Shantaram: A Novel

by Gregory David Roberts

  No-one spoke or moved. There was a perceptible sharpening of focus and attention in the few silent moments as Khaderbhai gathered his thoughts. Each man had his own opinion and level of articulacy yet I had the clear impression that Khaderbhai’s contribution was usually the last word. I sensed that his response would set the tone, perhaps even becoming the answer those men would give, if the question about suffering were asked again. His expression was impassive, and his eyes were modestly cast down, but he was far too intelligent not to perceive the awe he inspired in others. I thought that he was far too human, as well, not to be flattered by it. When I came to know him better, I discovered that he was always avidly interested in what others thought of him, always acutely aware of his own charisma and its effect on those around him, and that every word he spoke, to everyone but God, was a performance. He was a man with the ambition to change the world forever. Nothing that he ever said or did—not even the quiet humility in his deep voice as he spoke to us then—was an accident, a chance, or anything but a calculated fragment of his plan.

  ‘In the first place, I would like to make a general comment, and then I would like to follow it with a more detailed answer. Do you all allow me this? Good. Then, to the general comment—I think that suffering is the way we test our love. Every act of suffering, no matter how small or agonisingly great, is a test of love in some way. Most of the time, suffering is also a test of our love for God. This is my first statement. Does anyone wish to discuss this point, before I proceed?’

  I looked from one face to another. Some men smiled in appreciation of his point, some nodded their agreement, and some others frowned in concentration. All of them seemed eager for Khaderbhai to continue.

  ‘Very well, I will move on to my more detailed answer. The Holy Koran tells us that all things in the universe are related, one to another, and that even opposites are united in some way. I think that there are two points about suffering that we should remember, and they have to do with pleasure and pain. The first is this: that pain and suffering are connected, but they are not the same thing. Pain can exist without suffering, and it is also possible to suffer without feeling pain. Do you agree with this?’

  He scanned the attentive, expectant faces, and found approval.

  ‘The difference between them is this, I think: that what we learn from pain—for example, that fire burns and is dangerous—is always individual, for ourselves alone, but what we learn from suffering is what unites us as one human people. If we do not suffer with our pain, then we have not learned about anything but ourselves. Pain without suffering is like victory without struggle. We do not learn from it what makes us stronger or better or closer to God.’

  The others wagged their heads at one another in agreement.

  ‘And the other part, the pleasure part?’ Abdul Ghani asked. A few of the men laughed gently, grinning at Ghani as he looked from one to the other. He laughed at them in return. ‘What? What? Can’t a man have a healthy, scientific interest in pleasure?’

  ‘Ah,’ Khader continued, ‘I think that it’s a little bit like what Mr. Lin tells us this Sapna fellow has done with the words from the Christian Bible. It is the reverse. Suffering is exactly like happiness, but backwards. One is the mirror image of the other, and has no real meaning or existence without the other.’

  ‘I am sorry, I do not understand,’ Farid said meekly, glancing at the others and blushing darkly. ‘Please can you explain it?’

  ‘It is like this,’ Khaderbhai said gently. ‘Take my hand, as an example. If I open my hand out like this, stretching the fingers and showing you the palm, or if I open my hand and put it on your shoulder, my fingers stretched out like this—that is happiness, or we may call it so for the sake of this moment. And if I curl my fingers, and close them tightly into a fist, just so, we may call that suffering. The two gestures are opposite in their meaning and power. Each one is completely different in appearance and in what it can do, but the hand that makes the gesture is the same. Suffering is happiness, backwards.’

  Each man was then given another turn to speak, and the discussion itself moved backwards and forwards, reversing on itself as arguments were embellished or abandoned for two long hours. Hashish was smoked. Tea was served twice more, Abdul Ghani choosing to mix a small pellet of black opium in his, and drinking it down with a practised grimace.

  Madjid modified his position by agreeing that suffering was not necessarily a sign of weakness, but insisting that we could toughen ourselves against it with a strong will; strength of will coming from strict self-discipline, a kind of self-imposed suffering. Farid added to his notion of suffering as an anti-toxin to the poison of happiness by recalling specific incidents from the lives of his friends. Old Sobhan whispered a few sentences in Urdu, and Khaderbhai translated the new point for us: there are some things we human beings will never understand, the things only God can understand, and that suffering may well be one of them. Keki Dorabji made the point that the universe, as those of the Parsee faith see it, is a process of struggle between opposites—light and darkness, hot and cold, suffering and pleasure—and that nothing can exist without the existence of its opposite. Rajubhai added that suffering is a condition of the unenlightened soul, locked within the wheel of Karma. Khaled Fattah said nothing more, despite the artful urgings of Abdul Ghani, who teased and cajoled him several times before finally giving up the attempt, visibly piqued by the stubborn refusal.

  For his part, Abdul Ghani emerged as the most vocal and likeable of the group. Khaled was an intriguing man, but there was anger—too much anger, perhaps—brooding in him. Madjid had been a professional soldier in Iran. He seemed brave and direct, yet given to a simplistic view of the world and its people. Sobhan Mahmoud was undoubtedly pious, but there was a vaguely antiseptic scent of inflexibility about him. Young Farid was openhearted, self-effacing and, I suspected, too easily led. Keki was dour and unresponsive, and Rajubhai seemed to be suspicious of me, almost to the point of rudeness. Of all of them, only Abdul Ghani displayed any sense of humour, and only he laughed aloud. He was as familiar with younger men as he was with those senior to him. He sprawled in his place, where others sat. He interrupted or interjected when he pleased, and he ate more, drank more, and smoked more than any man in the room. He was especially, irreverently, affectionate with Khaderbhai, and it was certain that they were close friends.

  Khaderbhai asked questions, probed, made comments upon what was said, but never added another word to his own position. I was silent; drifting, tired, and grateful that no-one pressured me to speak.

  When Khaderbhai finally adjourned the meeting, he walked with me to the door that opened into the street beside the Nabila Mosque, and stopped me there with a gentle hand on my forearm. He said he was glad I’d come, and that he hoped I’d enjoyed myself. Then he asked me to return on the following day because there was a favour I could do for him, if I was willing. Surprised and flattered, I agreed at once, promising to meet him at the same place on the following morning. I stepped out into the night, and almost put it out of my mind.

  On the long walk home, my thoughts browsed among the ideas I’d heard presented by that scholarly group of criminals. I recalled other, similar discussions I’d shared with men in prison. Despite their general lack of formal education, or perhaps because of it, many men I’d known in prison had a fervent interest in the world of ideas. They didn’t call it philosophy, or even know it as such, but the stuff of their conversations was often just that—abstract questions of moral and ethic, meaning and purpose.

  It had been a long day, and an even longer night. With Madame Zhou’s photograph in my hip pocket, my feet pinched by shoes that had been bought to bury Karla’s dead lover, and my head clogged with definitions of suffering, I walked the emptying streets and remembered a cell in an Australian prison where the murderers and thieves I’d called my friends often gathered to argue, passionately, about truth and love and virtue. I wondered if they thought of me from time to time. Am I a d
aydream for them now, I asked myself, a daydream of freedom and flight? How would they answer the question, what is suffering?

  I knew. Khaderbhai had dazzled us with the wisdom of his uncommon sense, and the cleverness of his talent for expressing it. His definition was sharp, and barbed enough—suffering is happiness, backwards—to hook a fish of memory. But the truth of what human suffering really means, in the dry, frightened mouth of life, wasn’t in Khaderbhai’s cleverness that night. It belonged to Khaled Ansari, the Palestinian. His was the definition that stayed with me. His simple, unbeautiful words were the clearest expression of what all prisoners, and everyone else who lives long enough, know well—that suffering, of every kind, is always a matter of what we’ve lost. When we’re young, we think that suffering is something that’s done to us. When we get older—when the steel door slams shut, in one way or another—we know that real suffering is measured by what’s taken away from us.

  Feeling small and alone and lonely, I walked by memory and touch through the dark, lightless lanes of the slum. As I turned into the last gully where my own empty hut waited, I saw lamplight. A man was standing not far from my door with a lantern in his hand. Beside him was a small child, a little girl, with knotted, teased hair. I drew near and saw that the man with the lantern was Joseph, the drunkard who’d beaten his wife, and that Prabaker was with him in the shadows.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I whispered. ‘It’s late.’

  ‘Hello, Linbaba. Nice clothes you’re wearing for changes,’ Prabaker smiled, his round face floating in the yellow light. ‘I love it, your shoes—so clean and shining. Just in time you are. Joseph is doing it good things. He has paid money, to have it the good luck sign put on everybody his doors. Since not being a badly drinking fellow any more, he has been working full overtimes, and with some of his extra money he paid for this, to help us all with good luck.’

  ‘The good luck sign?’

  ‘Yes, look here at this child, look at her hand.’ He lifted the little girl’s wrists, and exposed the hands. In the feeble light, it wasn’t clear what I was supposed to see. ‘Look, here, only four fingers she has. See that! Four fingers only. Very good luck, this thing.’

  I saw it. Two fingers on the child’s hands were joined, imperceptibly, to make just one thick finger between the index and middle fingers. Her palms were blue. Joseph held a flat dish of blue paint. The child had been dipping her hands into it, and making handprints on the door of every hut in our lane to bring protection against the many afflictions attributed to the Evil Eye. Superstitious slum-dwellers apparently deemed her to be especially blessed because she was born with the rare difference of only four fingers on each hand. As I watched, the child reached over to press her small hands against my flimsy door. With a brief, serious nod, Joseph led the girl away to the next hut.

  ‘I am helping that used-to-be-beating-his-wife-and-badly-drinking-fellow, that Joseph,’ Prabaker said, in a stage whisper that could be heard twenty metres away. ‘You are wanting any things, before I’m going?’

  ‘No. Thanks. Good night, Prabu.’

  ‘Shuba ratri, Lin,’ he grinned. Good night. ‘Have it sweet dreams for me, yes?’

  He turned to leave, but I stopped him.

  ‘Hey Prabu.’

  ‘Yes, Lin?’

  ‘Tell me, what is suffering? What do you think? What does it mean, that people suffer?’

  Prabaker glanced along the dark lane of ramshackle huts to the hovering glow-worm of Joseph’s lamp. He looked back at me, only his eyes and his teeth visible, although we were standing quite close together.

  ‘You’re feeling okay, Lin?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I laughed.

  ‘Did you drink any daru tonight, like that badly-drinking-Joseph?’

  ‘No, really, I’m fine. Come on, you’re always defining everything for me. We were talking about suffering tonight, and I’m interested to know, what do you think about it?’

  ‘Is easy—suffering is hungry, isn’t it? Hungry, for anything, means suffering. Not hungry for something, means, not suffering. But everybody knows that.’

  ‘Yes, I guess everybody does. Good night, Prabu.’

  ‘Goodnight, Lin.’

  He walked away, singing, and he knew that none of the people sleeping in the wretched huts around him would mind. He knew that if they woke they would listen for a moment, and then drift back to sleep with a smile because he was singing about love.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  ‘WAKE UP, LIN! Hey, Linbaba, you must awake up now!’

  One eye opened, and focused on a hovering, brown balloon that had Johnny Cigar’s face painted on it. The eye closed again.

  ‘Go away, Johnny.’

  ‘Hello to you, too, Lin,’ he chuckled, infuriatingly happy. ‘You have to get up.’

  ‘You’re an evil man, Johnny. You’re a cruel and evil man. Go away.’

  ‘One fellow has an injury, Lin. We need your medicine box, and your good medical self also.’

  ‘It’s still dark, man.’ I groaned. ‘It’s two o’clock in the morning. Tell him to come back in the daylight, when I’m alive.’

  ‘Oh, certainly, I will tell him, and he will go, but I think you should know that he is bleeding very swiftly. Still, if you must have more sleep, I will beat him away from your door, this very instant, with three-four good shots from my slipper.’

  I was leaning out over the deep pool of sleep but that word, bleeding, pulled me back from the edge. I sat up, wincing at the numbed stiffness of one hip. My bed, like most of the beds in the slum, was a blanket, folded twice and placed on the hard-packed earth. Kapok mattresses were available, but they were impractical. They took up too much space in the small huts, they quickly became infested with lice, fleas, and other vermin, and rats found them irresistible. After long months of sleeping on the ground, I was as used to it as a man gets, but there wasn’t much flesh on my hips, and I woke up sore every morning.

  Johnny was holding a lamp quite close to my face. I blinked, pushing it aside to see another man squatting in the doorway with his arm held out in front of him. There was a large cut or gash on the arm, and blood seeped from it, drip, drip, drop, into a bucket. Only half awake, as I was, I stared stupidly at the yellow plastic bucket. The man had brought his own bucket with him to stop the blood from staining the floor of my hut, and that seemed more disturbing, somehow, than the wound itself.

  ‘Sorry for trouble, Mr. Lin,’ the young man said.

  ‘This is Ameer,’ Johnny Cigar grunted, whacking the injured man on the back of the head with a resounding slap. ‘Such a stupid fellow he is, Lin. Now he’s sorry for trouble. I should take my slipper and beat your black, and beat some of your blue also.’

  ‘God, what a mess. This is a bad cut, Johnny.’ It was a long, deep slash from the shoulder almost to the tip of the elbow. A large, triangular flap of skin, shaped like the lapel of an overcoat, was beginning to curl away from the wound. ‘He needs a doctor. This has to be stitched up. You should’ve taken him to the hospital.’

  ‘Hospital naya!’ Ameer whined. ‘Nahin, baba!’

  Johnny slapped him on the ear.

  ‘Shut up, you stupid! He won’t go to a hospital or a doctor, Lin. He’s a cheeky fellow, a goonda. He’s afraid of police. Aren’t you, hey, you stupid? Afraid of police, na?’

  ‘Stop hitting him, Johnny. It’s really not helping. How did this happen?’

  ‘Fighting. His gang, with the other gang. They fight, with swords and choppers, these street gangsters, and this is the result.’

  ‘The other fellows started it. They were doing the Eve-teasing!’ Ameer complained. Eve-teasing was the name given to the charge of sexual harassment, under Indian law, and it covered a range of offences from insulting language to physical molestation. ‘We warned them to stop it. Our ladies were not walking safely. For that reason only we did fight them.’

  Johnny raised his broad hand, silencing Ameer’s protest. He wanted to strike the young man aga
in, but my frown gave him reluctant pause.

  ‘You think this is a reason to fight with swords and choppers, you stupid? Your mummy will be very happy that you stop the Eve-teasing, and get yourself hacked up into teeny pieces, na? Very happy she’ll be! And now you want Linbaba to sew you up, and make nice repairs to your arm. Shameful, you are!’

  ‘Wait a minute, Johnny. I can’t do this. It’s too big, too messy … it’s too much.’

  ‘You have the needles and cotton in your medical boxes, Lin.’

  He was right. The kit contained suture needles and silk thread. But I’d never used them.

  ‘I’ve never used them, Johnny. I can’t do it. He needs a professional—a doctor or a nurse.’

  ‘I told you, Lin. He won’t go to a doctor. I tried to force him. Someone in the other gang was hurt even more seriously than this stupid boy. Maybe he will die also, this other fellow. It is a police matter now, and they are asking questions. Ameer won’t go to any doctor or hospital.’

  ‘If you give me, I will do myself,’ Ameer said, swallowing hard.

  His eyes were huge with fright and horror-struck resolve. I looked at him full in the face for the first time, and I saw how young he was: sixteen or seventeen years old. He was wearing Puma sneakers, jeans, and a basketball singlet with the number 23 printed on the front. The clothes were Indian copies of famous western brands, but they were considered fashionably hip by his peers in the slum, other young men with lean bellies and heads full of scrambled foreign dreams; young men who went without food to buy clothes that they imagined made them look like the cool foreigners in magazines and films.

  I didn’t know the kid. He was one of thousands I’d never seen, although I’d been there for almost six months, and no-one in the place lived more than five or six hundred metres from my hut. Some men, such as Johnny Cigar and Prabaker, appeared to know everyone in the slum. It seemed extraordinary to me that they should know intimate details from the lives of so many thousands of people. It was even more remarkable that they cared—that they encouraged and scolded and worried about all of them. I wondered how that young man was connected to Johnny Cigar. Ameer shivered in the swirling chill of night, pressing his lips into a wide, noiseless whine as he contemplated taking needle and thread to his own flesh. I wondered how it was that Johnny, standing above him, knew him well enough to be sure he would do it; to nod at me with the message, Yes, if you give him the needle, he will do it himself.