with a long-enough experience of prisons, and he’ll tell you that all it takes to harden a man’s heart is a system of justice.

  And strange and shameful as it is to admit it, I was glad that something, someone, some experience had flinted my heart. That hard stone within my chest was all that protected me from those first sounds and images of Prabaker’s dark tour of the city.