Shantaram: A Novel

by Gregory David Roberts

  ‘Meet her?’

  ‘If you want it, I will speak to her. You want her to be your friend?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Oh, yes! Karla is my friend, and she will be your friend also, I think so. Maybe you will make a lot of money for your very good self, in business with Karla. Maybe you will become such good and closely friends that you will have it a lot of sexes together, and make a full enjoyment of your bodies. I am sure you will have a friendly pleasure.’

  He was actually rubbing his hands together. The red juices of the paan stained the teeth and lips of his smile. I had to grasp at his arm to stop him from approaching her, there, in the group of her friends.

  ‘No! Stop! For Christ’s sake, keep your voice down, Prabaker. If I want to speak to her, I’ll do it myself.’

  ‘Oh, I am understand,’ he said, looking abashed. ‘It is what foreigners are calling foreplay, isn’t it?’

  ‘No! Foreplay is … never mind what foreplay is!’

  ‘Oh, good! I never mind about the foreplays, Mr. Lindsay. I am an Indian fellow, and we Indian fellows, we don’t worry about the foreplayings. We go straight to the bumping and jumping. Oh yes!’

  He was holding an imaginary woman in his hands and thrusting his narrow hips at her, smiling that red-juiced smile all the while.

  ‘Will you stop that!’ I snapped, looking up to see if Karla and her friends were watching him.

  ‘Okay Mr. Lindsay,’ he sighed, slowing his rhythmic thrusts until they stopped altogether. ‘But, I can still make a good offer of your friendship to the Miss Karla, if you like?’

  ‘No! I mean—no, thank you. I don’t want to proposition her. I … Oh God, what’s the use. Just tell me … the man who’s talking now—what language is he speaking?’

  ‘He is speaking Hindi language, Mr. Lindsay. You wait one minute, I will tell you what is it he is saying.’

  He moved to the far side of the stall and joined her group quite unself-consciously, leaning in to listen. No-one paid any attention to him. He nodded, laughed with the others, and returned after a few minutes.

  ‘He is telling it one very funny story, about an inspector of Bombay Police, a very great powerful fellow in this area. That inspector did lock up a very clever fellow in his jail, but the clever fellow, he did convince the inspector to let him out again, because he told the inspector he had some gold and jewels. Not only that, but when he was free, the clever fellow sold the inspector some of the gold and some jewels. But they were not really gold and not really jewels. They were the imitations, and very cheaply not the really things. And the worst mischief, the clever fellow lived in the inspector’s house for one week before he sold the not-really jewels. And there is a big rumour that the clever fellow had sexy business with that inspector’s wife. Now the inspector is crazy, and so much angry, that everybody is running when they see him.’

  ‘How do you know her? Does she live here?’

  ‘Know who, Mr. Lindsay—that inspector’s wife?’

  ‘No, of course not! I mean the girl—Karla.’

  ‘You know,’ he mused, frowning hard for the first time, ‘there are a lots of girls in this Bombay. We are only five minutes from your hotel. In this five minutes, we have seen it hundreds of girls. In five minutes more, there is more hundreds of girls. Every five minutes, more hundreds of girls. And after a little of walking, we will see hundreds, and hundreds, and hundreds, and hundreds —’

  ‘Oh, hundreds of girls, great!’ I interrupted sarcastically, my voice much louder than I’d intended it to be. I glanced around. Several people were staring at me with undisguised contempt. I continued, in a hushed tone. ‘I don’t want to know about hundreds of girls, Prabaker. I’m just … curious … about … about that girl, okay?’

  ‘Okay Mr. Lindsay, I will be telling you everything. Karla—she is a famous businessman in Bombay. Very long she is here. I think five years maybe. She has one small house, not far. Everybody knows the Karla.’

  ‘Where is she from?’

  ‘I think, German, or something like that.’

  ‘But she sounded American.’

  ‘Yes, is sounding, but she is from German, or like to the German. And now, anyway, is almost very Indian. You want to eat your foods now?’

  ‘Yeah, just a minute.’

  The group of young friends called out their goodbyes to others near the paan stand, and walked off into the mill and swirl of the crowd. Karla joined them, walking away with her head held high in that curiously straight-backed, almost defiant posture. I watched her until she was swallowed by the people-tide of the crowds, but she never looked back.

  ‘Do you know a place called Leopold’s?’ I asked Prabaker as he joined me, and we started to walk once more.

  ‘Oh, yes! Wonderful and lovely place it is, Leopold’s Beer Bar. Full of the most wonderful, lovely peoples, the very, very fine and lovely people. All kind of foreigners you can find there, all making good business. Sexy business, and drugs business, and money business, and black-market business, and naughty pictures, and smuggler business, and passport business, and —’

  ‘Okay, Prabaker, I get it.’

  ‘You want to go there?’

  ‘No. Maybe later.’ I stopped walking, and Prabaker stopped beside me. ‘Listen, what do your friends call you? I mean, what’s your name for short, instead of Prabaker?’

  ‘Oh, yes, short name I am having also. My short name is Prabu.’

  ‘Prabu … Hike it.’

  ‘It’s meaning the Son of Light, or like to that. Is good name, yes?’

  ‘Is good name, yes.’

  ‘And your good name, Mr. Lindsay, it is really not so good, if you don’t mind I’m telling your face. I don’t like it this long and kind of a squeaky name, for Indian people speaking.’

  ‘Oh, you don’t?’

  ‘Sorry to say it, no. I don’t. Not at all. Not a bit. Not even a teensy or a weensy —’

  ‘Well,’ I smiled, ‘I’m afraid there’s not a lot I can do about it.’

  ‘I’m thinking that a short name—Lin—is much better,’ he suggested. ‘If you’re not having objections, I will call you Lin.’

  It was as good a name as any, and no more or less false than the dozen others I’d assumed since the escape. In fact, in recent months I’d found myself reacting with a quirky fatalism to the new names I was forced to adopt, in one place or another, and to the new names that others gave me. Lin. It was a diminutive I never could’ve invented for myself. But it sounded right, which is to say that I heard the voodoo echo of something ordained, fated: a name that instantly belonged to me, as surely as the lost, secret name with which I was born, and under which I’d been sentenced to twenty years in prison.

  I peered down into Prabaker’s round face and his large, dark, mischievous eyes, and I nodded, smiled, and accepted the name. I couldn’t know, then, that the little Bombay street guide had given me a name thousands of people, from Colaba to Kandahar, from Kinshasa to Berlin, would come to know me by. Fate needs accomplices, and the stones in destiny’s walls are mortared with small and heedless complicities such as those. I look back, now, and I know that the naming moment, which seemed so insignificant then, which seemed to demand no more than an arbitrary and superstitious yes or no, was in fact a pivotal moment in my life. The role I played under that name, and the character I became—Linbaba—was more real, and true to my nature, than anyone or anything that I ever was before it.

  ‘Yes, okay, Lin will do.’

  ‘Very good! I am too happy that you like it, this name. And like my name is meaning Son of Light in Hindi language, your name, Lin, has it also a very fine and so lucky meaning.’

  ‘Yeah? What does Lin mean in Hindi?’

  ‘It’s meaning Penis!’ he explained, with a delight that he expected me to share.

  ‘Oh, great. That’s just … great.’

  ‘Yes very great, very lucky. It is not exactly meaning this, but it is sounding like ling, or lingam, and that is m
eaning penis.’

  ‘Come off it, man,’ I protested, beginning to walk once more. ‘How can I go around calling myself Mr. Penis? Are you kidding me? I can see it now—Oh, hello, pleased to meet you, my name is Penis. No way. Forget it. I think we’ll stick to Lindsay.’

  ‘No! No! Lin, really I’m telling you, this is a fine name, a very power name, a very lucky, a too lucky name! The people will love this name, when they hear it. Come, I will show you. I want to leave it this bottle of whisky you gave to me, leave it with my friend, Mr. Sanjay. Here, just here in this shop. Just you see how he likes it your name.’

  A few more paces along the busy street brought us to a small shop with a hand-painted sign over the open door:

  RADIO SICK

  Electric Repair Enterprises

  Electrical Sales and Repairs, Sanjay Deshpande Proprietor

  Sanjay Deshpande was a heavy-set man in his fifties with a halo of grey-white hair, and white, bushy eyebrows. He sat behind a solid wooden counter, surrounded by bomb-blast radios, eviscerated cassette players, and boxes of parts. Prabaker greeted him, chattering in rapid Hindi, and passed the bottle of whisky over the counter. Mr. Deshpande slapped a meaty hand on it, without looking at it, and slid it out of sight on his side of the counter. He took a sheaf of rupee notes from his shirt pocket, peeled off a number, and passed them across with his palm turned downward. Prabaker took the money and slipped it into his pocket with a movement as swift and fluid as the tentacle-grab of a squid. He finished talking, at last, and beckoned me forward.

  ‘This is my very good friend,’ he informed Mr. Deshpande, patting me on the arm. ‘He is from New Zealand.’

  Mr. Deshpande grunted.

  ‘He is just today coming in Bombay. India Guest House, he is staying.’

  Mr. Deshpande grunted again. He studied me with a vaguely hostile curiosity.

  ‘His name is Lin. Mr. Linbaba,’ Prabaker said.

  ‘What’s his name?’ Mr. Deshpande asked.

  ‘Lin,’ Prabaker grinned. ‘His name is Linbaba.’

  Mr. Deshpande raised his impressive eyebrows in a surprised smile.

  ‘Linbaba?’

  ‘Oh, yes!’ Prabaker enthused. ‘Lin. Lin. Very fine fellow, he is also.’

  Mr. Deshpande extended his hand, and I shook it. We greeted one another, and then Prabaker began to tug at my sleeve, pulling me towards the doorway.

  ‘Linbaba!’ Mr. Deshpande called out, as we were about to step into the street. ‘Welcome in Bombay. You have any Walkman or camera or any ghetto-blasting machine for selling, you come to me, Sanjay Deshpande, at Radio Sick. I am giving best prices.’

  I nodded, and we left the shop. Prabaker dragged me a few paces further along the street, and then stopped.

  ‘You see, Mr. Lin? You see how he likes it your name?’

  ‘I guess so,’ I muttered, bewildered as much by his enthusiasm as by the brief exchange with Mr. Deshpande. When I got to know him well enough, when I began to cherish his friendship, I discovered that Prabaker believed with the whole of his heart that his smile made a difference, in people’s hearts and in the world. He was right, of course, but it took me a long time to understand that truth, and to accept it.

  ‘What’s the baba part, at the end of the name? Lin, I can understand. But what’s the Linbaba bit all about?’

  ‘Baba is just a respecting name,’ Prabaker grinned. ‘If we put baba up on the back of your name, or on the name of anybody special, it is like meaning the respect we give it to a teacher, or a holy persons, or a very old, old, old —’

  ‘I get it, I get it, but it doesn’t make me any more comfortable with it, Prabu, I gotta tell ya. This whole penis thing … I don’t know.’

  ‘But you did see, Mr. Sanjay Deshpande! You did see how he liked it your name! Look, see how the people love this name. You see now, you look, I will tell it to everybody! Linbaba! Linbaba! Linbaba!’

  He was speaking in a shout, addressing strangers as they passed us on the street.

  ‘All right, Prabu, all right. I take your word for it. Calm down.’ It was my turn to tug at his sleeve, and move him along the street. ‘I thought you wanted to drink the whisky?’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ he sighed, ‘was wanting it, and was already drinking it in my mind also. But now, Linbaba, with this money from selling your good present to Mr. Sanjay, I can buy two bottles of very bad and nicely cheap Indian whisky, to enjoy, and plenty of money left for one nice new shirt, red colour, one tola of good charras, tickets for enjoying air condition Hindi picture, and two days of foods. But wait, Linbaba, you are not eating it your paan. You must put it now in the side of your mouth and chew it, before it is getting stale and not good for taste.’

  ‘Okay how do I do it? Like this?’

  I put the leaf-wrapped parcel, almost the size of a matchbox, into the side of my mouth between the cheek and the teeth, as I’d seen the others do. Within seconds, a suffusion of aromatic sweetnesses possessed my mouth. The taste was sharp and luscious—honeyed and subtly piquant at the same time. The leaf wrapping began to dissolve, and the solid, crunchy nibbles of shaved betel nut, date, and coconut swirled in the sweet juices.

  ‘You must spit it out some paan now,’ Prabaker said, staring at my grinding jaws with earnest concentration. ‘You make like this, see? Spit him out like this.’

  He spat out a squirt of red juice that landed on the road, a metre away, and formed a palm-sized blotch. It was a precise, expert procedure. Not a speck of the juice remained on his lips. With his enthusiastic encouragement, I tried to imitate him, but the mouthful of crimson liquid bubbled out of my mouth, left a trail of slobber on my chin and the front of my shirt, and landed with an audible splat on my right boot.

  ‘No problem this shirt,’ Prabaker frowned, pulling a handkerchief from his pocket, and smearing the blood-red fluid deeper into my shirtfront with vigorously ineffective rubbing. ‘No problem your boots also. I will wipe him just like this, see? I must ask it now, do you like the swimming?’

  ‘Swimming?’ I asked, swallowing the little paan mixture that was still in my mouth.

  ‘Oh, yes. Swimming. I will take you to Chowpatty beach, so nice beach it is, and there you can practise chewing and spitting and chewing and more spitting the paan, but without so many of all your clothes only, for a good saving on your laundry.’

  ‘Listen, about that—going around the city—you work as a guide, right?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Very best Bombay guide, and guiding all India also.’

  ‘How much do you charge per day?’

  He glanced at me, his cheeks appled in the impish grin I was learning to recognise as the clever under-side of his broad and gentle smile.

  ‘I charge hundred rupees all day’ he said.

  ‘Okay …’

  ‘And tourists buy it the lunch.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘And taxi also, tourists pay.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And Bombay bus tickets, all they pay.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And chai, if we drink it on a hot afternoon, for refreshing our good selves.’

  ‘U-huh —’

  And sexy girls, if we go there, on a cool night, if we are feeling a big needy swelling in our —’

  ‘Yeah, okay, okay. Listen, I’ll pay you for the whole week. I want you to show me Bombay, teach me a bit about the city. If it works out okay, there’ll be a bonus for you at the end of the week. How does that sound?’

  The smile sparked his eyes, but his voice was surprisingly sombre as he replied.

  ‘This is your good decision, Linbaba. Your very good decision.’

  ‘Well,’ I laughed, ‘we’ll see. And I want you to teach me some Hindi words, okay?’

  ‘Oh, yes! I can teach everything! Ha means yes, and nahin means no, and pani means water, and khanna means foods, and —’

  ‘Okay okay, we don’t have to learn it all at once. Is this the restaurant? Good, I’m starved.’

  I was
about to enter the dark and unprepossessing restaurant when he stopped me, his expression suddenly grave. He frowned, and swallowed hard, as if he was unsure how to begin.

  ‘Before we are eating this good foods,’ he said, at last, ‘before we … before we make any business also, something there is, I must tell it to you.’

  ‘O-kay …’

  His manner was so dejected that I felt a twinge of apprehension.

  ‘Well, now I am telling … that tola charras, the one I was selling to you in hotel …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Well … that was the business price. The really price—the friendship price—is only fifty rupees for one tola Afghani charras.’ He lifted his arms, and then let them slap down at his thighs. ‘I charged it fifty rupees too much.’

  ‘I see,’ I answered quietly. The matter was so trivial, from my point of view, that I was tempted to laugh out loud. It was obviously important to him, however, and I suspected that he wasn’t often moved to make such admissions. In fact, as he told me much later, Prabaker had just then decided to like me, and for him that meant he was bound to a scrupulous and literal honesty in everything he said or did. It was at once his most endearing and most irritating quality, that he always told me the whole of the truth.

  ‘So … what do you want to do about it?’

  ‘My suggestion,’ he said seriously, ‘we smoke it that business price charras very fast, until finish that one, then I will buy new one for us. After from now, it will be everything friendship prices, for you and for me also. This is a no problem policy, isn’t it?’

  I laughed, and he laughed with me. I threw my arm around his shoulder and led him into the steamy, ambrosial activity of the busy restaurant.

  ‘Lin, I think I am your very good friend,’ Prabaker decided, grinning happily. ‘We are the lucky fellows, isn’t it?’

  ‘Maybe it is,’ I replied. ‘Maybe it is.’

  Hours later, I lay back in a comfortable darkness, under the sound-strobe of a ceaselessly revolving ceiling fan. I was tired, but I couldn’t sleep. Beneath my windows the street that had writhed and toiled in daylight was silent, subdued by a night-sultriness, moist with stars. Astounding and puzzling images from the city tumbled and turned in my mind like leaves on a wave of wind, and my blood so thrilled with hope and possibility that I couldn’t suppress a smile, lying there in the dark. No-one, in the world I’d left behind me, knew where I was. No-one, in the new world of Bombay, knew who I was. In that moment, in those shadows, I was almost safe.