Shantaram

by Gregory David Roberts

  I held Karla as if holding her could heal me, and we didn’t make love until night lit the last star in our wide window of sky. Her hands were kisses on my skin. My lips unrolled the curled leaf of her heart. She breathed in murmurs, guiding me, and I spoke rhythm to her, echoing my needs. Heat joined us, and we enclosed ourselves with touch and taste and perfumed sounds. Reflected on the glass, we were silhouettes, transparent images—mine full of fire from the beach, and hers full of stars. And at last, at the end, those clear reflections of our selves melted, merged, and fused together.

  It was good, so good, but she never said she loved me.

  ‘I love you,’ I whispered, the words moving from my lips to hers.

  ‘I know you do,’ she replied, rewarding me and pitying me. ‘I know you do.’

  ‘I don’t have to go on this trip, you know.’

  ‘Why are you going?’

  ‘I’m not sure. I feel … a sense of loyalty to him, to Khaderbhai, and I still owe him, in a way. But it’s more than that. It’s … have you ever had the feeling—about anything at all—that your whole life is kind of a prelude, or something—like everything you’ve ever done has been leading you up to this one point, and you knew, somehow, that one day you’d get there? I’m not explaining it well, but —’

  ‘I know what you mean,’ she interrupted quickly. And yes, I have felt like that. I did something, once, that was my whole life—even the years I haven’t lived yet—in one second.’

  ‘What was it?’

  ‘We were talking about you,’ she corrected me, avoiding my eyes. ‘About you, not having to go to Afghanistan.’

  ‘Well,’ I smiled, ‘like I said, I don’t have to go.’

  ‘Then don’t,’ she said flatly, turning her head to look at the night and the sea.

  ‘Do you want me to stay?’

  ‘I want you to be safe. And … I want you to be free.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant.’

  ‘I know it’s not,’ she sighed.

  I felt the small stir of restlessness in her body against mine, that said she wanted to move. I didn’t move.

  ‘I’ll stay,’ I said quietly, fighting my heart, and knowing it was a mistake, ‘if you tell me you love me.’

  She closed her mouth, and pressed her lips together so tightly that they formed a white scar. Slowly, cell by cell, it seemed, her body drew back into itself all that she’d given to me a few moments before.

  ‘Why are you doing this?’ she asked.

  I didn’t know why. Maybe it was the cold turkey, what I’d been through in the last months, and the new life I felt I’d won. Maybe it was death—Prabaker’s death, and Abdullah’s, and the death I secretly feared was waiting for me in Afghanistan. Whatever the reason, it was stupid and pointless and even cruel, and I couldn’t stop wanting it.

  ‘If you say that you love me,’ I said again.

  ‘I don’t,’ she murmured, at last. I tried to stop her, with my fingertips on her mouth, but she turned her head to face me, and her voice was clearer and strong. ‘I don’t. I can’t. I won’t.’

  When Nazeer returned from the beach, coughing and clearing his voice loudly to announce his arrival, we were already showered and dressed. He smiled—such a rare thing, that smile—as he looked from me, to her, and back again. But the cold sorrow in our eyes drove the downward curves of his face into willow-wreaths of disappointment, and he looked away.

  We watched her leave in a taxi on that long and lonely night before we went to Khader’s war, and when Nazeer finally met my eyes he nodded, slowly and solemnly. I held the stare for a few moments, but then it was my turn to look away. I didn’t want to face the strange mix of grief and elation I’d seen in his eyes because I knew what it was telling me. Karla was gone, yes, but it was the whole world of love and beauty that we’d lost that night. As soldiers in Khader’s cause we had to leave it all behind. And the other world, the once unlimited world of what we might yet be, was shrinking, hour by hour, to a bullet’s blood-red full stop.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  NAZEER WOKE ME before dawn, and we left the house as the first yawning rays of light stretched into the fading night. When we climbed from our taxi at the airport we saw Khaderbhai and Khaled Ansari near the entrance to the domestic terminal, but we didn’t acknowledge them. Khader had laid out a complex itinerary that would take us, with four major changes of transport, from Bombay to Quetta, in Pakistan, near the Afghan border. His instructions were that we should appear at all times to be individual travellers, and that the travellers shouldn’t acknowledge one another in any way. We were setting out with him to commit a score of crimes across three international boundaries, and to interfere in a war between Afghanistan’s mujaheddin freedom fighters and the mighty Goliath of the Soviet Union. He was planning to succeed in his mission, but he was also allowing for failure. He was ensuring that if any of us were killed or captured at any stage, the trail of connections back to Bombay would be as cold as a mountain climber’s axe.

  It was a long journey, and it began as a silent one. Nazeer, scrupulous as ever in his conformity with Khaderbhai’s instructions, never uttered a single word on the first leg from Bombay to Karachi. An hour after we’d checked into our separate rooms in the Chandni Hotel, however, I heard a soft tap on the door. Before the door was halfway open he slipped inside and pressed it shut behind him. His eyes were wide with nervous excitement and his manner was agitated, almost frantic. I was unsettled and a little disgusted by the conspicuousness of his fear, and I reached out to put a hand on his shoulder.

  ‘Take it easy, Nazeer. You’re freaking me out, brother, with all this cloak-and-dagger shit.’

  He saw the condescension behind my smile, even if he didn’t understand the full meaning of the words. His jaw locked around some inscrutable resolve, and he frowned at me fiercely. We’d become friends, Nazeer and I. He’d opened his heart to me. But friendship, for him, was measured by what men do and endure for one another, not by what they share and enjoy. It puzzled and even tormented him that I almost always met his earnest gravity with facetiousness and triviality. The irony was that we were, in fact, similarly dour and serious men, but his grim severity was so stark that it roused me from my own solemnity, and provoked a childish, prankish desire to mock him.

  ‘Russian … everywhere,’ he said, speaking quietly, but with a hard, breathy intensity. ‘Russian … know everything … know every man … pay money for know everything.’

  ‘Russian spies?’ I asked. ‘In Karachi …’

  ‘Everywhere Pakistan,’ he nodded, turning his head aside to spit on the floor. I wasn’t sure if the gesture was in contempt or for luck. ‘Too much danger! Not speak anyone! You go … Faloodah House … Bohri bazaar … today … saade char baje.’

  ‘Half past four,’ I repeated. ‘You want me to meet someone at the Faloodah House, in the Bohri bazaar, at half past four? Is that it? Who do you want me to meet?’

  He allowed me a grim little smile and then opened the door. Glancing briefly along the corridor, he slipped out again as swiftly and silently as he’d entered. I looked at my watch. One o’clock. I had three hours to kill. For my passport-smuggling missions, Abdel Ghani had given me a money belt that was his uniquely original design. The belt was made from a tough, waterproof vinyl and was several times wider than the standard money belt. Worn flat against the stomach, the belt could hold up to ten passports and a quantity of cash. On that first day in Karachi it held four of my own books. The first of them was the British book that I’d used to purchase plane and train tickets, and register at the hotel. The second book was the clean American passport that Khaderbhai required me to use for the mission into Afghanistan. The two others, a Swiss book and a Canadian book, were spares for emergency use. There was also a ten thousand dollar contingency fund, paid in advance, as part of my fee for accepting the hazardous mission. I wrapped the thick belt around my waist, beneath my shirt, slipped my switchblade into the scabbard at the back
of my trousers, and left the hotel to explore the city.

  It was hot, hotter than usual for the mild month of November, and a light, unseasonable rain had left the streets hazy with a thickened, steamy air. Karachi was a tense and dangerous city then. For several years the military junta that had seized power in Pakistan and executed the democratically elected prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, had ruled the nation by dividing it. They’d exploited genuine grievances between ethnic and religious communities by inciting violent conflicts. They’d pitted the indigenous ethnic groups—particularly the Sindis, the Pashtuns, and the Punjabis—against the immigrants, known as Mohajirs, who’d streamed into the newly founded nation of Pakistan when it was partitioned from India. The army secretly supported extremists from the rival groups with weapons, money, and the judicious application of favours. When the riots that they’d provoked and fomented finally erupted, the generals ordered their police to open fire. Rage against the police violence was then contained by the deployment of army troops. In that way the army, whose covert operations had created the bloody conflicts, were seen to be the only force capable of preserving order and the rule of law.

  As massacres and revenge killings tumbled over one another with escalating brutishness, kidnappings and torture became routine events. Fanatics from one group seized supporters from another group, and inflicted sadistic torments on them. Many of those who were abducted died in that fearsome captivity. Some vanished, and their bodies were never found. And when one group or another became powerful enough to threaten the balance of the deadly game, the generals incited violent conflict within their group to weaken it. The fanatics then began to feed on themselves, killing and maiming rivals from their own ethnic communities.

  Each new cycle of violence and vengeance ensured, of course, that no matter what form of government emerged or dissolved in the nation, only the army would grow stronger, and only the army could exercise real power.

  Despite that dramatic tension—and because of it—Karachi was a good place to do business. The generals, who were like a mafia clan without the courage, style, or solidarity of genuine, self-respecting gangsters, had seized the country by force, held the entire nation hostage at the points of many guns, and looted the treasury. They lost no time in assuring the great powers, and the other arms-producing nations, that Pakistan’s armed forces were open for their business. The civilised nations responded with enthusiasm, and for years Karachi was host to junketing parties of arms-dealers from America, Britain, China, Sweden, Italy, and other countries. No less industrious in their pursuit of a deal with the camarilla of generals were the illegals—the black marketeers, gunrunners, freebooters, and mercenaries. They crowded into the cafés and hotels: foreigners from fifty countries who had crime in mind and adventure in their hearts.

  In a sense, I was one of them, a ravager like the rest of them, profiting from the war in Afghanistan like the rest of them, but I wasn’t comfortable in their company. For three hours I drifted from a restaurant to a hotel to a chai shop, sitting near or with groups of foreigners who were searching for a quick buck. Their conversations were dispiritingly calculating. The war in Afghanistan, most of them conjectured cheerily, had a few good years left in it. The generals were, it had to be admitted, under considerable pressure. There were rumours that Benazir, daughter of the executed prime minister, was planning to return to Pakistan from exile in London to lead the democratic alliance opposed to the junta. But with a little luck and skilful connivance, the profiteers hoped, the army might remain in control of the country—and the well-established channels of corruption—for some years yet.

  The talk was of cash crops, a euphemism for contraband and black-market trade goods, which were in great demand along the entire border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Cigarettes, particularly American blends, were selling at Khyber Pass for sixteen times their already inflated Karachi price. Medicines of every kind were generating profits that increased in scale from month to month. Winter clothing, suitable for snow habitats, was exceptionally marketable. One enterprising German freebooter had driven a Mercedes truck loaded with surplus German army alpine-issue uniforms, complete with thermal underwear, from Munich to Peshawar. He’d sold the lot, including the truck, for five times its purchase value. The buyer was an Afghan warlord who was favoured by western powers and agencies, including the American CIA. The heavy winter clothing, after a journey of thousands of kilometres through Germany, Austria, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan, never reached the fighting men of the mujaheddin in the snowdraped mountains of Afghanistan. Instead, the winter uniforms and underwear were stored in one of the warlord’s warehouses in Peshawar, awaiting the end of the war. The renegade and his small army were sitting out the war in the safety of their fortress compounds in Pakistan. His plan was to launch a strike for power with his own troops after the real fighting against the Russians was done, and the war was won.

  News of that new market—a warlord, cashed up with CIA money and hungry for supplies at any price—sent thrilling, speculative ripples through the community of foreign opportunists in Karachi. I encountered the story of the venturesome German and his truck full of alpine uniforms in three slightly different incarnations during the course of the afternoon. In a fever, something like gold fever, the foreigners passed the story among themselves as they pursued and closed down deals for shipments of canned foods, bales of brushed fleeces, shipping containers of engine parts, a warehouse full of second-hand spirit stoves, and stocks of every kind of weapon from bayonets to grenade launchers. And everywhere, in every conversation, I heard the dark, desperate incantation: If the war goes on for another year, we’ll have it made …

  Vexed and gloomy with squalling emotions I entered the Faloodah House in the Bohri bazaar, and ordered one of the sweet, technicoloured drinks. The faloodha was an indecently sweet concoction of white noodles, milk, rose flavours, and other melliferous syrups. The Firni House in Bombay’s Dongri area, near Khaderbhai’s house, was justly famous for its delicious faloodah drinks, but they were insipid when compared to the fabulous confections served at Karachi’s Faloodah House. When the tall glass of pink, red, and white sugary milk appeared beside my right hand, I looked up to thank the waiter and saw that it was Khaled Ansari, carrying two drinks.

  ‘You look like you need something stronger than this, man,’ he said with a smile—a small, sad smile—as he sat down beside me. ‘What’s up? Or what’s down, for that matter?’

  ‘It’s nothing,’ I sighed, offering him a smile in return.

  ‘Come on,’ he insisted. ‘Let’s have it.’

  I looked into his honest, open, scarred face and it occurred to me that Khaled knew me better than I knew him. Would I have noticed and realised how troubled he was, I wondered, if our roles were reversed, and he’d entered the Faloodah House with such disturbing preoccupations? Probably not. Khaled was so often gloomy that I wouldn’t have given it a second thought.

  ‘Well, it’s just a bit of soul-searching, I guess. I’ve been doing some research, digging around in some of the chaikhannas and restaurants you told me about—some of the places where the black-market guys and the mercenaries hang out. It was pretty depressing. There’s a lot of people here who want the war to go on forever, and they don’t give a shit who’s getting killed or who’s doing the killing.’

  ‘They’re making money,’ he shrugged. ‘It’s not their war. I don’t expect them to care. That’s just how it is.’

  ‘I know, I know. It’s not the money thing,’ I frowned, searching for the words, rather than the emotion that had prompted them. ‘It’s just—if you wanted a definition of sick, really sick-minded, you could do worse than somebody who wants a war—any war—to go on longer.’

  ‘And … you feel … kind of tainted … kind of like them?’ Khaled asked gently, looking down into his glass.

  ‘Maybe I do. I don’t know. I wouldn’t even think about it—you know, if I heard people talking like that some
where else. It wouldn’t bug me if I wasn’t here, and if I wasn’t doing exactly the same thing myself.’

  ‘It isn’t exactly the same.’

  ‘It is. Pretty much. Khader’s paying me—so I’m making money out of it, like them—and I’m smuggling new shit into a shit-fight, just like they are.’

  ‘And maybe you’re starting to ask yourself what the fuck you’re doing here?’

  ‘That, too. Would you believe me if I told you I haven’t got a clue? I really, honestly, don’t know why the fuck I’m doing it. Khader asked me to be his American, and I’m doing it. But I don’t know why.’

  We were silent for a while, sipping at our drinks and listening to the clatter and buzz surrounding us in the busy Faloodah House. A large portable radio was playing romantic gazals in Urdu. I could hear conversations in three or four languages from customers close to us. I couldn’t understand the words, nor could I even identify which languages they were: Baluchi, Uzbek, Tajik, Farsi …

  ‘This is great!’ Khaled said, using a long spoon to scoop noodles into his mouth from the glass.

  ‘It’s too sweet for my taste,’ I answered him, drinking the treat nonetheless.

  ‘Some things should be too sweet,’ he replied, giving me a wink as he sucked on the straw. ‘If faloodahs weren’t too sweet, we wouldn’t drink them.’

  We finished our drinks and walked out into the late afternoon sunlight, pausing beyond the doorway to light our cigarettes.