Shantaram: A Novel

by Gregory David Roberts

  In the dark corner near the trough in the zigzag roof space, my friend lit the cigarette lighter. I saw that he’d connected the power saw to the cord. He was ready to make the cut. I took the lighter, and held it for him. Without a second of hesitation, he hoisted the heavy saw and clicked it to life. The machine screamed like the whine of a jet engine on a runway. My friend looked at me, and a huge grin tore his mouth open. His teeth were clenched in the smile, and his eyes were glittering with the reflected fire. Then he drove the saw into the thick wood. With four swift, ear-splitting cuts, he made a perfect hole that revealed a square of gleaming tin.

  We waited in the silence that followed, our ears ringing with diminishing echoes, and our hearts thumping at our chests. After a moment we heard a telephone ring close by, at the main gate, and we thought we were finished. Then someone answered the phone. It was one of the gate guards. We heard him laugh and talk on in a relaxed, conversational tone. It was okay. We were safe. They’d heard the power saw, of course; but, just as I’d hoped, they’d dismissed it as noise made by the workmen.

  Heartened, I punched a hole in the tin with the screwdriver. Sunlight from the free sky above shot in on us. I widened the hole, and then used the tin snips to cut a panel of tin around three sides. Pushing with two sets of hands, we shoved the flap of tin outwards, and I poked my head through the hole. I saw that we had indeed cut our way into one of the troughs of the roof. The deepest part of that V-shaped trench was a blind spot. If we lay down in that narrow defile we couldn’t see the tower guards, and they couldn’t see us.

  We had one job left to do. The power cord was still plugged into the outlet, downstairs and outside the building. We needed the cord. It was our rope. We needed it to climb down the outside of the prison wall to the street. One of us had to go down the stairs, push out through the door in full view of the guards in the adjacent gate area, unplug the power cord, and then climb back up into the roof again. I looked at my friend, his sweating face clear in the bright light bathing us from the hole we’d cut in the roof, and I knew it had to be me.

  Downstairs, with my back against the inside wall, next to the door, I paused again, and tried to will the strength into my arms and legs for the move out into the open. I was breathing so hard that I felt dizzy and nauseous. My heart, like a trapped bird, hurled itself against the cage of my chest. After a few long moments, I knew I couldn’t do it. Everything, from judicious caution to superstitious terror, screamed at me not to go out there again. And I couldn’t.

  I had to cut the cord. There was no other way. I took the chisel from the side-pocket of my coveralls. It was very sharp, even after the work we’d done with it in trying to penetrate the wooden barrier in the roof. I placed it against the trailing power cord, where it entered under the door. I raised my hand to strike. The thought occurred to me that if I blew out the power by cutting through the cord it could sound an alarm, and perhaps send a guard into the building to investigate. It didn’t matter. I didn’t have any choice. I knew I couldn’t go out into the open again. I slammed my hand down hard onto the chisel. It cut through the cord, and embedded itself in the wooden floor. I swept the snipped ends of the cord away from the metal chisel, and waited for the sound of an alarm or the tumble of voices to approach from the gate area. There was nothing. Nothing. I was safe.

  I grabbed the loose end of the power cord, and rushed back upstairs and into the roof space. At the new manhole we’d cut in the roof, we secured the cord to a heavy, wooden bearer beam. Then my friend started out through the hole. When he was halfway onto the tin roof, he got stuck. For a few moments, he couldn’t move upward and he couldn’t move back. He began to thrash wildly, straining with all his strength, but it was hopeless. He was stuck fast.

  It was dark again in the roof space, with his body blocking the hole we’d made. I scrabbled around with my hands in the dust, between the roof joists, and found the cigarette lighter. When I struck it, I saw at once what had trapped him. It was his tobacco pouch—a thick, leather wallet that he’d made for himself in one of the hobby groups. Telling him to hold still, I used the chisel to tear a flap in the pocket at the back of his coveralls. When I ripped the pocket away, the tobacco pouch fell free into my hands, and my friend went up through the hole and onto the roof.

  I followed him up to the tin roof. Wriggling like worms in the gutter of the trough, we moved forward to the castellated front wall of the prison. We knelt to look over the wall. We were visible then, for a few seconds, but the tower guards weren’t looking our way. That part of the prison was a psychological blind spot. The tower guards ignored it because they didn’t believe that anyone would be crazy enough to attempt a daylight escape over the front wall.

  Risking a quick, frantic glimpse at the street below, we saw that there was a queue of vehicles outside the prison. They were deliverymen, waiting to enter through the main gate. Because each vehicle was searched throughout, and checked with mirrors beneath, the queue made slow progress. My friend and I hunkered down in the trough to consider our options.

  ‘That’s a mess down there.’

  ‘I say we go now,’ he said.

  ‘We have to wait,’ I countered.

  ‘Fuck it, just throw the cord over and let’s go.’

  ‘No,’ I whispered. ‘There’s too many people down there.’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘One of them’ll play hero, for sure.’

  ‘Fuck him. Let him play hero. We’ll just go over the top of him.’

  ‘There’s too many of them.’

  ‘Fuck them all. We’ll go straight through ‘em. They won’t know what hit ‘em. It’s us or them, mate.’

  ‘No,’ I said finally. ‘We have to wait. We have to go over when there’s no-one down there. We have to wait.’

  And we did wait, for a twenty-minute eternity, and I wriggled forward again and again to look over the wall, risking exposure every time. Then, at last, I looked down to the street and saw that it was completely empty in both directions. I gave my friend the signal. He scrambled forward over the wall, and down out of sight. I crept forward to look, expecting to see him climbing down the cord, but he was already on the street. I saw him disappear into a narrow lane, across the street from the prison. And I was still inside, on the roof.

  I clambered over the bluestone parapet, and took hold of the cord. Standing with my legs against the wall, and the cord in both hands, my back to the street, I looked at the gun-tower on my left. The guard was talking into a telephone and gesturing with his free hand. He had an automatic rifle slung over his shoulder. I looked to the other tower. The guard there, also armed with a rifle, was calling down to another guard inside the prison in the gate area. He was smiling and relaxed. I was invisible. I was standing on the front wall of the toughest maximum-security prison in the state, and I was invisible.

  I pushed off with my legs and started the descent, but my hands slipped—the fear, the sweat—and I lost the cord. I fell. It was a very high wall. I knew it was a killing fall to the ground below. In an agony of terror and desperation, I grabbed at the cord and seized it. My hands were the brakes that slowed my fall. I felt the skin tear away from my palms and fingers. I felt it singe and burn. And slower, but still hard enough to hurt, I slammed into the ground, stood, and staggered across the road. I was free.

  I looked back at the prison once. The cord was still dangling over the wall. The guards were still talking in their towers. A car drifted past on the street, the driver drumming his fingers on the steering wheel in time to a song. I turned my back. I walked on through the lane into a hunted life that cost me everything I’d ever loved.

  When I committed the armed robberies, I put fear into people. From that time—even as I did the crimes—and on through prison and life on the run, fate put fear into me. The nights were steeped in it, and sometimes I felt as if the blood and the breath in my body were clotted with fright. The fear I’d put into others became ten terrors, fifty, a thousand, filling th
e loneliest hours of every night with dread.

  By day, in those early Bombay months, when the world worked and worried around me, I wedged my life into a busy thickness of duties, needs, and small pleasures. But at night, when the sleeping slum dreamed, the horror crept across my skin. My heart backed away into a black cave of memory. And I walked most nights, while the city slept. I walked, and I forced myself not to look over my shoulder at the gun-towers and the dangling power cord on the high wall that wasn’t there.

  The nights, at least, were quiet. At midnight, every night in those years, the cops imposed a curfew on Bombay. Half an hour before twelve, police jeeps gathered in the main streets of the central city, and began the enforced closure of restaurants, bars, stores, and even the tiny pavement shops that sold cigarettes and paan. The beggars, junkies, and hookers who weren’t already at home or hiding were chased from the footpaths. Steel shutters came down over the shop windows. White calico cloths were thrown over the tables in all the markets and bazaars. Quiet and emptiness descended. In the whirl and crush of people and purposes in Bombay’s daylight scramble, it was impossible to imagine those deserted silences. But each and every night was the same: soundless, beautiful, and threatening. Bombay became a haunted house.

  For two to three hours after midnight, in an operation known as the round-up, squads of plain-clothes cops patrolled the vacant streets in search of criminals, junkies, suspects, and homeless, unemployed men. More than half the people in the city were homeless, of course, and many of them lived, ate, and slept on the streets. The sleepers were everywhere, stretched out on the footpaths with only a thin blanket and a cotton sheet to keep out the damp of night. Single people, families, and whole communities who’d escaped some drought, flood, or famine slept on the stone paths and in doorways, huddled together in bundled necessity.

  It was technically illegal to sleep on the streets in Bombay. The cops enforced that regulation, but they were as pragmatic about it as they were about enforcing the laws against prostitution on the Street of Ten Thousand Whores. A certain discrimination was required, and in fact the list of those they wouldn’t arrest for the crime of homelessness was quite long. Sadhus and all other religious devotees, for example, were exempted. Elderly people, amputees, the sick, or the injured didn’t find much sympathy, and were sometimes forced to move on to another street, but they weren’t arrested. Lunatics, eccentrics, and itinerant entertainers such as musicians, acrobats, jugglers, actors, and snake charmers were occasionally roughed up, but they were invariably excluded from the round-up. Families, particularly those with young children, usually received no more than a stern warning not to remain longer than a few nights in a given area. Any man who could prove he had a job, however menial, by displaying the business card or written address of his employer, was spared. Single men who were clean and respectful and could demonstrate some level of education could usually talk their way out of an arrest, even if they weren’t employed anywhere. And, of course, anyone who could pay baksheesh was safe.

  That left the very poor, homeless, unemployed, uneducated, single young men as the high-risk group in the midnight round-up. With no money to pay their way out of the police net, and not enough education to talk their way out, scores of those young men were arrested throughout the city, every night. Some of them were arrested because they fitted descriptions of wanted men. Some were found to have drugs or stolen goods in their possession. Some were well known, and the cops arrested them routinely, on suspicion. Many, however, were simply dirty and poor and stricken with a sullen helplessness.

  The city didn’t have the funds to provide thousands of pairs of metal handcuffs; and even if the money were found, the cops probably wouldn’t have burdened themselves with heavy chains. Instead, they carried lengths of rough twine made from hemp and coconut fibres, and used it to tie the arrested men one to the other by the right hand. The thin rope was enough to hold the men because the victims of nightly round-ups were mostly too weak, under-nourished, and spiritually defeated to run. They submitted meekly, silently. When between a dozen and twenty men had been arrested and tied into the human chain, the six or eight cops in the round-up squad marched them back to holding cells.

  For their part, the cops were fairer than I’d expected them to be, and undeniably brave. They were armed only with the thin bamboo cane known as the lathi. They carried no clubs, gas, or guns. They had no walkie-talkies, so they couldn’t call for back-up if they ran into trouble on the patrols. There were no vehicles to spare for the round-up, so the squads walked the many kilometres of their beat. And although they struck out often with the lathi, savage or even serious beatings were rare—much less frequent than police beatings in the modern, western city where I’d grown up.

  Nevertheless, the round-up did mean days, weeks, or even months of confinement for the young men in prisons that were as bad as any in Asia, and the caravans of roped, arrested men that shambled throughout the city, after midnight, were more melancholy and forlorn than most funeral processions.

  In my late-night walks around the city, I was invariably alone when the round-up was done. My rich friends feared the poor. My poor friends feared the cops. Most foreigners feared everybody, and kept to their hotels. The streets were mine as I searched their cool silences.

  On one of those night walks, about three months after the fire, I found myself on the sea wall at Marine Drive. The broad footpath beside the sea wall was bare and clean. A six-lane road separated the seaside path from a horizon-wide, incurving crescent of affluence: fine homes, expensive apartments, consular offices, first-class restaurants, and hotels that looked out over the black and heaving sea.

  There were very few cars on the Drive, that night, only one every fifteen or twenty minutes, travelling slowly. Few lights shone in any of the rooms across the street behind me. A cool wind carried the clean, salt air in irascible gusts. It was quiet. The sea was louder than the city.

  Some of my friends from the slum worried about me walking alone on the streets at night. Don’t walk at night, they said. The night is no safety in Bombay. But it wasn’t the city that I feared. I felt safe on the streets. Strange and troubled as my life was, the city enfolded it within the millions of others as if … as if it belonged there, no less than any other.

  And the work I was doing enhanced that sense of belonging. I gave myself assiduously to the role of slum doctor. I found books on diagnostic medicine, and studied them by lamplight in my hut. I accumulated a modest cache of medicines, salves, and bandages, buying them from local chemists with money I earned in black-market deals with tourists. And I stayed on there, in those squalid acres, even after I’d made enough money to leave. I stayed on in the cramped little hut when I could’ve moved to a comfortable apartment. I allowed my life to be swept up in the broiling, dancing struggle of their twenty-five thousand lives. I bound myself to Prabaker and Johnny Cigar and Qasim Ali Hussein. And although I tried not to think of Karla, my love put claws in the sky. I kissed the wind. I spoke her name, when I was alone.

  On the sea wall, I felt the cool breeze wash across the skin of my face and chest like water poured from a clay matka. There was no sound but my own breath in the wind and the crash of deep water on the rocks, three metres below the wall. The waves, reaching up in splash and spindrift, pulled at me. Let go. Let go. Get it over with. Just fall down and die. So easy. It wasn’t the loudest voice in my mind, but it came from one of the deepest sources—the shame that smothered my self-esteem. The shamed know that voice: You let everyone down. You don’t deserve to live. The world would be better off without you … And for all that I tried to belong, to heal myself with the work in the clinic, to save myself with the fool notion of being in love with Karla, the truth was that I was alone in that shame, and lost.

  The sea surged and shoved at the rocks below. One push, and it would all be over. I could feel the fall, the crash as my body struck the rocks; the cold slipperiness of drowning death. So easy.

  A hand touched
my shoulder. The grip was soft and gentle, but firm enough to hold me there. I turned quickly in shocked surprise. There was a tall, young man standing behind me. His hand remained on my shoulder as if to brace me there; as if he’d read my thoughts a few moments before.

  ‘Your name is Mr. Lin, I believe,’ he said quietly. ‘I don’t know if you can remember me—my name is Abdullah. We met at the den of the Standing Babas.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ I stammered. ‘You helped us, helped me. I remember you well. You left—you disappeared—before I got to thank you properly.’

  He smiled easily, and took away his hand to run it through his thick, black hair.

  ‘No need for thanks. You would be doing the same for me, in your country, isn’t it? Come, there is someone who wants to meet you.’

  He gestured to a car that was parked at the kerb ten metres away. It had drawn up behind me, and the motor was still running, but somehow I’d failed to hear it. It was an Ambassador, India’s modest version of a luxury car. There were two men inside—a driver, and one passenger in the back.

  Abdullah opened the rear door and I stooped to look inside. A man in his middle to late sixties sat there, his face half illuminated by the streetlights. It was a lean, strong, intelligent face with a long, thin nose and high cheekbones. I was struck and held at once by the eyes, an amber brilliance of amusement and compassion and something else—ruthlessness, perhaps, or love. His hair and beard were close-cropped and white-grey.

  ‘You are Mr. Lin?’ he said. His voice was deep, resonant, and supremely confident. ‘I am pleased to meet you. Yes, very pleased. I have heard something good about you. It is always a delight to hear good things—and even more pleasurable, when it concerns foreigners, here in our Bombay. Perhaps you have heard of me also. My name is Abdel Khader Khan.’

  Sure, I’d heard of him. Everyone in Bombay had heard of him. His name appeared in the newspapers every other week. People spoke about him in the bazaars and nightclubs and slums. He was admired and feared by the rich. He was respected and mythologised by the poor. His discourses on theology and ethics, held in the courtyard of the Nabila Mosque in Dongri, were famous throughout the city, and drew many scholars and students from every faith. No less famous were his friendships with artists, businessmen, and politicians. He was also one of the lords of Bombay’s mafia—one of the founders of the council system that had divided Bombay into fiefdoms ruled by separate councils of mafia dons. The system was a good one, people said, and popular, because it had brought order and relative peace to the city’s underworld after a decade of bloody power struggles. He was a powerful, dangerous, brilliant man.