Shantaram: A Novel

by Gregory David Roberts

  Those words—now you are part of the plan—should’ve woken some fear in me. I should’ve sensed … something … even then, right at the start. But I wasn’t afraid. I was almost happy. The words seemed exciting. They rushed my blood. When my fugitive life began, I was exiled from my family, homeland, and culture. I thought that was the whole of it. Years into the banishment, I realised that I was exiled to something, as well. What I escaped to was the lonely, reckless freedom of the outcast. Like outcasts everywhere, I courted danger because danger was one of the few things strong enough to help me forget what I’d lost. And staring into the warmth of the afternoon wind, riding with Abdullah into the web of streets, I fell as fearlessly into my fate, that afternoon, as a man falls into love with a shy woman’s best smile.

  The journey to the lepers’ camp took us to the outskirts of the city. There were several treatment colonies for Bombay’s lepers, but the men and women we went to see refused to live in them. Funded by state and private contributions, the colonies provided medical attention, caring support, and clean environments. The rules and regulations that governed them were strict, however, and not all the lepers could bring themselves to conform. As a result, some chose to leave, and some were forced out. At any one time, a few dozen men, women, and children lived outside the colonies, in the wider community of the city.

  The elastic tolerance of slum-dwellers—who accommodated every caste and race and condition of person within their sprawl of huts—rarely extended to lepers. Local councils and street committees didn’t endure their presence for long. Feared and shunned, the lepers formed themselves into mobile slums that settled, within an hour, in any open space they could find, and made a traceless departure in even less time. Sometimes they established themselves for several weeks beside a rubbish dump, fending off the permanent rag-pickers, who resisted their incursion. At other times they set up their camp on a swampy patch of vacant land or some outfall for industrial waste. When I first visited them with Abdullah, that day, I found that they’d built their ragged shelters on the rusty stones of a railway siding near the suburb of Khar.

  We were forced to park Abdullah’s bike, and enter the railway land as the lepers did, through gaps in fences and across ditches. The rusty plateau was a staging area for most trains on the urban route and many of the goods wagons carrying produce and manufactured articles out of the city. Beyond the sub-station itself were office outbuildings, storage warehouses, and maintenance sheds. Further on was a vast shunting area—an open space marked by dozens of railway lines and their confluences. At the outer edges, high wire fences enclosed the space.

  Outside was the commerce and cosiness of suburban Khar: traffic and gardens, balconies and bazaars. Within was the aridity of function and systems. There were no plants, no animals, and no people. Even the rolling stock were ghost trains, trundling from shunting stop to shunting stop without staff or passengers. Then there was the lepers’ slum.

  They’d seized a diamond of clear space between the tracks for themselves, and patched their shelters together in it. None of the huts was taller than my chest. From a distance, they looked like the pup tents of an army bivouac wreathed in the smoke of cooking fires. As we neared them, however, we saw that their appalling raggedness made the slum huts where I lived seem like solid, comfortable structures. They were made from scraps of cardboard and plastic held aloft with crooked branches, and braced with thin string. I could’ve knocked the whole camp to rubble with an open hand, and it would’ve taken me less than a minute, yet thirty men, women, and children made their lives there.

  We entered the slum unchallenged, and made our way to one of the huts near the center. People stopped and stared at us, but no-one spoke. It was hard not to look at them, and then hard not to stare when I did look. Some of the people had no noses, most of them had no fingers, the feet of many were bound in bloody bandages, and some were so advanced into the deteriorations that their lips and ears were missing.

  I don’t know why—the price, perhaps, that women pay for their loveliness—but the disfigurements seemed more ghastly for the women than they were for the men. Many of the men had a defiant and even a jaunty air about them—a kind of pugnacious ugliness that was fascinating in itself. But shyness just looked cowed in the women, and hunger looked predatory. The disease was indiscernible in the many children I saw. They looked fit, if uniformly thin, and quite well. And they worked hard, all of those children. Their small fingers did the grasping for the whole of their tribe.

  They’d seen us coming, and must’ve passed the word because, as we approached the hut, a man crawled out and stood to greet us. Two children came at once and supported him. He was tiny, reaching to just above my waist, and severely stricken with the disease. His lips and the lower part of his face were eaten away to a hard, knobby ridge of dark flesh that extended downwards from the cheeks to the hinges of his jaw. The jaw itself was exposed, as were the teeth and gums, and the gaping holes where his nose had been.

  ‘Abdullah, my son,’ he said, in Hindi. ‘How are you? Have you eaten?’

  ‘I am well, Ranjitbhai.’ Abdullah replied in respectful tones. ‘I have brought the gora to meet you. We have just now eaten, but we will drink tea, thank you.’

  Children brought stools to us, and we sat there in the open space in front of Ranjit’s hut. A small crowd gathered and sat on the ground, or stood around us.

  ‘This is Ranjitbhai,’ Abdullah told me, in Hindi, speaking loudly enough for all to hear. ‘He is the boss here, the senior fellow, in the slum of the lepers. He is the king here, in this club for kala topis.’

  Kala topi means black hat in Hindi, and it’s a phrase used, sometimes, to describe a thief, referring to the black-banded hats that convicted thieves were forced to wear in Bombay’s Arthur Road Prison. I wasn’t sure exactly what Abdullah had meant by the remark, but Ranjit and the other lepers took it well enough, smiling and repeating the phrase several times.

  ‘Greetings, Ranjitbhai,’ I said, in Hindi. ‘My name is Lin.’

  ‘Aap doctor hain? he asked. You are a doctor?

  ‘No!’ I almost shouted in panic, disconcerted by the disease and my ignorance of it, and afraid he would ask me to help them. I turned to Abdullah, and switched to English. ‘Tell him I’m not a doctor, Abdullah. Tell him I just do a little first aid, and treat rat bites and scratches caused by the barbed wire, and things like that. Explain to him. Tell him that I haven’t had any real training, and I don’t know the first thing about leprosy.’

  Abdullah nodded, and then faced Ranjitbhai.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘He is a doctor.’

  ‘Thank you very much, Abdullah,’ I gnashed out through clenched teeth.

  Children brought full glasses of water for us, and tea in chipped cups. Abdullah drank his water in quick gulps. Ranjit tilted his head back, and one of the children tipped the water in a gurgle down his throat. I hesitated, fearful of the grotesque sickness around me. One of the slum words in Hindi for lepers can be translated as the undead, and I felt that I was holding the nightmares of the undead in my hands. All the world of suffering disease was concentrated in that glass of water, it seemed to me.

  But Abdullah had drunk his glass. I was sure he’d calculated the risks, and decided it was safe. And every day of my life was a risk. Every hour had its hazards, after the big gamble of escape from prison. The voluptuous recklessness of a fugitive moved my arm to my mouth, and I drank the water down. Forty pairs of eyes watched me drink.

  Ranjit’s own eyes were honey-coloured, and clouded by what I judged to be incipient cataracts. He examined me closely, those eyes roving from my feet to my hair and back, several times, with unshy curiosity.

  ‘Khaderbhai has told me that you need medicines,’ he said slowly in English.

  His teeth clicked together as he spoke, and with no lips to help him form the words, his speech was difficult to understand. The letters B, F, P, and V were impossible, for example, with M and W coming out as other
sounds altogether. The mouth forms more than just words, of course: it forms attitudes and moods and nuances of meaning, and those expressive hints were also missing. And he had no fingers, so even that aid to communication was denied him. Instead, there was a child, perhaps his son, who stood at his shoulder and repeated his words in a quiet but steady voice, one beat behind the rhythm of his speech, just as a translator might.

  ‘We are always happy to help lord Abdel Khader,’ the two voices said. ‘I have the honour to serve him. We can give you much medicine, every week, no problem. First-class stuff, as you see.’

  He shouted a name, then, and a tall boy in his early teens pushed through the crowd to lay a canvas bundle at my feet. He knelt to roll out the canvas, and revealed a collection of ampoules and plastic bottles. There was morphine hydrochloride, penicillin, and antibiotics for staph and strep infections. The containers were labelled and new.

  ‘Where do they get this stuff?’ I asked Abdullah as I examined the medicines.

  ‘They steal it,’ he answered me, in Hindi.

  ‘Steal it? How do they steal it?’

  ‘Bahut hoshiyaar,’ he replied. Very cleverly.

  ‘Yes, yes.’

  A chorus of voices surrounded us. There was no humour in that concord. They accepted Abdullah’s praise solemnly, as if he was admiring some work of art they’d collectively produced. Good thieves, clever thieves, I heard people mutter around me.

  ‘What do they do with it?’

  ‘They sell it on the black market,’ he told me, still speaking in Hindi, so that all those present could follow our conversation. ‘They survive nicely from this, and other very good stealing.’

  ‘I don’t get it. Why would anyone buy medicine from them? You can buy this stuff from just about any chemist.’

  ‘You want to know everything, brother Lin, isn’t it? Well then, we must have another cup of tea, because this is a two-cups-of-tea story.’

  The crowd laughed at that, and pressed a little closer, picking out places to sit near us for the story. A large, empty, unattended goods wagon rumbled past slowly on an adjacent track, perilously close to the huts. No-one gave it more than a cursory glance. A railway worker, dressed in khaki shirt and shorts, strolled between the lines, inspecting the rails. He looked up at the lepers’ camp from time to time, but his mild curiosity faded as he passed us, and he never looked back. Our tea arrived, and we sipped it as Abdullah began his story. Several of the children were sitting against our legs, their arms wrapped around one another companionably. One little girl slipped her arm around my right leg, and hugged me with artless affection.

  Abdullah spoke in very simple Hindi, repeating some passages in English, when he perceived that I hadn’t understood. He began by talking of the British Raj, the time when Europeans controlled all of India from the Khyber Pass to the Bay of Bengal. The firengi, the foreigners, he said, gave lepers the lowest priority on their scale of privileges and entitlements. As the last in line, lepers often missed out on the limited supply of medicines, bandages, and medical treatment. When famine or flood struck, even the traditional medicines and herbal remedies were in short supply. The lepers became skilled at stealing what they couldn’t obtain by other means—so skilled, in fact, that they accumulated surpluses, and began to sell medicines in their own black market.

  In India’s vastness, Abdullah went on, there were always conflicts—brigandage, rebellions, wars. Men fought, and blood was spilled. But many more men died through the festering of wounds and the ravages of disease than were killed in battles. One of the best sources of intelligence available to police forces and governments lay in the control of medicines, bandages, and expertise. All sales from chemists, hospital pharmacies, and pharmaceutical wholesalers were registered. Any purchase or string of purchases significantly greater than the established norm attracted attention that sometimes led to captures or killings. A telltale trail of medicines, particularly of antibiotics, had led to the downfall of many dacoits and revolutionaries. In their black market, however, the lepers asked no questions, and sold to anyone who could pay. Their networks and secret markets existed in every great city in India. Their customers were terrorists, infiltrators, separatists, or just more than usually ambitious outlaws.

  ‘These people are dying,’ Abdullah concluded, with the colourful turn of phrase that I was learning to expect from him, ‘and they steal life for themselves, and then they sell life to others who are dying.’

  When Abdullah finished speaking, there was a dense and ponderous silence. Everyone looked at me. They seemed to want some response, some reaction, to the story of their sadness and skill, their cruel isolation and violent indispensability. Whistling hisses of breath came through the clenched teeth of lipless mouths. Patient, serious eyes fixed me with expectant concentration.

  ‘Can I … can I have another glass of water, please?’ I asked, in Hindi, and it must’ve been the right thing to say because the whole crowd started laughing. Several children rushed off to fetch the water, and a number of hands patted me on the back and shoulder.

  Ranjitbhai explained, then, how Sunil, the boy who’d showed us the canvas bundle of medicines, would make deliveries to my hut in the slum as and when I required them. Before we could leave, he asked that I remain seated for a while longer. Then he directed every man, woman, and child in his group to come forward and touch my feet. It was mortifying, a torment, and I entreated him not to do it. He insisted. A stern, almost severe expression burned in his eyes, while the lepers hobbled forward, one by one, and tapped their leathery stumps or the blackened, curled claws of their fingernails to my feet.

  An hour later, Abdullah parked his bike near the World Trade Centre. We stood together for a moment, and then he reached out impulsively and enclosed me in a warm, bearish hug. I laughed as we came apart, and he frowned at me, clearly puzzled.

  ‘Is it funny?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ I reassured him. ‘I just wasn’t expecting a bear hug, that’s all.’

  ‘Bare? Do you mean it is naked?’

  ‘No, no, we call that a bear hug,’ I explained, gesturing with my hands, as if they were claws. ‘Bears, you know, the furry animals that eat honey and sleep in caves. When you hold someone like that, we say you’re giving them a bear hug.’

  ‘Caves? Sleeping in caves?’

  ‘It’s okay. Don’t worry about it. I liked it. It was … good friendship. It was what friends do, in my country, giving a bear hug like that.’

  ‘My brother,’ he said, with an easy smile, ‘I will see you tomorrow, with Sunil, from the lepers, with new medicine.’

  He rode off, and I walked alone into the slum. I looked around me, and that place I’d once regarded as grievously forlorn seemed sturdy, vital, a miniature city of boundless hope and possibility. The people, as I passed them, were robust and invigorated. I sat down in my hut, with the thin plywood door closed, and I cried.

  Suffering, Khaderbhai once told me, is the way we test our love, especially our love for God. I didn’t know God, as he’d put it, but even as a disbeliever I failed the test that day. I couldn’t love God—anyone’s God—and I couldn’t forgive God. The tears stopped after a few minutes, but it was the first time I’d cried for too long, and I was still deep in the mud of it when Prabaker came into my hut and squatted down beside me.

  ‘He is a danger man, Lin,’ he said without preamble.

  ‘What?’

  ‘This Abdullah fellow, who came here today. He is a very danger man. You are better not for any knowing of him. And doings with him are even worsely dangerous, also.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘He is …’ Prabaker paused, and the struggle was explicit in his gentle, open face. ‘He is a killing man, Lin. A murdering fellow. He is killing the people for money. He is a goonda—a gangster fellow—for Khaderbhai. Everybody knows this. Everybody, except of you.’

  I knew it was true without asking any more, without a shred of proof beyond Praba
ker’s word. It’s true, I said in my mind. In saying it, I realised that I’d always known, or suspected it. It was in the way other people treated him, the whispers he inspired, and the fear I’d seen in so many of the eyes that looked into his. It was in the ways that Abdullah was like the best and most dangerous men I’d known in prison. That, or something like that, had to be true.

  I tried to think clearly about what he was, and what he did, and what my relationship to him should or shouldn’t be. Khaderbhai was right, of course. Abdullah and I were very much alike. We were men of violence, when violence was required, and we weren’t afraid to break the law. We were both outlaws. We were both alone in the world. And Abdullah, like me, was ready to die for any reason that seemed good enough on the day. But I’d never killed anyone. In that, we were different men.

  Still, I liked him. I thought of that afternoon at the lepers’ slum, and I recalled how self-assured I’d been there with Abdullah. I knew that a part of whatever equanimity I’d managed to display, perhaps most of it, had really been his. With him I’d been strong and able to cope. He was the first man I’d met, since the escape from prison, who’d had that effect on me. He was the kind of man that tough criminals call a hundred-percenter. the kind of man who’ll put his life on the line if he calls you his friend; the kind who’ll put his shoulder beside yours, without question or complaint, and stand with you against any odds.

  Because men like that are so often the heroes in films and books, we forget how rare they are in the real world. But I knew. It was one of the things that prison taught me. Prison pulls the masks away from men. You can’t hide what you are, in prison. You can’t pretend to be tough. You are, or you’re not, and everyone knows it. And when the knives came out against me, as they did more than once, and it was kill or be killed, I learned that only one man in hundreds will stand with you, to the end, in friendship’s name.