Shantaram: A Novel

by Gregory David Roberts

  The two men were Africans. I guessed them to be Nigerians. Watching from the footpath, I remembered the shock and shame I’d felt when I’d seen mob rage like that for the first time, almost eighteen months before, on the first day of Prabaker’s dark tour of the city. I remembered how helpless and cowardly I’d felt when the crowd had carried the man’s broken body away. I’d told myself then that it wasn’t my culture, it wasn’t my city, it wasn’t my fight. Eighteen months later, the Indian culture was mine, and that part of the city was my own. It was a black-market beat. My beat. I worked there every day. I even knew some of the people in the murderous crowd. I couldn’t let it happen again without trying to help.

  Shouting louder than the rest, I ran into the screaming crowd and began dragging men away from the tight press of bodies.

  ‘Brothers! Brothers! Don’t hit! Don’t kill! Don’t hit!’ I shouted in Hindi.

  It was a messy business. For the most part, they allowed me to drag them away from the mob. My arms were strong. The men felt the power that shoved them aside. But their killing rage soon hurled them back into the uproar, and I felt their fists and fingers pounding and gouging at me from everywhere at once. At last I succeeded in clearing a path to the passenger and then separating him from the leaders of the pack. With his back pressed defensively against the side of the car, the man raised his fists as if ready to fight on. His face was bloody. His shirt was torn and smeared with vivid, crimson blood. His eyes were wide and white with fear, and he breathed hard through clenched teeth. Yet there was determined courage in the set of his jaw and the scowl that bared his teeth. He was a fighter, and he would fight to the very end.

  I took that in with a second’s glance, and then turned my back to stand beside him and face the crowd. Holding my open hands in front of me, pleading and placating, I shouted for the violence to stop.

  As I’d run forward and started the attempt to save the man I’d had a fantasy that the crowd would part and listen to my voice. Stones would fall from the limp hands of mortified men. The mob, swayed by my eloquent courage, would wander away from the scene with shamed and downcast eyes. Even now, in my recollections of that moment and that danger, I sometimes surrender to a wish that my voice and my eyes had changed their hearts that day, and that the circle of hate, humiliated and disgraced, had widened and dispersed. Instead, the crowd hesitated for only an instant and then pressed in upon us again in a brawling, hissing, screaming, boiling rage, and we were forced to fight for our lives.

  Ironically, the very numbers of the crowd attacking us worked to our advantage. We were trapped in an awkward L-shape made by the tangle of vehicles. The crowd surrounded us, and there was no escape. But the crush of their numbers inhibited their movements. Fewer blows struck us than might’ve been the case had fewer men opposed us, and the thrashing crowd actually struck at themselves quite often in their fury.

  And perhaps there really was some softening of their fury, some reluctance to kill us, despite their urgent desire to cause us pain. I know that reluctance. I’ve seen it many times, in many violent worlds. I can’t fully explain it. It’s as if there’s a collective conscience within the groupmind of a mob, and the right appeal, at exactly the right moment, can turn murderous hate aside from its intended victim. It’s as if the mob, in just that critical moment, want to be stopped, want to be prevented from the worst of their own violence. And in that one doubting moment, a single voice or fist raised against the gathering evil can be enough to avert it. I’ve seen it in prison, where men bent on the pack-rape of another prisoner can be stopped by one voice that stirs their shame. I’ve seen it in war, where one strong voice can weaken and wither the hate-filled cruelty that torments a captured prisoner. And perhaps I saw it on that day, as the Nigerian and I struggled with the mob. Perhaps the strangeness of the situation—a white man, a gora, pleading in Hindi for the lives of two black men—held them back from murder.

  The car behind us suddenly roared to life. The heavy-set driver had managed to start the car. He gunned the engine, and began to gently reverse away from the wreckage. The passenger and I slowly shuffled and slithered along beside the car as it backed up into the crowd. We struck out, shoving men away from us and wrenching their hands from our clothes. When the driver reached backward over his seat and opened the rear passenger door, we both jumped into the car. The press of the crowd slammed the door. Twenty, fifty hands drummed, beat, slapped, and pounded on the outside of the car. The driver pulled away, heading at a crawl along the Causeway Road. A collection of missiles—tea glasses, food containers, dozens of shoes—rained on the car. Then we were free, speeding along the busy road and watching through the rear window to make sure we weren’t followed.

  ‘Hassaan Obikwa,’ the passenger beside me said, offering his hand.

  ‘Lin Ford,’ I replied, shaking his hand and noticing for the first time how much gold he wore. There were rings on every finger. Some of them closed around blue-white, glittering diamonds. There was also a diamond-encrusted gold Rolex hanging loosely at his wrist.

  ‘This is Raheem,’ he said, nodding to the driver. The huge man in the front seat glanced over his shoulder to offer me a broad grin. He rolled his eyes in a survivor’s happy prayer, and turned to face the road.

  ‘I owe you my life,’ Hassaan Obikwa said with a grim smile. ‘We both do. They wanted to kill us, back there, that’s for sure.’

  ‘We were lucky’ I answered, looking into his round, healthy, handsome face and beginning to like him.

  His eyes and his lips defined his face. The eyes were unusually wide-set and large, giving him a slightly reptilian stare, and the marvellous lips were so full and sumptuously shaped that they seemed to be designed for a much larger head. His teeth were white and even at the front, but all the teeth on either side were capped with gold. Rococo curves at the corners of his wide nose gave his nostrils a delicate flare, as if he was constantly inhaling a pleasantly intoxicating scent. A wide, gold earring, conspicuous beneath his short black hair and against the blue-black skin of his thick neck, pierced his left ear.

  I glanced at his torn, bloody shirt, and at the cuts and bruises that were swelling on his face and every exposed centimetre of flesh. When I met his eyes again they were glittering with excited good humour. He wasn’t too shaken by the violence of the mob, and neither was I. We were both men who’d seen worse, and had been through worse, and we recognised that in each other immediately. In fact, neither of us ever mentioned the incident directly after that day of our meeting. I looked into his glittering eyes, and I felt my smile stretching to match his.

  ‘We were damn lucky!’

  ‘Fuck yes! Yes, we were!’ he agreed, laughing hard and slipping the Rolex watch from his wrist. He held it to his ear to make sure it was still ticking. Satisfied, he snapped the watch back on his wrist, and gave his full attention to me. ‘But the debt is there, and the debt is still important, even if we were very lucky. A debt like this—it is the most important of all a man’s obligations. You must allow me to repay you.’

  ‘It’ll take money’ I said. The driver glanced in the rear-vision mirror and exchanged a look with Hassaan.

  ‘But … this debt cannot be repaid with money’ Hassaan answered.

  ‘I’m talking about the cart-puller—the one you hit with your car. And the taxi you damaged. If you give me some money, I’ll see that it gets to them. It’ll go a long way to calming things down at Regal Circle. That’s in my beat—I have to work there, every day, and people are going to be pissed off for a while yet. Do that, and we’ll call it square.’

  Hassaan laughed, and slapped his hand on my knee. It was a good laugh—honest but wicked, and generous but shrewd.

  ‘Please don’t worry’ he said, still smiling broadly. ‘This is not my area, it is true, but I am not without influence, even here. I will make sure that the injured man receives all the money he needs.’

  ‘And the other one,’ I added.

  ‘The other one?’r />
  ‘Yes, the other one.’

  ‘The other … what?’ he asked, perplexed.

  ‘The taxi driver.’

  ‘Yes, yes, the taxi driver also.’

  There was a little silence, humming with puzzles and questions. I glanced out the window of the cab, but I could still feel his enquiring eyes on me. I turned to face him again.

  ‘I … like … taxi drivers,’ I said.

  ‘Yes …’

  ‘I … I know a lot of taxi drivers.’

  ‘Yes …’

  ‘And that cab being smashed up—it’ll cause a lot of grief for the driver and his family.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘So, when will you do it?’ I asked.

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘When will you put the money up, for the cart-puller and the cab driver?’

  ‘Oh,’ Hassaan Obikwa grinned, looking up again into the rear-vision mirror to exchange a look with Raheem. The big man shrugged, and grinned back into the mirror. ‘Tomorrow. Is tomorrow okay?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I frowned, not sure what all the grinning was about. ‘I just want to know, so that I can talk to them about it. It’s not a question of the money. I can put the money up myself. I was planning to do it anyway. I’ve gotta mend some fences back there. Some of them are … acquaintances of mine. So … that’s why it’s important. If you’re not going to do it, I need to know, so that I can take care of it myself. That’s all.’

  The whole thing seemed to be getting very complicated. I wished I’d never raised the matter with him. I began to feel angry at him, without really understanding why. Then he offered me his open palm in a handshake.

  ‘I give you my word,’ he said solemnly, and we shook hands.

  We were silent again, and after a few moments I reached over to tap the driver on the shoulder.

  ‘Just here is fine,’ I said, perhaps a little more harshly than I’d intended. ‘I’ll get out here.’

  The car pulled into the kerb, a few blocks from the slum. I opened the door to leave, but Hassaan gripped my wrist. It was a very strong grip. For a second, I calculated all the long way upward to the much greater strength I knew must be in Raheem’s grip.

  ‘Please, remember my name—Hassaan Obikwa. You can find me at the African ghetto, in Andheri. Everyone knows me there. Whatever I can do for you, please tell me. I want to clear my debt, Lin Ford. This is my telephone number. You can reach me, from here, at any time of the day or the night.’

  I took the card—it bore only his name and number—and shook his hand. Nodding to Raheem, I left the car.

  ‘Thank you, Lin,’ Hassaan called out through the open window. ‘Inshallah, we’ll meet again soon.’

  The car drove off, and I turned toward the slum, staring at the gold-lettered business card for a full block before I put it in my pocket. A few minutes later, I passed the World Trade Centre and entered the compound of the slum, remembering, as I always did, the first time I entered those blest and tormented acres.

  As I passed Kumar’s chai shop, Prabaker came out to greet me. He was wearing a yellow silk shirt, black pants, and red-and-black patent leather high-heeled platform shoes. There was a crimson silk scarf tied at his throat.

  ‘Oh, Lin!’ he called out, hobbling across the broken ground on his platform shoes. He clung to me, as much for balance as in friendly greeting. ‘There is someone, a fellow you know, he is waiting for you, in your house. But one minute please, what happened on your face? And your shirts? Have you been having it some fights, with some bad fellow? Arrey! Some fellow gave you a solid pasting. If you want me, I will go with you, and tell that fellow he is a bahinchudh.’

  ‘It’s nothing, Prabu. It’s okay’ I muttered, striding toward the hut. ‘Do you know who it is?’

  ‘Who it … is? You mean, who it is, who was hitting your face?’

  ‘No, no, of course not! I mean, the man who’s waiting in my hut. Do you know who it is?’

  ‘Yes, Lin,’ he said, stumbling along beside me and clutching my sleeve for support.

  We walked on for a few more seconds in silence. People greeted us on every side, calling out invitations to share chai, food, or a smoke.

  ‘Well?’ I asked, after a while.

  ‘Well? What well?’

  “Well, who is it? Who’s in my hut?’

  ‘Oh!’ he laughed. ‘Sorry, Lin. I thought you want some surprises, so I didn’t tell you.’

  ‘It’s hardly a surprise, Prabu, because you told me there was someone waiting for me in my hut.’

  ‘No, no!’ he insisted. ‘You don’t know it his name yet, so still you get the surprise. And that is a good things. If I don’t tell you there is somebody, then you go to your hut, and you get the shocks. And that is a bad things. A shocks is like a surprise, when you are not ready.’

  ‘Thank you, Prabu,’ I replied, my sarcasm evaporating as it was uttered.

  He needn’t have concerned himself with sparing me the shock. The closer I came to my hut, the more often I was informed that a foreigner was waiting to see me. Hello, Lin baba! There’s a gora in your house, waiting for you!

  We arrived at my hut to find Didier sitting in the shade of the doorway on a stool, and fanning himself with a magazine.

  ‘It’s Didier,’ Prabaker informed me, grinning happily.

  ‘Yes. Thank you, Prabu,’ I turned to Didier, who rose to shake hands. ‘This is a surprise. It’s good to see you.’

  ‘And good to see you, my dear friend,’ Didier replied, smiling despite the distressing heat. ‘But, I must be honest, you look a little worse for wear, as Lettie would say.’

  ‘It’s nothing. A misunderstanding, that’s all. Give me a minute to wash up.’

  I stripped off my torn, bloody shirt, and poured a third of a bucket of clean water from the clay matka. Standing on the flattened pile of stones beside my hut, I washed my face, arms, and chest. Neighbours passed me as I washed, smiling when they caught my eye. There was an art to washing in that way, with no wasted drop of water and no excess of mess. I’d mastered that art, and it was one of the hundred little ways my life imitated theirs, and folded into the lotus of their loving, hoping struggle with fate.

  ‘Would you like a chai?’ I asked Didier as I slipped on a clean, white shirt in the doorway of my hut. ‘We can go to Kumar’s.’

  ‘I just had one full cup,’ Prabaker interjected before Didier could reply. ‘But one more chai will be okay, for the friendship sake, I think so.’

  He sat down with us in the rickety chai shop. Five huts had been cleared to make space for a single, large room. There was a counter made from an old bedroom dresser, a patchwork plastic roof, and benches for the customers made from planks resting precariously on piles of bricks. All the materials had been looted from the building site beside the slum. Kumar, the chai shop owner, fought a running guerrilla war with his customers, who tried to pilfer his bricks and planks for their own houses.

  Kumar came to take our order himself. True to the general rule of slum life that the more money one made, the more poverty-stricken one had to look, Kumar’s appearance was more dishevelled and ragged than the meanest of his customers. He dragged up a stained wooden crate for us to use as a table. Appraising it with a suspicious squint, he slapped at the crate with a filthy rag and then tucked the cloth into his singlet.

  ‘Didier, you look terrible,’ I observed, when Kumar left to prepare our tea. ‘It must be love.’

  He grinned back at me, shaking his head of dark curls and raising the palms of his hands.

  ‘I am very fatigued, it is true,’ he said, managing a shrug of elaborate self-pity. ‘People do not understand the truly fantastic effort required in the corruption of a simple man. And the more simple the man, the more effort it requires. They do not realise what it takes out of me to put so much decadence into a man who is not born to it.’

  ‘You might be making a rod for your own back,’ I mocked.

  ‘Each thing in its own time,’ he re
plied, smiling thoughtfully. ‘But you, my friend, you look very well. Only a little, how shall I say it, lonely for information. And to that end, Didier is here. I have all the latest news and gossip for you. You know the difference between news and gossip, don’t you? News tells you what people did. Gossip tells you how much they enjoyed it.’

  We both laughed, and Prabaker joined in, laughing so loudly that everyone in the chai shop turned to look at him.

  ‘Well then,’ Didier continued, ‘where to start? Oh yes, Vikram’s pursuit of Letitia proceeds with a certain bizarre inevitability. She began by loathing him—’

  ‘I think loathing is bit strong,’ I argued.

  ‘Ah, yes, perhaps you’re right. If she loathes me—and it is completely certain that she does, the dear and sweet English Rose—then her feeling for Vikram was indeed something less. Shall we say detest?’

  ‘I think detest would cover it,’ I agreed.

  ‘Et bien, she began by detesting him but, through the persistence of his devoted romantic attentions, he has managed to arouse in her what I can only describe as an amiable revulsion.’

  We laughed again, and Prabaker slapped at his thigh, hooting with such hilarity that every head turned toward him. Didier and I inspected him with quizzical looks of our own. He responded with an impish smile, but I noticed that his eyes darted away quickly to his left. Following the glance, I saw his new love, Parvati, preparing food in Kumar’s kitchen. Her thick, black plait of hair was the rope by which a man might climb to heaven. Her petite figure—she was tiny, shorter even than Prabaker—was the perfect shape of his desire. Her eyes, when she turned in profile to look at us, were black fire.

  Looking over Parvati’s shoulder, however, was her mother, Nandita. She was a formidable woman, three times the combined width and weight of her petite daughters, Parvati and Sita, and she glowered at us, her expression managing to combine greed for our custom with contempt for our male sex. I smiled at her, and wagged my head. Her smile, in return, was remarkably similar to the fierce grimace that Maori warriors affect to intimidate their enemies.