Shantaram: A Novel

by Gregory David Roberts

  Khaderbhai leaned across after the singing stopped. His lips were moving, and I knew he was speaking to me, but for a moment I couldn’t hear him.

  ‘I’m sorry, I couldn’t hear you.’

  ‘I said that the truth is found more often in music,’ he repeated, ‘than it is in books of philosophy.’

  ‘What is the truth?’ I asked him. I didn’t really want to know. I was trying to hold up my end of the conversation. I was trying to be clever.

  ‘The truth is that there are no good men, or bad men,’ he said. ‘It is the deeds that have goodness or badness in them. There are good deeds, and bad deeds. Men are just men—it is what they do, or refuse to do, that links them to good and evil. The truth is that an instant of real love, in the heart of anyone—the noblest man alive or the most wicked—has the whole purpose and process and meaning of life within the lotus-folds of its passion. The truth is that we are all, every one of us, every atom, every galaxy, and every particle of matter in the universe, moving toward God.’

  Those words of his are mine forever now. I can hear them. The blind singers are forever. I can see them. The night, and the men that were the beginning, father and brother, are forever. I can remember them. It’s easy. All I have to do is close my eyes.

  CHAPTER TEN

  ABDULLAH TOOK HIS BROTHERING SERIOUSLY. A week after the Night of the Blind Singers, he arrived at my hut in the Cuffe Parade slum carrying a satchel filled with medicines, salves, and bandages. He also brought a small metal case containing a few surgical instruments. We went through the bag together. He asked me about the medicines, wanting to know how useful they were and what quantities I might need in the future. When he’d satisfied himself, he dusted off the wooden stool and sat down. He was silent for a few minutes, watching me pack the supplies he’d brought into a rack of bamboo shelves. The crowded slum chattered, brawled, sang, and laughed around us.

  ‘Well, Lin, where are they?’ he finally asked.

  ‘Where’s who?’

  ‘The patients. Where are they? I want to see my brother healing them. There can’t be healing, without sick people, isn’t it?’

  ‘I, er, I don’t have any patients just now.’

  ‘Oh,’ he sighed. He frowned, drumming his fingers on his knees. ‘Well, do you think I should go and get you some?’

  He half rose from his seat, and I had a vision of him dragging sick and injured people to my hut by force.

  ‘No, no, take it easy. I don’t see people every day. But if I do see people, if I’m here, they usually start coming around two o’clock. They don’t come this early in the morning. Nearly everyone works until at least noon. I’m usually working myself. I have to earn money too, you know.’

  ‘But not this morning?’

  ‘No, not today. I made some money last week. Enough to last me for a while.’

  ‘How did you make this money?’

  He stared at me ingenuously, unaware that the question might embarrass me or be taken as rude.

  ‘It’s not polite to ask foreigners how they make their money, Abdullah,’ I informed him, laughing.

  ‘Oh, I see,’ he said, smiling. ‘You made it by the illegal means.’

  ‘Well, that’s not exactly the point. But yes, now that you mention it. There was this French girl who wanted to buy half a kilo of charras. I found it for her. And I helped a German guy get a fair price for his Canon camera. They were both commission jobs.’

  ‘How much did you make with this business?’ he asked, his eyes not wavering. They were a very pale brown, those eyes, almost a golden colour. They were the colour of sand dunes in the Thar Desert, on the last day before it rains.

  ‘I made about a thousand rupees.’

  ‘Each business, one thousand?’

  ‘No, both jobs together made a thousand.’

  ‘This is very little money, Lin brother,’ he said, his nose wrinkling and his mouth puckering with contempt. ‘This is tiny, tiny, very small money.’

  ‘Well, it might be tiny to you,’ I mumbled defensively, ‘but it’s enough to keep me going for a couple of weeks or so.’

  ‘And now you are free, isn’t it?’

  ‘Free?’

  ‘You have no patients?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And you have no little commission business to do?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Good. Then we go together, now.’

  ‘Oh, yeah? Where are we going?’

  ‘Come, I will tell you when we get there.’

  We stepped out of the hut and were greeted by Johnny Cigar, who’d obviously been eavesdropping. He smiled at me, and scowled at Abdullah, then smiled at me again with traces of the scowl in the shadows of his smile.

  ‘Hi, Johnny. I’m going out for a while. Make sure the kids don’t get into the medicines, okay? I put some new stuff into the shelves today, and some of it’s dangerous.’

  Johnny thrust his jaw out to defend his wounded pride.

  ‘Nobody will touch anything in your hut, Linbaba! What are you saying? You could put millions of rupees in there, and nobody would touch anything. Gold also you could put in there. The Bank of India is not as safe as this, Linbaba’s hut.’

  ‘I only meant that …’

  ‘And diamonds, also, you can leave in there. And emeralds. And pearls.’

  ‘I get the picture, Johnny.’

  ‘No need to worry about all that,’ Abdullah interjected. ‘He makes such tiny money that nobody would have the interest to be taking it. Do you know how much money he made last week?’

  Johnny Cigar seemed suspicious of Abdullah. The hostile scowl pinched his face a little tighter, but he was intrigued by the question, and his curiosity got the better of him.

  ‘How much?’

  ‘I don’t think we need to go into this right now, guys,’ I grumbled, struggling to head off what I knew could become a one-hour discussion of my tiny money.

  ‘One thousand rupees,’ Abdullah said, spitting for emphasis.

  I seized him by the arm and gave him a shove along the path between the huts.

  ‘Okay, Abdullah. We were going somewhere, weren’t we? Let’s get on with it, brother.’

  We took a few steps, but Johnny Cigar came after us and tugged at my shirtsleeve, pulling me a pace or two behind Abdullah.

  ‘For God’s sake, Johnny! I don’t want to talk about how much money I made, right now. I promise, you can nag me about it later but …’

  ‘No, Linbaba, not about that,’ he rasped, in a scratchy whisper. ‘That man, that Abdullah—you shouldn’t trust him! Don’t do any business with him!’

  ‘What is this? What’s the matter, Johnny?’

  ‘Just don’t!’ he said, and might’ve said more, but Abdullah turned and called to me, and Johnny sulked off, vanishing in a twist of lane.

  ‘What is the problem?’ Abdullah asked as I drew level with him, and we set off between the snaking lines of huts.

  ‘Oh, no problem,’ I muttered, knowing that there was. ‘No problem at all.’

  Abdullah’s motorcycle was parked on the roadway, outside the slum, where several kids were watching over it. The tallest of them snapped up the ten-rupee tip Abdullah gave them, and then led his ragged urchin band away at a whooping run. Abdullah kicked the engine over, and I climbed up onto the pillion seat behind him. Wearing no helmets, and only thin shirts, we swung out into the friendly chaos of traffic, heading parallel to the sea towards Nariman Point.

  If you know bikes at all, you can tell a lot about a man by how he rides. Abdullah rode from reflex rather than concentration. His control of the bike in motion was as natural as his control of his legs in walking. He read the traffic with a mix of skill and intuition. Several times, he slowed before there was an obvious need, and avoided the hard braking that other, less instinctive riders were forced to make. Sometimes he accelerated into an invisible gap that opened magically for us, just when a collision seemed imminent. Although unnerving at first, the technique
did soon inspire a kind of grudging confidence in me, and I relaxed in the ride.

  At Chowpatty Beach, we turned away from the sea, and the cool breeze from the bay was stilled and then choked off by streets of tall terraces. We joined shoals of traffic in a steamy drift towards Nana Chowk. The architecture there was from the middle period of Bombay’s development as a great port city. Some of the buildings, constructed in the sturdy geometries of the British Raj, were two hundred years old. The detailed intricacies of balconies, window surrounds, and stepped facades reflected a luxurious elegance that the modern city, for all its chrome and glamour, rarely afforded itself.

  The section from Nana Chowk to Tardeo was known as a Parsee area. It had surprised me, at first, that a city so polymorphous as Bombay, with its unceasing variety of peoples, languages, and pursuits, tended to such narrow concentrations. The jewellers had their own bazaar, as did the mechanics, plumbers, carpenters, and other trades. The Muslims had their own quarter, as did the Christians, Buddhists, Sikhs, Parsees, and Jains. If you wanted to buy or sell gold, you visited the Zhaveri bazaar, where hundreds of goldsmiths competed for your custom. If you wanted to visit a mosque, you found several of them within walking distance of one another.

  But after a while I realised that the demarcations, like so many other long and short lines of division in the complex, culturally polyglot city, were not as rigid as they’d seemed. The Muslim quarter had its Hindu temples, the Zhaveri bazaar had its vegetable sellers among the glittering jewels, and almost every tower of luxury apartments had its adjacent slum.

  Abdullah parked the bike outside the Bhatia Hospital, one of several modern hospitals and clinics which were endowed by charitable Parsee trusts. The large building housed expensive wards for the rich, and free treatment centres for the poor. We climbed the steps and entered a spotlessly clean marble foyer pleasantly cooled by large fans. Abdullah spoke to the receptionist and then led me down a corridor to the busy casualty and admissions section. After more questions to a porter and a nurse, he finally located the man he sought—a short and very thin doctor who sat at a cluttered desk.

  ‘Doctor Hamid?’ Abdullah asked.

  The doctor was writing, and didn’t look up.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he answered testily.

  ‘I have come from Sheik Abdel Khader. My name is Abdullah.’

  The pen stopped at once, and Doctor Hamid slowly lifted his head. He stared at us with a look of apprehensive curiosity. It was a look you see sometimes on the faces of bystanders witnessing a fight.

  ‘He telephoned to you yesterday, and told you to expect me?’ Abdullah prompted quietly.

  ‘Yes, yes of course,’ Hamid said, regaining his composure in an easy smile. He stood up to shake hands across the desk.

  ‘This is Mr. Lin,’ Abdullah introduced me, as the doctor and I shook hands. It was a very dry and fragile hand. ‘He is the doctor in the Colaba hutments.’

  ‘No, no,’ I protested. ‘I’m not a doctor. I’ve just been sort of co-opted into helping out there. And I’m … I’m not trained for it, and … not really very good at it.’

  ‘Khaderbhai tells me that when you spoke to him, you complained about the referrals you’re making to the St. George and other hospitals,’ Hamid said, getting down to business, and ignoring my protest with the air of a man who was too busy to indulge another’s modesty. His eyes were dark brown, almost black, and glistening behind the polished lenses of his gold-framed glasses.

  ‘Well, yes,’ I replied, surprised that Khaderbhai had remembered my conversation with him, and that he’d found it important enough to tell the doctor. ‘The problem is that I’m flying blind, if you know what I mean. I don’t know enough to cope with all the problems people come to me with. When I come across illnesses that I can’t identify, or what I think are probably illnesses, I send them to the diagnostic clinic at St. George Hospital. I don’t know what else to do with them. But a lot of the time they come back to me without having seen anyone—no doctors, no nurses, no-one.’

  ‘These people are not feigning illness, you think?’

  ‘No. I’m sure.’ I was a little offended for myself, and even more indignant for the slum-dwellers. ‘They’ve got nothing to gain by pretending to be sick. And they’re proud people. They don’t ask for help lightly.’

  ‘Of course,’ he murmured, removing his glasses to rub at the deep ridges they’d imposed on his nose. ‘And have you been to the St. George yourself? Have you seen anyone there to ask them about this?’

  ‘Yes. I went there twice. They told me they’re swamped with patients, and they do the best they can. They suggested that if I could get referrals from licensed medical practitioners, then the slum-dwellers could jump the queue, so to speak. I’m not complaining about them, at the St. George. They’ve got their own problems. They’re under-staffed and overcrowded. In my little clinic, I look at about fifty patients a day. They get six hundred patients every day. Sometimes as many as a thousand. I’m sure you know how it is. I think they’re doing the best they can, and they’re pushed to the limit just trying to treat the emergency cases. The real problem is that my people can’t afford to see a real doctor, to get the referral that would help them jump the queue at the hospital. They’re too poor. That’s why they come to me.’

  Doctor Hamid raised his eyebrows, and offered me that easy smile.

  ‘You said my people. Are you becoming such an Indian, Mr. Lin?’

  I laughed, and answered him in Hindi for the first time, using a line from the theme song to a popular movie that was showing, then, in many cinemas.

  ‘In this life, we do what we can to improve ourselves.’

  Hamid also laughed, clapping his hands together once in pleased surprise.

  ‘Well, Mr. Lin, I think I may be able to help you. I am on duty here two days a week, but the rest of the time I can be found at my surgery, in Fourth Pasta Lane.’

  ‘I know Fourth Pasta Lane. That’s very close to us.’

  ‘Precisely, and, after speaking to Khaderbhai, I have agreed that you should begin referring your patients to me, when you need it, and I will arrange treatment at St. George Hospital when I think it is required. We can begin from tomorrow, if you wish.’

  ‘Yes, I do,’ I said quickly. ‘I mean, it’s great, thank you, thank you very much. I don’t know how we’re going to go about paying you but …’

  ‘No need for thanks, and no need to worry about payment,’ he replied, glancing at Abdullah. ‘My services will be free for your people. Perhaps you would like to join me for tea? I take a break here soon. There is a restaurant across the road from the hospital. If you can wait for me there, I will come across and join you. We have, I think, much to discuss.’

  Abdullah and I left him, and waited for twenty minutes in the restaurant, watching through a large window as poor patients hobbled to the entrance of the hospital, and rich patients were delivered in taxis and private cars. Doctor Hamid joined us, and outlined the procedures I was to follow in referring the slum-dwellers to his practice in Fourth Pasta Lane.

  Good doctors have at least three things in common: they know how to observe, they know how to listen, and they’re very tired. Hamid was a good doctor, and when, after an hour of discussion, I looked into his prematurely lined face, the eyes burned and reddened by lack of sleep, I felt shamed by his honest exhaustion. He could accumulate wealth, I knew, and surround himself with luxury, in private practice in Germany or Canada or America, yet he chose to be there, with his own people, for a fraction of the reward. He was one of thousands of health professionals working in the city, with careers as distinguished in what they denied themselves as in what they achieved every working day. And what they achieved was no less than the survival of the city.

  When Abdullah took us into the plaited traffic once more, his bike weaving a haphazard progress through the threads of buses, cars, trucks, bicycles, bullock wagons, and pedestrians, he called over his shoulder to tell me that Doctor Hamid had once live
d in a slum himself. He said that Khaderbhai had taken especially gifted slum children from several slums throughout the city, and paid for their enrolment in private colleges. Through secondary and then tertiary studies, the children were provided for and encouraged. They graduated to become physicians, surgeons, nurses, teachers, lawyers, and engineers. Hamid was one of those gifted children who’d been selected more than twenty years before. In response to the needs of my small clinic, Khaderbhai was calling in some dues.

  ‘Khaderbhai is a man who makes the future,’ Abdullah concluded, as we stopped for a traffic signal. ‘Most of us—me and you, my brother—we wait for the future to come to us. But Abdel Khader Khan dreams the future, and then he plans it, and then he makes it happen. That is the difference between him and the rest of us.’

  ‘What about you, Abdullah?’ I asked him in a shout as we roared off with the traffic once more. ‘Did Khaderbhai plan you?’

  He laughed out loud, his chest heaving with the pleasure and the force of the laugh.

  ‘I think he did!’ he replied.

  ‘Hey! This isn’t the way back to the slum. Where are we going now?’

  ‘We are going to visit the place where you will be getting your medicines.’

  ‘My what?’

  ‘Khaderbhai has arranged for you to get medicines, every week. The things I brought you today—those are the first. We are going to the medicine black market.’

  ‘A black market for medicine? Where is it?’

  ‘In the slum of the lepers,’ Abdullah answered, matter-of-factly Then he laughed again as he pushed the bike to greater speed through a gap in the traffic that opened for him, even as he reached it. ‘Just leave it to me, Lin brother. Now you are part of the plan, isn’t it so?’