Shantaram: A Novel

by Gregory David Roberts

  For a moment I looked at the marks, the curved indentations that her knees had made in the brocade cushion beside me on the floor. I felt tired and angry and confused. I turned to see Karla and Rajan staring at me impatiently in the doorway. As I followed them along the corridors of the Palace, I grew more sullen and resentful with every step.

  Rajan led us to a room at the very end of a corridor. The door was open. The room was decorated with large movie posters—Lauren Bacall in a still from To Have And Have Not, Pier Angeli from Somebody Up There Likes Me, and Sean Young from Blade Runner. A young and very beautiful woman sat on the large bed in the centre of the room. Her blonde hair was long and thick, ending in spirals of lush curls. Her sky-blue eyes were large and set unusually wide apart. Her skin was flawless pink, her lips painted a deep red. A suitcase and a cosmetic case were snapped shut and resting on the floor at her golden-slippered feet.

  ‘About fucking time. You’re late. I’m going outta my mind here.’ It was a deep voice. The accent was Californian.

  ‘Gilbert had to change his clothes,’ Karla replied, with something of her familiar composure. And the traffic, getting here—you don’t want to know.’

  ‘Gilbert?’ Her nose wrinkled with distaste.

  ‘It’s a long story,’ I said, not smiling. ‘Are you ready to go?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, looking at Karla.

  ‘You don’t know?’

  ‘Hey, fuck you, Jack!’ she exploded, rounding on me with so much fury that I didn’t see the fear behind it. ‘What the hell business is it of yours, anyway?’

  There’s a special anger we reserve for people who won’t let us do them a good turn. My teeth began to grind with it.

  ‘Look, are you coming or not?’

  ‘Did she say it’s okay?’ Lisa asked Karla. Both women looked to Rajan, and then to the mirror on the wall behind him. Their expressions told me that Madame Zhou was watching us, and listening, as we spoke.

  ‘It’s fine. She said you can go,’ I told her, hoping she wouldn’t comment on my imperfect American accent.

  ‘Is this for real? No bullshit?’

  ‘No bullshit,’ Karla said.

  The girl stood up quickly and grabbed at her bags.

  ‘Well, what’re we waiting for? Let’s get the fuck outta here before she changes her goddamn mind.’

  Rajan stopped me at the street door, and gave me a large, sealed envelope. He stared that perplexing malice into my eyes once more, and then closed the door. I caught up to Karla and pulled her round to face me.

  ‘What was that all about?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ she asked, a little smile trying to light her eyes. ‘It worked. We got her out.’

  ‘I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about you and me, and that crazy game Madame Zhou was playing up there. You were crying your eyes out, Karla—what was it all about?’

  She glanced at Lisa, who stood close by, impatient and shielding her eyes, even though the late-afternoon light wasn’t bright. She looked at me again, her green eyes puzzled and tired.

  ‘Do we have to talk about this now, in public?’

  ‘No, we don’t!’ Lisa answered for me.

  ‘I’m not talking to you,’ I snarled, not looking at her. My eyes were fixed on Karla’s face.

  ‘You’re not talking to me, either,’ Karla said firmly. ‘Not here. Not now. Let’s just go.’

  ‘What is this?’ I demanded.

  ‘You’re over-reacting, Lin.’

  ‘I’m over-reacting!’ I said, almost shouting, and proving her right. I was angry that she’d told me so little of the truth, and prepared me so poorly for the interview. I was hurt that she didn’t trust me enough to give me the whole story. ‘That’s funny, that’s really funny.’

  ‘Who is this fucking jerk?’ Lisa snarled.

  ‘Shut up, Lisa.’ Karla said, just as Madame Zhou had said it to her, only minutes before. Lisa reacted just as Karla had, with meek, sullen silence.

  ‘I don’t want to talk about this now, Lin,’ Karla said, turning to me with an expression of hard, reluctant disappointment. There are few things people can do with their eyes that hurt more, and I hated to see it. Passers-by stopped near us on the street, staring and eavesdropping openly.

  ‘Look, I know there’s a lot more going on here than getting Lisa out of the Palace. What happened up there? How did she … you know, how did she know about us? I’m supposed to be some guy from the embassy, and she starts talking about being in love with you. I don’t get it. And who the hell are Ahmed and Christina? What happened to them? What was she talking about? One minute you’re indestructible, and then the next minute you’re breaking down, while Madame Nutcase is babbling away in German or whatever.’

  ‘It was Swiss-German, actually,’ she snapped, a flash of spite in the gleam of her clenched teeth.

  ‘Swiss, Chinese, so what? I just want to know what’s going on. I want to help you. I want to know … well, where I stand.’

  A few more people stopped to join the idlers. One group of three young men stood very close, leaning on one another’s shoulders and gawking with aggressive curiosity. The taxi driver who’d brought us there was standing beside his cab, five metres away. He twirled his handkerchief to fan himself, watching us, smiling. He was much taller than I’d thought him to be; tall and thin and dressed in a tightly fitting white shirt and trousers. Karla glanced over her shoulder at him. He wiped at his moustache with the red handkerchief, and then tied it as a scarf around his neck. He smiled at her. His strong, white teeth were gleaming.

  ‘Where you’re standing is right here, on the street, outside the Palace,’ Karla said. She was angry and sad and strong—stronger than I was at that moment. I almost hated her for it. ‘Where I’m sitting is in that cab. Where I’m going is none of your damn business.’

  She walked away.

  ‘Where the hell did you get that guy?’ I heard Lisa say, as they approached the cab.

  The taxi driver greeted them, waggling his head happily. When they drove past me, there was music playing, Freeway of Love, and they were laughing. For one explosive moment of writhing fantasy I saw them all together, naked, the taxi driver and Lisa and Karla. It was improbable and ridiculous and I knew it, but the squirm was in my mind, and a white-hot thump of rage went pulsing along the thread of time and fate that connected me to Karla. Then I remembered that I’d left my boots and clothes at her apartment.

  ‘Hey!’ I called after the retreating cab. “My clothes! Karla!’

  ‘Mr. Lin?’

  There was a man standing beside me. His face was familiar, but I couldn’t place it immediately.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Abdel Khader want you, Mr. Lin.’

  The mention of Khader’s name jolted my memory. It was Nazeer, Khaderbhai’s driver. The white car was parked nearby.

  ‘How … how did you … what are you doing here?’

  ‘He say you come now. I am driving.’ He gestured toward the car, and took two little steps to encourage me.

  ‘I don’t think so, Nazeer. It’s been a long day. You can tell Khaderbhai that —’

  ‘He say you come now,’ Nazeer said grimly. He wasn’t smiling, and I had the feeling that I would have to fight him if I wanted to avoid getting into the car. I was so angry and confused and tired, just then, that I actually considered it for a moment. It might cost less energy, in the long run, to fight with him, I thought, than to go with him. But Nazeer screwed his face into agonised concentration, and spoke with unaccustomed courtesy. ‘Khaderbhai told it—You come, please—like that, Khaderbhai told it—Please come see me, Mr. Lin.’

  The word please didn’t sit well with him. It was clear that, in his view, lord Abdel Khader Khan gave orders that others quickly and gratefully obeyed. But he’d been told to request my company, rather than command it, and the English words he’d just spoken with such visible effort had been carefully memorised. I pictured him driving across the cit
y and repeating the incantation of the foreign words to himself, as uncomfortable and unhappy with them as if they were fragments of prayer from another man’s religion. Alien to him or not, the words had their effect on me, and he looked relieved when I smiled a surrender.

  ‘Okay, Nazeer, okay,’ I sighed. ‘We’ll go to see Khaderbhai.’

  He began to open the back door of the car, but I insisted on sitting in the front. As soon as we pulled away from the kerb, he switched on the radio and turned the volume to high, perhaps to prevent conversation. The envelope that Rajan had given me was still in my hands, and I turned it over to examine both sides. It was hand-made paper, pink, and about the size of a magazine cover. There was nothing written on the outside. I tore the corner and opened it to find a black-and-white photograph. It was an interior shot of a room, half-lit, and filled with expensive ornaments from a variety of ages and cultures. In the midst of that self-conscious clutter, a woman sat on a throne-like chair. She was dressed in an evening gown of extravagant length that spilled to the floor and concealed her feet. One hand rested on an arm of the chair. The other was poised in a regal wave or an elegant gesture of dismissal. The hair was dark and elaborately coifed, falling in ringlets that framed her round and somewhat plump face. The almond-shaped eyes stared straight into the camera. They wore a faintly neurotic look of startled indignation. The lips of her tiny mouth were pinched in a determined pout that pulled at her weak chin.

  A beautiful woman? I didn’t think so. And a range of less than lovely impressions stared from that face—haughty, spiteful, frightened, spoiled, self-obsessed. The photograph said she was all of those things, and more. And worse. But there was something else on the photograph, something more repugnant and chilling than the unlovely face. It was the message she’d chosen to stamp in red, block letters, across the bottom. It said: MADAME ZHOU IS HAPPY NOW.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  ‘COME IN, Mr. Lin. No, please, sit here. We have been expecting you.’ Abdel Khader waved me to a place at his left hand. I kicked off my shoes at the doorway, where several other pairs of sandals and shoes had been discarded, and sat down on the plush, brocade cushion he’d indicated. It was a large room—nine of us, seated in a circle about a low marble table, occupied no more than a corner of it. The floor was surfaced with smooth, cream, pentagonal tiles. A square of Isfahan carpet covered the tiles in our part of the room. The walls and vaulted ceiling featured a mosaic of pale blue and white miniatures, presenting the effect of a sky with drifts of cloud. Two open arches connected the room to wide passageways. Three picture-seat windows overlooked a palm-filled courtyard. They were all framed with sculptured pillars and topped with minaret-shaped domes inscribed with Arabic lettering. The spill, splash, and stir of water in a cascade fountain came to us from beyond those windows, somewhere in the courtyard.

  It was a room of diligently austere splendour. The only furniture was the low marble table and our nine cushions evenly arranged around the carpet. The only decoration was a framed black and gold-leaf depiction of the Kaaba at Mecca. The eight men who sat or reclined there seemed comfortable in that inornate simplicity, however, and certainly they were free to choose any style that they wanted, for there was the wealth and power of a small empire between them: an empire of crime.

  ‘Are you feeling quite refreshed, Mr. Lin?’ Khaderbhai asked.

  When I’d arrived at the building beside the Nabila Mosque, in Dongri, Nazeer had shown me at once to a large, well-appointed bathroom, where I’d used the toilet and then washed my face and hands. Bombay, in those years, was the most voluptuously dirty city in the world. It wasn’t only hot and cloyingly humid: in the eight rainless months of the year it was constantly aswirl with grimy dust clouds that settled on and smeared every exposed surface with a catholic variety of filths. If I wiped my face with a handkerchief after only half an hour’s walk along any street, the cloth was streaked with black.

  ‘Thank you, yes. I felt tired, when I arrived, but now I’m revived by a combination of politeness and plumbing.’ I was speaking in Hindi, and it was a struggle to carry the humour, sense, and good intentions in the small phrase. We can’t really know what a pleasure it is to run in our own language until we’re forced to stumble in someone else’s. It was a great relief when Khaderbhai spoke in English.

  ‘Please speak English, Mr. Lin. I am very happy that you are learning our languages, but today we would like to practise yours. Each of us here can speak and read and write English, to some extent. In my own case, I have been educated in English, as well as in Hindi and Urdu. In fact, I often find myself thinking first in English, before other languages. My dear friend, Abdul, sitting near you, would call English his first language, I think. And all of us, no matter what our level of learning, are enthusiastic about the study of English. It is a critical thing for us. One of the reasons why I asked you to come here, this evening, was so that we might enjoy the speaking of English with you, a native of the language. This is our monthly discussion night, you see, and our little group talks about—but wait, let me first introduce you.’

  He reached over to lay an affectionate hand on the bulky forearm of the heavy-set, elderly man who sat on his right. He was dressed in the green pantaloons and long tunic of Afghan traditional dress.

  ‘This is Sobhan Mahmoud—let us use first names, after our introductions, Lin, for we are all friends here, yes?’

  Sobhan wagged his grizzled, grey head at me in greeting, fixing me with a look of steely enquiry, perhaps to make sure that I understood the honour implied in the use of first names.

  ‘The very ample and smiling gentleman next to him is my old friend from Peshawar, Abdul Ghani. Next to him is Khaled Ansari, originally from Palestine. Rajubhai, next to him, is from the holy city of Varanasi—have you seen it? No? Well, you must make the time to do so before too long.’

  Rajubhai, a bald, thick-set man with a neat, grey moustache, smiled in response to Khaderbhai’s introduction, and turned to me with his hands joined together in a silent greeting. His eyes, above the gentle steeple of his fingers, were hard and wary.

  ‘Next to our dear Raju,’ Khaderbhai continued, ‘is Keki Dorabjee, who came to Bombay from Zanzibar, with other Indian Parsees, twenty years ago, when they were driven from the island by the nationalist movement.’

  Dorabjee, a very tall, thin man in his middle fifties, turned his dark eyes on me. His expression seemed fixed in such distressing melancholy that I felt compelled to offer him a small, comforting smile in return.

  ‘Next to our brother Keki is Farid. He is the youngest of our group, and the only one of us who is a native Maharashtrian, by virtue of being born in Bombay, although his family came here from Gujarat. Sitting next to you is Madjid, who was born in Teheran, but has lived here, in our city, for more than twenty years.’

  A young servant entered with a tray of glasses and a silver pot of black tea. He served us, beginning with Khaderbhai and ending with me. He left the room, returned momentarily to place two bowls of ladoo and barfi sweets on the table, and then left us once more.

  Immediately afterward, three men joined us in the room, making a place for themselves on another patch of carpet that was near, but a little apart from us. They were introduced to me—Andrew Ferreira, a Goan, and Salman Mustaan and Sanjay Kumar, both from Bombay—but from that moment they never spoke again. They were, it seemed, young gangsters on the next rung below council membership: invited to listen at the meetings, but not to speak. And they did listen, very attentively, while watching us closely. I turned, often, to find their eyes on me, staring out from the kind of grave appraisal I’d come to know too well in prison. They were deciding whether to trust me or not, and how hard it would be—as a purely professional speculation—to kill me, without a gun.

  ‘Lin, we usually talk about some themes, at our discussion nights,’ Abdul Ghani said in a clipped, BBC-accented English, ‘but first we would like to ask you what you make of this.’

  He reached acros
s, pushing toward me a rolled poster that was lying on the table. I opened it out and read through the four paragraphs of large, bold typeface.

  SAPNA

  People of Bombay, listen to the voice of your King. Your dream is come to you and I am he, Sapna, King of Dreams, King of Blood. Your time is come, my children, and your chains of suffering will be lifted from you. I am come. I am the law. My first commandment is to open your eyes. I want you to see your hunger while they waste food. I want you to see your rags while they wear silk. See that you live in the gutter while they live in palaces of marble and gold. My second commandment is to kill them all. Do this with cruel violence.

  Do this in memory of me, Sapna. I am the law.

  There was more, a lot more, all of it in the same vein. It struck me as absurd at first, and I started to smile. The silence in the room and the stares of tense concentration they turned on me stifled the smile to a grimace. They took it very seriously, I realised. Stalling for time, because I didn’t know what Ghani wanted from me, I read through the ranting, insane tract again. While I read the words, I remembered that someone had painted the name Sapna on the wall at the Village in the Sky, twenty-three floors off the ground. I remembered what Prabaker and Johnny Cigar had said about brutal murders done in Sapna’s name. The continuing silence and expectant seriousness in the room filled me with a chill of menace. The hairs on my arms tingled with it, and a caterpillar of sweat inched down the groove of my spine.

  ‘Well, Lin?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘What do you make of it?’

  The stillness was so complete that I could hear myself swallowing. They wanted me to give them something, and they expected it to be good.

  ‘I don’t know what to say. I mean, it’s so ridiculous, so fatuous, it’s hard to take it seriously.’

  Madjid grunted, and cleared his throat loudly. He drew his thick black eyebrows down over a thick black scowl.

  ‘If you call cutting a man from the groin to the throat, and then leaving his organs and his life’s blood all around his house serious, then it is a serious matter.’