Shantaram

by Gregory David Roberts

  Ten more minutes of discussion with the watchmen and the other guards resolved that it was impossible for us to bail out the handlers or their bear. There was nothing to be done. We returned to the metal gate and informed the bear-handlers that we were unable to help them. They broke into another animated dialogue with Prabaker.

  ‘They know all that we cannot be helping,’ Prabaker clarified for me, after a few minutes. ‘What they want is to be in that lock-up cell with Kano. They are worried for Kano because he is lonely. Since a baby, he has never been sleeping alone, even one night. For that only, they are a big worried. They say that Kano, he will be frightened. He will have a bad sleep, and have too many bad dreams. He will be crying, for his loneliness. And he will be ashamed, to be in the jail, because he is normally a very fine citizen, that bear. They want only to go down to that lock-up cell with Kano, and keep him some good companies.’

  One of the bear-handlers stared into my eyes when Prabaker finished his explanation. The man was distraught. His face was creased with worry. Anguish drew his lips back into something that resembled a snarl. He repeated one phrase again and again, hoping that with repetition and the force of his emotion he might make me understand. Suddenly, Prabaker burst into tears once more, sobbing like a child as he grasped the metal bars of the gate.

  ‘What’s he saying, Prabu?’

  ‘He says a man must love his bear, Lin,’ Prabaker translated for me. ‘He says like that. A man must love his bear.’

  Negotiations with the watchmen and the other guards were spirited once we presented them with a request that they could grant without bending the rules to their breaking point. Prabaker thrived in the theatrically energetic barter, protesting and pleading with equal vigour. At last he arrived at an agreed sum—two hundred rupees, about twelve American dollars—and the moustachioed watchman unlocked the gate for the bear-handlers while I handed over the bundle of notes. In a strange procession of people and purposes, we filed down the steel stairs, and the ground-floor watchman unlocked the cell that housed Kano. At the sound of their voices, the great bear rose from his seated position, and then fell forward on all fours, dragged downward by the chains. The bear swayed its head from side to side in a joyful dance, and pawed at the ground. When the bear-handlers rushed to greet him, Kano drove his snout into their armpits, and nuzzled in their long, dread-locked hair, snuffling and sniffing at their scent. For their part, the blue men smothered him in affectionate caresses, and sought to ease the stress of the heavy chains. We left them in the enclosure of that embrace. When the steel cell door slammed shut on Kano and his handlers the sound rattled through the empty parade ground, gouging echoes from the stone. I felt that sound as a shiver in my spine as Prabaker and I walked out of the police compound.

  ‘It is a very fine thing that you have done tonight, Linbaba,’ Prabaker gushed. ‘A man must love his bear. That is what they said, those bear-handling fellows, and you have made it come true. It is a very, very, very fine thing that you have done.’

  We woke a sleeping cab driver outside the police station, on Colaba Causeway. Prabaker joined me in the back seat, enjoying the chance to play tourist in one of the cabs he frequently drove. As the taxi pulled out from the kerb, I turned to see that he was staring at me. I looked away. A moment later, I turned my head and found that he was still staring. I frowned at him, and he wagged his head. He smiled his world-embracing smile for me, and placed his hand over his heart.

  ‘What?’ I asked irritably, although his smile was irresistible, and he knew it, and I was already smiling with him in my heart.

  ‘A man …’ he began, intoning the words with sacramental solemnity.

  ‘Not again, Prabu.’

  ‘… must love his bear,’ he concluded, patting at his chest and wagging his head frantically.

  ‘Oh, God help me,’ I moaned, turning again to look at the awkward stir and stretch of the waking street.

  At the entrance to the slum, Prabaker and I separated as he made his way to Kumar’s chai shop for an early breakfast. He was excited. Our adventure with Kano the bear had given him a fascinating new story—with himself cast in an important role—to share with Parvati, one of Kumar’s two pretty daughters. He hadn’t said anything to me about Parvati, but I’d seen him talking to her, and I guessed that he was falling in love. In Prabaker’s way of courtship, a young man didn’t bring flowers or chocolates to the woman he loved: he brought her stories from the wider world, where men grappled with demons of desire, and monstrous injustice. He brought her gossip and scandals and intimate secrets. He brought her the truth of his brave heart, and the mischievous, awe-struck wonder that was the wellspring of his laughter, and of that sky-wide smile. And as I watched him scurry toward the chai shop, I saw that already his head was wagging and his hands were waving as he rehearsed the story that he brought to her as the new day’s gift.

  I walked on into the grey pre-morning as the slum murmured itself awake. Smoke swirling from a hundred small fires roved the lanes. Figures wrapped in coloured shawls emerged, and vanished in the misty streams. The smells of rotis cooking on kerosene stoves, and chai boiling in fragrant pots joined the people-smells of coconut hair oil, sandalwood soap, and camphor-soaked clothing. Sleepy faces greeted me at every turn in the winding lanes, smiling and offering the blessings of the morning in six languages and as many different faiths. I entered my hut and looked with new fondness at the humble, comfortable shabbiness of it. It was good to be home.

  I cleaned up the mess in my hut and then joined the morning procession of men who filed out onto the concrete pier that we used as a latrine. When I returned, I discovered that my neighbours had prepared two full buckets of hot water for my bath. I rarely bothered with the laborious and time-consuming procedure of heating several pots of water on the kerosene stove, preferring the lazier, if less luxurious, option of a cold-water bath. Knowing that, my neighbours sometimes provided it for me. It was no small service. Water, the most precious commodity in any slum, had to be carried from the communal well in the legal compound, some three hundred metres away beyond the barbed wire. Because the well was only open twice a day, there were hundreds of people in the shove and wrestle for water, and each bucket was dragged into the light with bluff and scratch and shout. Carried back and hoisted through the wire, the water had to be boiled in saucepans on small kerosene stoves, at some cost of the relatively expensive fuel. Yet when they did that for me, none of my neighbours ever took credit for it or expected thanks. The water I used might’ve been boiled and brought there by Ameer’s family as a sign of appreciation for the treatment I’d given him. It might’ve come from my nearest neighbour, or it might’ve been provided by one of the half dozen people who stood around and watched me bathe. I would never know. It was one of the small, uncelebrated things people did for me every week.

  In a sense, the ghetto existed on a foundation of those anonymous, unthankable deeds; insignificant and almost trivial in themselves, but collectively essential to the survival of the slum. We soothed our neighbours’ children as if they were our own when they cried. We tightened a loose rope on someone else’s hut when we noticed it sagging, and adjusted the lay of a plastic roof as we passed by. We helped one another, without being asked, as if we were all members of one huge tribe, or family, and the thousand huts were simply rooms in our mansion home.

  At his invitation, I breakfasted with Qasim Ali Hussein. We drank sweet tea spiced with clove, and ate waffle-style rotis filled with ghee and sugar, and rolled into tubes. Ranjit’s lepers had delivered a new batch of medicines and bandages on the previous day. Because I was away all afternoon, they’d left the bundles with Qasim Ali. We sorted through them together. Qasim Ali couldn’t read or write English, and he insisted that I explain the contents and uses of the various capsules, tablets, and salves that I’d ordered. One of his sons, Ayub, sat with us, and wrote the name and description of each medicine in the Urdu script on tiny fragments of paper, and patiently attached a lab
el to every container or tube of cream with adhesive tape. I didn’t know it then, but Qasim Ali had chosen Ayub to be my assistant, to learn everything possible about medicines and their uses, so that he could replace me when the time came—as the head man was sure that it would—for me to leave the slum.

  It was eleven o’clock when I finally found time to stop at Karla’s small house near the Colaba Market. There was no answer to my knocking. Her neighbours told me she’d gone out an hour earlier. They had no idea when she would return. I was annoyed. I’d left my boots and jeans inside, and I was anxious to retrieve them, to get out of those loose but uncomfortable clothes, those clothes that were hers. I hadn’t exaggerated when I’d told her that the jeans, T-shirt, and boots were my only clothes. In my hut there were only two lungis, which I wore for sleeping, bathing, or for when I washed my jeans. I could’ve bought new clothes—a T-shirt, jeans, and track shoes would’ve cost me no more than four or five American dollars in the clothing bazaar at Fashion Street—but I wanted my own clothes, the clothes I felt right in. I left a grumble of words for her in a note, and set off to keep my appointment with Khaderbhai.

  The great house on Mohammed Ali Road seemed to be empty when I arrived. The six panels of the street door were folded back, and the spacious marble entrance hall was exposed. Thousands of people walked past every hour, but the house was well known and no-one on the street seemed to pay any attention to me as I entered, knocking on the green panels to announce my arrival. After a few moments, Nazeer came to greet me, his frown vaguely hostile. He directed me to swap my street shoes for a pair of house slippers, and then led me along a tall, narrow corridor in the opposite direction to that of the room I’d visited the night before. We passed a number of closed rooms as the corridor wound through two right turns, and eventually came out upon an inner courtyard.

  The very large, oval space was open to the sky in the centre as if a great hole had been cut in the thick plasterwork of the ceiling. It was paved with heavy, square Maharashtrian stone, and surrounded by pillared arches that gave a cloister effect. There were many plants and flowering shrubs in the wide circle of the interior garden, and five tall, slender palms. The fountain that I’d heard from the meeting room, where we’d talked about suffering, was the centrepiece. It was a circle of marble about a metre in height and four metres in diameter with a single huge, uncut boulder in the centre. Water seemed to spout from the very core of the enormous stone. At its peak, the small fountain curved into a lily-shaped plume before splashing gently onto the smooth, rounded surfaces of the boulder and flowing with rhythmic, musical flourishes into the pond of the fountain. Khaderbhai was sitting in a cane emperor chair, to one side of the fountain. He was reading a book, which he closed and placed on a glass-topped table when I arrived.

  ‘Salaam aleikum, Mr. Lin,’ he smiled. Peace be with you.

  ‘Wa aleikum salaam. Aap kaise hain?’ And with you be peace. How are you, sir?

  ‘I am well, thank you. Mad dogs and Englishmen may very well be out and about in the midday sun, but I prefer to sit here, in the shade of my humble garden.’

  ‘Not so humble, Khaderbhai,’ I remarked.

  ‘Do you think it altogether too grand?’

  ‘No, no. I didn’t mean that,’ I said hurriedly, because that’s precisely what I’d been thinking. I couldn’t help but recall that he owned the slum where I lived; the dusty, barren slum of twenty-five thousand people, where nothing green existed after eight rainless months, and the only water was rationed from wells that were padlocked shut, most of the time. ‘This is the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen in Bombay. I couldn’t have imagined this from the street outside.’

  He stared at me, for a few moments as if measuring the exact width and depth of the lie, and then waved me to a small, backless stool that was the only other chair in the courtyard.

  ‘Please sit down, Mr. Lin. Have you eaten?’

  ‘Yes, thank you. I had a late breakfast.’

  ‘Allow me to serve you tea, at least. Nazeer! Idhar-ao!’ he shouted, his voice startling a pair of doves that had been pecking for crumbs at his feet. The birds flew up and flapped around Nazeer’s chest as he entered. They seemed to be unafraid of him, even to recognise him, and they settled on the flagstones once more, following him like tame puppies.

  ‘Chai bono, Nazeer,’ Khaderbhai commanded. His tone with the driver was imperious, but not severe, and I guessed that it was the only tone Nazeer felt comfortable with and respected. The burly Afghan withdrew silently, the birds hop-running behind him into the very house.

  ‘Khaderbhai, there’s something I want to say before we … talk about anything else,’ I began quietly. My next words drew his head up swiftly, and I knew that I had his full attention. ‘It’s about Sapna.’

  ‘Yes, go on,’ he murmured.

  ‘Well, I thought about it a lot last night, what we were talking about, and what you asked me to do at the meeting, to sort of help you and so on, and I’ve got a problem with it.’

  He smiled, and raised one eyebrow quizzically, but he said nothing more, and I was forced to explain myself further.

  ‘I know I’m not saying this very well, but I just don’t feel right about it. No matter what this guy did, I don’t want to be put in a position of being … well, a kind of cop. I wouldn’t feel right about working with them, even indirectly. In my country, the phrase helping the police with their enquiries is a euphemism for informing on someone. I’m sorry. I understand that this guy killed people. If you want to go after him, that’s your business, and I’m happy to help you out in any way I can. But I don’t want to be involved with the cops, or to help them do it. If you’re working outside the law, on your own—if you want to go after him, and put him out of action personally, for whatever reason of your own—then I’ll be glad to help. You can count me in, if you want to fight his gang, whoever they are.’

  ‘Is there anything more?’

  ‘No. That’s … that’s … pretty much it.’

  ‘Very well, Mr. Lin,’ he replied. His face was impassive as he studied me, but there was a puzzling laughter in his eyes. ‘I may put your mind at rest, I think, in assuring you that while I do assist a large number of policemen financially, so to say, I do not ever work with them. I can tell you, however, that the matter of Sapna is a deeply personal one, and I would ask that if you should wish to confide anything at all about this terrible fellow, you will speak of it only to me. You will not speak to any of the gentlemen you met here, last night, about this Sapna or … or to anyone else. Is that agreed?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, that’s agreed.’

  ‘Was there anything else?’

  ‘Well, no.’

  ‘Excellent. Then, to business: I have very little time today, Mr. Lin, so I will come directly to the point of the matter. The favour that I mentioned yesterday—I want you to teach one small boy, named Tariq, the English language. Not everything, of course, but enough that his English will be considerably improved, and that he will have some little advantage when he begins his formal studies.’

  ‘Well, I’ll be happy to try,’ I stammered, bewildered by the request, but not daunted by it. I felt competent to teach the fundamentals of the language that I wrote in every day of my life. ‘I don’t know how good I’ll be at it. I think there must be a lot of people who’d be better than I would, but I’m happy to take a shot at it. Where do you want me to do it? Would I come here to teach him?’

  He looked at me with benign, almost affectionate condescension.

  ‘Why, he will stay with you, naturally. I want you to have him with you, constantly, for the next ten or twelve weeks. He will live with you, eat with you, sleep at your house, go where you go. I do not simply want that he learns the English phrases. I want that he learns the English way. Your way. I want that he learns this, with your constant company.’

  ‘But … but I’m not English,’ I objected stupidly.

  ‘This is no matter. You are English enough, don�
�t you think? You are a foreigner, and you will teach him the ways of a foreigner. It is my desire.’

  My mind was hot, my thoughts scattered and flapping like the birds that he’d startled with his voice. There had to be a way out. It was impossible.

  ‘But I live at the zhopadpatti. You know that. It’s very rough. My hut is really small, and there’s nothing in it. He’ll be uncomfortable. And it’s … it’s dirty and crowded and … where would he sleep and all that?’

  ‘I am aware of your situation, Mr. Lin,’ he replied, a little sharply. ‘It is precisely this, your life in the zhopadpatti, that I want him to know. Tell me your honest opinion, do you think that there are lessons to be learned in the slum? Do you think he will benefit from spending some time with the city’s poorest people?’

  I did think that, of course. It seemed to me that every child, beginning with the sons and daughters of the rich, would benefit from the experience of slum life.

  ‘Yes, I suppose I do. I do think it’s important to see how people live there. But you have to understand, it’s a huge responsibility for me. I’m not doing a spectacular job of looking after myself. I don’t know how I could look after a kid.’

  Nazeer arrived with the tea and a prepared chillum.

  ‘Ah, here is our tea. We shall first smoke, yes?’

  We first smoked. Nazeer squatted on his haunches to smoke with us. As Khaderbhai puffed on the clay funnel, Nazeer gave me a complex series of nods, frowns, and winks that seemed to say, Look, see how the master smokes, see what a great lord he is, see how much he is, that you and I will never be, see how lucky we are to be here with him.

  Nazeer was a head shorter than I was, but I guessed that he was at least several kilos heavier. His neck was so thick that it seemed to draw his powerful shoulders up towards his ears. The bulky arms that stretched the seams of his loose shirt appeared to be only slightly more slender than his thighs. His broad, permanently scowling face was composed of three downward curves, something like the insignia of sergeant’s stripes. The first of them consisted of his eyebrows, which began a little above and in the centre of his eyes, and descended with bristling unruliness along the slope of his frown to the level of the eyes themselves. The second curve began in the deep grooves at the wings of his nose, and divided his face all the way to the jaw. The third was drawn by the desperate, pugnacious unhappiness of his mouth, the upside-down horseshoe of bad luck that fate had nailed to the doorpost of his life.