Shantaram: A Novel

by Gregory David Roberts

‘You’re a real funny guy, Lin. How did you really get hooked up with that kid?’

  ‘I told you.’

  ‘So what’s he like?’

  ‘I thought you didn’t like kids.’

  ‘I don’t. They’re so … innocent. Except that they’re not. They know exactly what they want, and they don’t stop till they get it. It’s disgusting. All the worst people I know are just like big, grown-up children. It’s so creepy it makes me sick to my stomach.’

  Children might’ve turned her stomach, but it seemed to be immune to the searing effects of the sour mash whisky. She tipped the bottle back and drank off a good quarter of it in long, slow swallows. That’s the one, I thought. If she wasn’t drunk before, she is now. She wiped her lips with the back of her hand and smiled, but the expression was lopsided, and the focus was spilling from the bowls of her china blue eyes. Falling and fading as she was, the mask of her many abrasive attitudes began to slip, and she suddenly looked very young and vulnerable. The set of her jaw—angry, fearing, and dislikeable—relaxed into an expression that was surprisingly gentle and compassionate. Her cheeks were round and pink. The tip of her nose was turned-up slightly, and formed in soft contours. She was a twenty-four-year-old woman with the face of a girl, unmarked by the hollows of compromise or the deeply drawn lines of hard decisions. From the few things that Karla had told me about her, and what I’d seen at Madame Zhou’s, her life had in fact been harder than most, but none of that showed in her face.

  She offered me the bottle and I accepted it, taking a sip. I held on to it for a few moments, and when she wasn’t looking I placed it on the floor beside the bed, discreetly out of her reach. She lit a cigarette and messed at her hair, spilling the loosely tied bun until the long curls fell over one shoulder. With her hand poised there, on top of her head, the wide sleeve of her silk jacket slipped past her elbow, and exposed the pale stubble of a shaved armpit.

  There was no sign of other drugs in the room, but her pupils were contracted to pinpoints, suggesting that she’d taken heroin or some other opiate. Whatever the combination, it was sending her swiftly over the edge. She was slumped uncomfortably against the bedstead, and she was breathing noisily through her mouth. A little trickle of whisky and saliva dribbled from the corner of her slack lower lip.

  Still, she was beautiful. The thought struck me that she would always look beautiful, even when she was being ugly. Hers was a big, lovely, empty face: the face of a pom-pom girl at a football match, the face advertisers use to help them sell preposterous and irrelevant things.

  ‘So go on, tell me. What’s he like, that little kid?’

  ‘Well, I think he’s some kind of religious fanatic,’ I confided, smiling, as I looked over my shoulder at the sleeping boy. ‘He made me stop three times today, and this evening, so he could say his prayers. I don’t know if it’s doing his soul any good, but his stomach seems to be working fine. He can eat like they’re giving prizes for it. He kept me in the restaurant for more than two hours tonight, eating everything from noodles and grilled fish to ice cream and jelly. That’s why we’re late. I would’ve been home ages ago, but I couldn’t get him out of the restaurant. It’s going to cost me an arm and a leg to keep him for the next couple of days. He eats more than I do.’

  ‘Do you know how Hannibal died?’ she asked.

  ‘Come again?’

  ‘Hannibal, that guy with the elephants. Don’t you know your history? He crossed the Alps, with his elephants, to attack the Romans.’

  ‘Yeah, I know who you’re talking about,’ I said testily, irritated by the conversational non sequitur.

  ‘Well, how did he die?’ she demanded. Her expressions were becoming exaggerated, the gross burlesque of the drunk.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Ha!’ she scoffed. ‘You don’t know everything.’

  ‘No. I don’t know everything.’

  There was a lengthening silence. She stared at me blankly. It seemed that I could see the thoughts drifting downwards, through the blue of her eyes, like white flakes in the bubble of a snow-dome.

  ‘So, are you going to tell me?’ I probed after a while. ‘How did he die?’

  ‘Who die?’ she asked, mystified.

  ‘Hannibal. You were going to tell me how he died.’

  ‘Oh, him. Well, he kinda led this army of thirty thousand guys over the Alps into Italy, and fought the Romans for like, sixteen years. Six-teen goddamn years! And he never got beaten, even one time. Then, after a lot of other shit, he went back to his own country, where he became a big honcho, what with being a big hero and all. But the Romans, those guys never forgot that he embarrassed the fuck outta them, so they used politics, and they got his own people to turn on him, and kick him out. Are you getting any of this?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘I mean really, am I wastin’ my goddamn time here with this? I don’t have to do this, you know. I can spend my time with a lot better people than you. I can be with anyone I like. Anyone!’

  The forgotten cigarette was burning down to her fingers. I placed the ashtray under it and prised it loose, letting it fall from her hand into the bowl. She didn’t seem to notice.

  ‘Okay, so the Romans forced Hannibal’s own people to kick him out,’ I pressed, actually curious about the fate of the Carthaginian warrior.

  ‘They exiled him,’ she corrected grumpily.

  ‘Exiled him. Then what happened? How did he die?’

  Lisa stirred her head from the pillows suddenly, her movements groggy, and glared at me with what seemed to be real malevolence.

  ‘What’s so special about Karla, huh?’ she demanded furiously. ‘I’m more beautiful than she is! Take a good look—my tits are better than hers.’

  She pulled the silk jacket open until she was quite naked, touching at her breasts clumsily. ‘Well? Aren’t they?’

  ‘They’re … very nice,’ I muttered.

  ‘Nice? They’re goddamn beautiful is what they are. They’re perfect! You want to touch them, don’t you? Here!’

  She snatched at my wrist with surprising speed, and dragged my hand onto her thigh, near the hip. The flesh was warm and smooth and supple. Nothing in the world is so soft and pleasing to the touch as the skin of a woman’s thigh. No flower, feather, or fabric can match that velvet whisper of flesh. No matter how unequal they may be in other ways, all women, old and young, fat and thin, beautiful and ugly, have that perfection. It’s a great part of the reason why men hunger to possess women, and so often convince themselves that they do possess them: the thigh, that touch.

  ‘Has Karla told you what I did at the Palace, huh? What I used to do there?’ she said with puzzling hostility, moving my hand onto the hard little mound of blonde hair between her legs. ‘Madame Zhou has us play games there. They’re big on games at the Palace. Karla told you about those games, did she? Huh? Blind Man’s Butt, did she tell you about that? The customers wear blindfolds and get a prize for guessing which one of us they push their cock into. No hands, ya see. That’s the trick. Did she tell you any of this? Did she tell you about the Chair? That’s a real popular number. One girl kneels down on her hands and knees, see, then another girl lies on top of her, back to back, and they tie them together. The customers go from one to another, kind of a multiple choice. Is this turnin’ you on, Lin? Are you gettin’ hot with this? It used to turn Karla’s customers on, when she brought them to the Palace. Karla has a business head. Did you know that? I worked at the Palace, but it was just a job, and all I ever made out of it was money. She’s the one who made it dirty. She’s the one who made it a … a sick thing. Karla’s the one who’ll do anything to get what she wants. Damn right, a business head, and a heart to match …’

  She was rubbing my hand against herself with both of her own hands, grinding against it with rolling motions of her hips. She drew up her knees, and her legs parted. My hand was drawn to the lips of her vagina, heavy and swollen and wet. She pushed two of my fingers inside the dark heat. />
  ‘You feel that?’ she mumbled, her teeth clenched and exposed in a grim smile. ‘That’s muscle power, boy. That’s what that is. That’s training and practice, hours of it, months of it. Madame Zhou makes us squat, and squeeze down hard on a pencil, to build up a grip like a fist. I got so fuckin’ good at it, I could write a letter with the goddamn thing. You feel how good that is? You’ll never find anything as tight as this, not anywhere. Karla isn’t this good. I know she isn’t. What’s the matter with you? Don’t you wanna fuck me? What are you, some kinda faggot? I …’

  She was still squeezing down on my fingers, still grasping at my wrist, but the straining smile faded, and her face slowly turned away.

  ‘I … I … I think I’m gonna throw up.’

  I withdrew my fingers from her body, and my hand from her weakening grip, and backed away from the bed towards the bathroom. Hurriedly soaking a towel in cold water and grabbing up a large dish from the bathroom, I returned to find her sprawled out awkwardly, her hands on her belly. I straightened her into a more comfortable position, covering her with a light cotton blanket. I draped the cool towel over her forehead. She stirred a little, but she didn’t resist. Her frown gradually dissolved into the earnest mask of the unwell.

  ‘He committed suicide,’ she said softly, her eyes closed. ‘That Hannibal. They were going to extradite him back to Rome, make him face charges at a trial, so he killed himself. How do ya like that? After all that fighting, all those elephants, all those big battles, he killed himself. It’s true. Karla told me. Karla always tells the truth … even when she’s lying … she said that to me once … I always tell the truth, even when I’m lying … Fuck, I love that girl. I love that girl. You know, she saved me from that place—and you did, too—and she’s helping me to get clean … to dry out … gotta dry out, Lin … Gilbert … gotta get off the shit … I love that girl …’

  She slept. I watched her for a while, waiting to see if she was sick, if she would wake, but she was wrapped in unworried sleep. I went to check on Tariq, and he too was sleeping soundly. I decided not to wake him. Being alone, in that stillness, was a piercing pleasure. Wealth and power, in a city where half the many millions were homeless, were measured by the privacy that only money could buy, and the solitude that only power could demand and enforce. The poor were almost never alone in Bombay, and I was poor.

  There, in that breathing room, no sound reached me from the quieting street. I moved through the apartment freely, unwatched. And the silence was sweeter, it seemed, the peace more profound, for the presence of the two sleepers, woman and child. A balm of fantasy soothed me. There was a time, once, when I’d known such a life: when a woman and a sleeping child were my own, and I was their man.

  I stopped at Karla’s cluttered writing desk, and caught sight of myself in a wide mirror on the wall above it. The momentary fantasy of belonging, that little dream of home and family, hardened and cracked in my eyes. The truth was that my own marriage had crumbled to ruin, and I’d lost my child, my daughter. The truth was that Lisa and Tariq meant nothing to me, and I meant nothing to them. The truth was that I belonged nowhere and to no-one. Surrounded by people and hungry for solitude, I was always and everywhere alone. Worse than that, I was hollow, empty, gouged out and scraped bare by the escape and flight. I’d lost my family, the friends of my youth, my country and its culture—all the things that had defined me, and given me identity. Like all the fugitive kind, the more successful I was, the longer and further I ran, the less I kept of my self.

  But there were people, a few who could reach me, a few new friends for the new self I was learning to become. There was Prabaker, that tiny, life-adoring man. There was Johnny Cigar, and Qasim Ali, and Jeetendra and his wife, Radha: heroes of chaos who propped up the collapsible city with bamboo sticks, and insisted on loving their neighbours, no matter how far they’d fallen; no matter how broken or unlovely they were. There was Khaderbhai, there was Abdullah, there was Didier, and there was Karla. And as I looked into my own hard eyes in the green-edged mirror, I thought about them all, and asked myself why those people made a difference. Why them? What is it about them? Such a disparate group—the richest and the most wretched, educated and illiterate, virtuous and criminal, old and young—it seemed that the only thing they had in common was a power to make me feel … something.

  On the desk in front of me was a thick, leather-bound book. I opened it and saw that it was Karla’s journal, filled with entries in her own elegant handwriting. Knowing that I shouldn’t, I turned through the pages and read her private thoughts. It wasn’t a diary. There were no dates on any of the pages, and there were none of the day-to-day accounts of things done and people met. Instead, there were fragments. Some of them were culled from various novels and other texts, each one attributed to the respective author and annotated with her own comments and criticisms. There were many poems. Some had been copied out from selections and anthologies and even newspapers, with the source and the poet’s name written beneath. Other poems were her own, written out several times with a word or a phrase changed and a line added. Certain words and their dictionary meanings were listed throughout the journal and marked with asterisks, forming a running vocabulary of unusual and obscure words. And there were random, stream-of-consciousness passages that described what she’d been thinking or feeling on a certain day. Other people were mentioned frequently, yet they were never identified except as he and she.

  On one page there was a cryptic and disturbing reference to the name Sapna. It read:

  THE QUESTION: What will Sapna do?

  THE ANSWER: Sapna will kill us all.

  My heart began to beat faster as I read the words through several times. I didn’t doubt she was talking about the same man—the Sapna whose followers had committed the gruesome murders Abdul Ghani and Madjid had talked about, the Sapna who was hunted by the police and the underworld alike. And it seemed, from that strange couplet, that she knew something about him, perhaps even who he was. I wondered what it meant, and if she was in danger.

  I examined the pages before and after the entry more carefully, but I found nothing more that might concern him, or Karla’s connection to him. On the second-last page of the journal, however, there was one passage that clearly referred to me:

  He wanted to tell me that he is in love with me. Why did I stop him? Am I so ashamed that it might be true? The view from that place was incredible, amazing. We were so high that we looked down on the kites that flew so high above the children’s heads. He said that I don’t smile. I’m glad he said that, and I wonder why.

  Beneath that entry she’d written the words:

  I don’t know what frightens me more,

  the power that crushes us

  or our endless ability to endure it.

  I remembered the remark very well. I remembered her saying it after the slum huts had been smashed and dragged away. Like so many of the things she said, it had the kind of cleverness that insinuated itself into my memory. I was surprised and perhaps a little shocked to see that she, too, had remembered the phrase, and that she’d copied it down there—even improving it, with more aphoristic roundness than the impromptu remark had possessed. Is she planning to use those words again, I asked myself, with someone else?

  The last page carried a poem that she’d written—her most recent addition to the almost completed journal. Because it appeared on the page following her reference to me, and because I was so hungry for it, I read the poem and told myself that it was mine. I let myself believe that it was meant for me, or that at least some part of it was born in feelings that were mine. I knew it wasn’t true, but love seldom concerns itself with what we know or with what’s true.

  To make sure none followed where you led

  I used my hair to cover our tracks.

  Sun set on the island of our bed

  night rose

  eating echoes

  and we were beached there, in tangles of flicker,

  candles
whispering at our driftwood backs.

  Your eyes above me

  afraid of the promises I might keep

  regretting the truth we did say

  less than the lie we didn’t,

  I went in deep, I went in deep,

  to fight the past for you.

  Now we both know

  sorrows are the seeds of loving.

  Now we both know I will live and

  I will die for this love.

  Standing there, at the desk, I snatched up a pen and copied out the poem on a sheet of paper. With the stolen words folded secretly in my wallet, I closed the journal and replaced it exactly as I’d found it.

  I walked to the bookshelf. I wanted to study the titles for clues to the woman who’d chosen them and read them. The small library of four shelves was surprisingly eclectic. There were texts on Greek history, on philosophy and cosmology, on poetry and drama. Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma in an Italian translation. A copy of Madame Bovary in the original French. Thomas Mann and Schiller in German. Djuna Barnes and Virginia Woolf in English. I took down a copy of Maldoror, by Isidore Ducasse. The pages were dog-eared, and heavily annotated in Karla’s own hand. I took out another book, a German translation of Gogol’s Dead Souls, and it too bore Karla’s hand-written notes on many pages. She consumed her books, I saw. She devoured her books, and was unafraid to mark them, even to scar them, with her own comments and system of references.

  A row of journals, similar to the one I’d discovered on the desk, occupied half of one shelf, some twenty books in all. I took one of them down and flipped through it. The fact that it, like the others, was written in English, struck me for the first time. She was born in Switzerland and she was fluent in German and French, I knew; but when she wrote out her most intimate thoughts and feelings she used English. I seized on that, telling myself that there were good and hopeful signs in it. English was my language. She spoke to herself, from her heart, in my language.

  I moved around the apartment, studying the things she chose to surround herself with in her private living space. There was an oil painting of women carrying water from a river, with matkas balanced on their heads, and children following with smaller pots on their own heads. Prominently displayed on a dedicated shelf was a hand-carved, rosewood figure of the goddess Durga. It was surrounded by incense holders. I noticed an arrangement of everlastings and other dried flowers. They were my own favourites, and very unusual in a city where fresh flowers were plentiful and inexpensive. There was a collection of found objects—a huge frond from a date palm that she’d picked up somewhere and fixed to one wall; shells and river stones that filled a large and waterless fish tank; a discarded spinning wheel on which she’d draped a collection of small, brass temple-bells.