Shantaram

by Gregory David Roberts

  ‘Well, that makes two of us, yaar. You and me both, brother,’ Vikram put in. He finished his beer, and lit one of the long, thin, cheroots that he smoked as much for the complement they made to his costume as for the enjoyment of the smoke.

  ‘You have been going out with Letitia for three months now,’ Didier observed. His frown was irritated and profoundly unsympathetic. ‘What is your problem?’

  ‘You tell me! I’m going out with her all over the place, and I still can’t get to first base. I’m not even in the ballpark. Fuck the ballpark, yaar—I’m not even in the fuckin’ zip code. This chick is killin’ me. This love is killin’ me. She’s playing hard to get. And brother, I’m hard but not getting any. I swear, I’m about to fuckin’ explode!’

  ‘You know, Vikram,’ Didier said, his eyes shining once more with shrewdness and good humour, ‘I have a strategy that just might work for you.’

  ‘Didier, man, I’ll try anything. The way things are, with this Indira thing and all, I gotta grab any chance while I can. Who knows where we’ll all be tomorrow, na?’

  ‘Yes, well, attention! This plan, it involves great daring, and careful planning, and a precise timing. If you are careless, it might cost you your life.’

  ‘My … my life?’

  ‘Yes. Make no mistake. But if you succeed, I think you will win her heart forever. Are you, how do they say it, are you game, to try it?’

  ‘I’m the game-iest motherfucker in the whole damn saloon, yaar. Let’s hear it!’

  ‘I might take this as my cue to leave, before you guys get too deep into this,’ I interrupted, standing and shaking hands with both men. ‘Thanks for the tip, Didier. I appreciate it. And a tip for you, Vikram—whatever you plan to try with Lettie, you can start by losing the phrase hot-titty English chick. Every time you call her that, she winces like you just strangled a baby rabbit.’

  ‘You really think so?’ he asked, frowning his puzzlement.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But it’s one of my best lines, yaar. In Denmark—’

  ‘You’re not in Denmark any more, Toto.’

  ‘Okay Lin,’ he conceded, laughing. ‘Listen, when you find out what went down with the jail thing … I mean, who the motherfucker was who put you in there, and all … well, if you need a hand, count me in. Okay?’

  ‘Sure,’ I said, enjoying the good eye contact. ‘Take it easy.’

  I paid the bill and left, walking along the Causeway to Regal Cinema roundabout. It was early evening, one of the three best times of day in Bombay city. Early morning before the heat, and late night after the heat are special times of day, with special pleasures; but they’re quiet times, with few people. Evening brings the people to their windows, balconies, and doorways. Evening fills the streets with strolling crowds. Evening is an indigo tent for the circus of the city, and families bring children to the entertainments that inspire every corner and crossroad. And evening is a chaperone for young lovers: the last hour of light before the night comes to steal the innocence from their slow promenades. There’s no time, in the day or night, when there are more people on the streets of Bombay than there are in the evening, and no light loves the human face quite so much as the evening light in my Mumbai.

  I walked through the evening crowds, loving the faces, loving the perfumes of skin and hair, loving the colours of clothes and the cadences of words that surrounded me. Yet I was alone, too much alone with my love of evening in the city. And all the while a black shark slowly circled in the sea of my thoughts: a black shark of doubt and anger and suspicion. A woman betrayed me. A woman. A young and very beautiful woman…

  The persistent blaring of a car horn drew my attention, and I saw Prabaker waving to me from his taxi. I got into the cab and asked him to drive me to my evening meeting with Khaled, near Chowpatty Beach. One of the first things I’d done with the first real money I’d made in Khaderbhai’s service was pay for Prabaker’s taxi licence. The cost of the licence had always been prohibitive for Prabaker, and it had eluded his sub-miniature talent for thrift. He drove occasional shifts in his cousin Shantu’s taxi without the required licence, but ran considerable risks in doing it. With his own licence, he was free to approach any of the taxi lords who owned fleets of cabs and hired them out to licensed taxi drivers.

  Prabaker was a hard worker and an honest man; but, more than that, he was the most likable man that most of those who knew him ever met. Even the hard-nosed taxi lords weren’t immune to his sanguine charm. Within a month he had a semi-permanent lease on a taxi, which he cared for as if it was his own. On the dashboard he’d installed a plastic shrine to Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth. The gold, pink, and green plastic figure of the goddess blazed an alarmingly fierce expression through the bulbs in her red eyes whenever he hit the brakes of the car. From time to time he reached over, with a showman’s flourish, to squeeze a rubber tube at the base of the figure. That action sprayed, through what appeared to be a valve in the navel of the goddess, a potent and disquietingly industrial mix of chemical perfumes onto the shirt and trousers of his passenger. Every squeeze of the spray was followed by a reflexive, polishing rub of his brass taxi driver’s identification badge, which he wore with swaggering pride. Only one thing, in the whole city, rivalled the affection he felt for the black-and-yellow Fiat taxi.

  ‘Parvati. Parvati. Parvati …’ he said, as we sped past Churchgate Station towards Marine Drive. He was drunk on the music of her name. ‘I love her too much, Lin! Is love, yes, when a terrible feeling makes you happy? When you worry about a girl, more even than you worry about your taxi? That’s a love, isn’t it? A great love, isn’t it? My God! Parvati. Parvati. Parvati …’

  ‘It’s love, Prabu.’

  ‘And Johnny has it too much love for Sita, my Parvati her sister. Too much love.’

  ‘I’m happy for you. And for Johnny. He’s a good man. You’re both good men.’

  ‘Oh, yes!’ Prabaker agreed, slapping his hand on the horn a few times for emphasis. ‘We are fine fellows! And tonight we are going out for a triple dates, with the sisters. It will be too much fun.’

  ‘There’s another sister?’

  ‘Another?’

  ‘Yeah—you said a triple date. Are there three sisters? I thought there were only two.’

  ‘Yes, Lin, absolutely only two sisters.’

  ‘Well, don’t you mean a double date?’

  ‘No, Lin. Parvati and Sita, they always bring their mummy, the wife of Kumar, Mrs. Patak. The girls, they are sitting on one side only, and Mrs. Nandita Patak, she is sitting in middle, and Johnny Cigar is with me, sitting on the other side. It is a triple date.’

  ‘It sounds … like … a lotta fun.’

  ‘Yes, fun! Of course fun! So much of fun! And when we offer it some foods and some drinks to Mrs. Patak, we can look at the girls, and they can look at us also. This is our system. This is how we smile at the girls and give them big winks with our eyes. We are having such good luck that Mrs. Patak, she has a happy appetites, and she will eat, without stopping, for three hours in a movie. So there is a very constant passing of foods, and plenty of looking at the girls. And Mrs. Patak—thanks to the God, it is impossible to fill up that woman in one movie only.’

  ‘Hey, slow down … that looks like a … a riot.’

  A mob of people, hundreds, thousands, streamed around a corner and onto wide Marine Drive, some three hundred metres in front of us. They advanced toward us across the whole width of the street.

  ‘Not a riots, Linbaba,’ Prabaker replied, slowing the cab to a stop. ‘Riot nahin, morcha hain.’ It’s not a riot, it’s a demonstration.

  It was clear that the people were passionately angry. The men and the women shook their fists in time with their furious chanting. Their anguished faces stiffened on necks and shoulders made rigid with their rage. They chanted about Indira Gandhi, and about revenge, and about the punishments they wanted to visit upon the Sikhs. I tensed as they neared us, but the human torrent parted for the cab
, and then swept around and beyond us without so much as the scrape of a sleeve against the side of the car. Nevertheless, the eyes that looked in upon us were hate-stricken and cruel. I knew that if I were a Sikh, if I’d been wearing a Sikh turban or Sardarji scarf, the door would’ve been wrenched open.

  As the crowd passed us and the road ahead became clear, I turned to see that Prabaker was wiping tears from his eyes. He fumbled in his pocket for a handkerchief, dragging a huge, red-checked sheet out at last, and dabbing at his eyes with it.

  ‘It is a too much very sad situations, Linbaba,’ he sniffed. ‘That is the end of She. What is to become of our India now, without She? I am asking myself, and not having much of answers.’

  She was one of the most common names for Indira: journalists, peasants, politicians, and black marketers all referred to her as She.

  ‘Yeah. It’s a mess, Prabu.’

  He seemed so distraught that I sat with him in silence, for a while, staring out my window toward the darkening sea. When I turned to look at him once more, I saw that he was praying, with his head bowed forward and his hands pressed together at the base of the steering wheel. I watched his lips twitch and ripple in the whispered prayer, and then he opened his hands, turned his head, and smiled at me. His eyebrows rose and fell twice as he held the huge smile.

  ‘So, Lin, how is about some sexy perfumes, on your good self?’ he asked, reaching across to press the bulb beneath the plastic Lakshmi goddess on the dashboard of his cab.

  ‘No!’ I shrieked, trying to stop him.

  Too late. He crushed the bulb, and a swirling belch of the noxious chemical mixture spurted from the belly of the goddess and settled on my trousers and my shirt.

  ‘Now,’ he grinned, starting the engine and pulling out onto Marine Drive again, ‘we are ready for the life again! We are the lucky fellows, isn’t it?’

  ‘Sure it is,’ I grumbled, gasping for a clean breath of air at the open window. A few minutes later we neared the car park, where I’d arranged to meet Khaled. ‘You can let me out just here, Prabu. This is my stop, near that big tree.’

  He parked beside a tall date palm, and I climbed out. We fought over payment for the cab ride. Prabaker refused the money, and I insisted that he take it. I suggested a compromise. He should take the money, and use it to buy some new perfume for his plastic goddess.

  ‘Oh, yes, Linbaba!’ he cried, accepting the money at last. ‘What a good ideas you’re having! I was just thinking that I have almost finished my perfumes bottle, and it is so much expensive that I didn’t want to buy it another gallon any more. Now I can buy a big bottle, a new big bottle, and for weeks I can fill up my Lakshmi like new! Thank you, too much!’

  ‘Don’t mention it,’ I answered him, laughing in spite of myself. ‘Good luck on your triple date.’

  He swung the car away from the kerb and out into the stream of traffic. I heard the car horn blaring a musical good-bye until he was out of sight.

  Khaled Ansari was waiting for me in our chartered cab, fifty metres away. He sat in the back, with both doors opened for the breeze. I wasn’t late, and he couldn’t have been waiting more than fifteen or twenty minutes, but still there were ten cigarette butts on the ground beside the open door of the cab. Each one of them, I knew, was an enemy crushed under his heel, a violent wish, a brutal fantasy of the suffering he would one day inflict on those he hated.

  And they were many, the ones he hated. Too many. The images of violence that filled his mind were so real, he’d told me, that sometimes he was nauseous with it. The anger was an ache in his bones. The hatred locked his jaws, and made him grind his teeth on the fury. The taste of it was bitter, always, all day and night, every waking minute, as bitter as the taste of the blackened knife he’d clamped between his teeth, as a Fattah guerrilla, when he’d crawled across broken ground toward his first kill.

  ‘It’s gonna kill you, Khaled, you know.’

  ‘So I smoke too much. So what the fuck. Who wants to live forever?’

  ‘I’m not talking about the cigarettes. I’m talking about what’s inside you, making you chain-smoke them. I’m talking about what you’re doing to yourself by hating the world. Someone told me once that if you make your heart into a weapon, you always end up using it on yourself.’

  ‘You’re a fine one to come on with a lecture, brother,’ he said, and he laughed. The small laugh. The sad laugh. ‘You’re not exactly Father Fucking Christmas, Lin.’

  ‘You know, Khader told me … about Shatila.’

  ‘What did he tell you?’

  ‘That … you lost your family there. It must’ve been incredibly hard for you.’

  ‘What do you know about it?’ he demanded.

  It wasn’t an offensive question, and it wasn’t asked in an aggressive way, but there was too much hurt in it, too much of his pain for me to let it go.

  ‘I know about Sabra and Shatila, Khaled. I’ve been into politics all my life. I was on the run, at the time, when it happened, but I followed the news every day, for months. It was … it was a heartbreaking story.’

  ‘I was in love with a Jewish girl once, you know?’ Khaled asked. I didn’t reply. ‘She was … she was a beautiful girl, and smart, and maybe, I don’t know, maybe the nicest human being I’m ever gonna meet. That was in New York. We were students together. Her parents, they were reform Jews—they supported Israel, but they were against the occupation of the territories. I was with that girl, making love to her, on the night my father died in an Israeli prison.’

  ‘You can’t blame yourself for being in love, Khaled. And you can’t blame yourself for what other people did to your father.’

  ‘Oh, sure I can,’ he said, offering me that small, sad smile. ‘Anyway, I went back home, and I was just in time for the October War—the one the Israelis call the Yom Kippur War. We got smashed. I made it to Tunis, and got some training. I started fighting, and I kept on fighting, all the way to Beirut. When the Israelis invaded, we made a stand at Shatila. My whole family was there, and a lot of my neighbours from the old days. All of them, all of us, we were all refugees, with nowhere else to go.’

  ‘Were you evacuated, with the other fighters?’

  ‘Yeah. They couldn’t beat us, so they worked out a truce. We left the camps—with our weapons, you know, to show that we weren’t defeated. We marched, like soldiers, and there was a lot of firing in the air. Some people got killed just watching us. It was weird, like a parade or some kind of bizarre celebration, you know? And then, when we were gone, they broke all their promises, and they sent the Phalange into the camps, and they killed all the old men, and the women, and the children. And they all died. All my family. All the ones I left behind. I don’t even know where their bodies are. They hid them, because they knew it was a war crime. And you think … you think I should let it go, Lin?’

  We were facing the sea, looking down on a section of Chowpatty Beach from a car park on the steep rise above Marine Drive. Beneath us the first wave of families, and couples, and young men out for the night tried their luck at throwing darts or shooting balloons pinned to a target. The ice cream and sherbet-drink vendors called out from their flamboyantly decorated bowers like birds of paradise singing for mates.

  The hatred that had coiled around Khaled’s heart was the only thing we ever argued about. I’d been raised among Jewish friends. Melbourne, the city where I grew up, had a large Jewish community, many of them Holocaust survivors and their children. My mother had been prominent in Fabian socialist circles, and she’d attracted left-leaning intellectuals from the Greek, Chinese, German, and Jewish communities. Many of my friends had attended a Jewish school, Mt. Scopus College. I grew up with those kids, reading the same books, enjoying the same movies and music, marching together in support of the same causes. Some of those friends were among the few who’d stood by me when my life imploded in agony and shame. It was a Jewish friend, in fact, who’d helped me to escape from Australia after I broke out of prison. I respected, ad
mired, and loved all of those friends. And Khaled hated every Israeli, and every Jew in the world.

  ‘It would be like me hating all Indians, just because some Indians tortured me in an Indian prison.’ I said softly.

  ‘It’s not the same.’

  ‘I’m not saying it’s the same. I’m trying to … look, when they had me chained to the wall there, at Arthur Road, and they went to work on me, it went on for hours. After a while, all I could smell and taste was my own blood. All I could hear was the lathis ripping into me.’

  ‘I know, Lin—’

  ‘No, let me finish. There was a minute, right in the middle of it, that was … so weird … it was like I was floating, outside myself, looking down at my own body, and at them, and watching everything that was going on. And … I got this weird feeling … this really strange kind of understanding … of everything that was happening. I knew who they were, and what they were, and why they were doing it. I knew it all really clearly, and then I knew that I had two choices—to hate them or to forgive them. And … I don’t know why, or how, but it was absolutely clear to me that I had to forgive them. I had to, if I wanted to survive. I know it sounds crazy—’

  ‘It doesn’t sound crazy’ he said flatly, almost regretfully.

  ‘It still seems crazy to me. I haven’t really … figured it out, yet. But that’s exactly what happened. And I did forgive them. I really did. And I’m sure, somehow, that that’s what got me through it. I don’t mean that I stopped being angry—shit, if I’d gotten free and gotten a gun, I probably would’ve killed them all. Or maybe not. I don’t know. But the point is, I did forgive them, right there and then, in the middle of it. And I’m sure that if I didn’t do that—if I’d just hated them—I wouldn’t have made it through till Khader got me out. I would’ve gone under. The hate would’ve killed me.’