‘Maybe,’ I replied, smiling. ‘I never thought about it that way, but maybe you’re right.’
‘Alors, my father returned to Marseilles, after the war, and returned to the very house that he had been forced to leave when the Jew-haters took control of the town. He had fought with the Resistance, and he was wounded, in hand-to-hand fighting with the Germans. Because of that, no-one dared to challenge him. Not openly. But I am sure that his Jewish face and his Jewish pride and his beautiful young Jewish bride reminded the good citizens of Marseilles of the thousands of French Jews who were betrayed and sent to their deaths. And it was a cold triumph for him, returning to that house he had been forced out of, and to that community that had betrayed him. And that coldness claimed his heart, I believe, when my mother died. Even his touch, when I think of it now, was cold. Even his hand, when he touched me.’
He paused and took a sip from his glass, replacing it slowly and carefully in the precise circle of moisture it had left on the table in front of him.
‘Well then, he was a brilliant man,’ he continued, raising his eyes to mine with a hastily gathered smile. ‘And, with one exception, he was a brilliant teacher. The exception was me. I was his only failure. I had no head for science and mathematics. They were languages I could never decipher or understand. My father responded to my stupidity with a brutal temper. His cold hand, it seemed to me when I was a child, was so large that when he struck me my whole body was shocked and bruised by the giant’s hard palm and the whips of his fingers. I was afraid of him, and ashamed of my failures at school, so I played the truant very often, and fell into what the English call a bad company. I was many times in the courts, and served two years in the prisons for children before my thirteenth birthday. At sixteen, I left my father’s house, my father’s city, and my father’s country forever.
‘By chance I came to Genova. Have you seen it? I tell you, it is the jewel in the tiara of the Ligurian coast. And one day, on the beach at Genova, I met a man who opened my life to every good and beautiful thing that there is in the world. His name was Rinaldo. He was forty-eight years old then, when I was sixteen. His family held some ancient title, a noble line that reached to the time of Columbus. But he lived in his magnificent house on the cliffs without the pretensions of his rank. He was a scholar, the only true Renaissance man I ever met. He taught me the secrets of antiquity, the history of art, the music of poetry, and the poetry of music. He was also a beautiful man. His hair was silver and white, like the full moon, and his very sad eyes were grey. In contrast to the brutish hands of my father, with their chilling touch, Rinaldo’s hands were long, slender, warm, expressive, and he made tenderness in everything that he touched. I learned what it is to love, with all of the mind and all of the body, and I was born in his arms.’
He began to cough, and attempted to clear his throat, but the cough became a fit that wracked his body in painful spasms.
‘You’ve got to stop smoking and drinking so much, Didier. And you’ve gotta do a little exercise now and then.’
‘Oh, please!’ he shuddered, stubbing out a cigarette and fishing another from the pack in front of him as the coughs subsided. ‘There is nothing so depressing as good advice, and I will be pleased if you do not inflict it upon me. Frankly, I am shocked at you. You must know this, surely? Some years ago I suffered such an offensively gratuitous piece of good advice that I was depressed for six months afterward. It was a very close call—I almost never recovered.’
‘Sorry’ I smiled. ‘I don’t know what came over me.’
‘You are forgiven,’ he sniffed, downing one glass of whisky as the waiter brought the next.
‘You know,’ I admonished him, ‘Karla says that depression only happens to people who don’t know how to be sad.’
‘Well she is wrong!’ he declared. ‘I am an expert in the tristesse. It is the perfect, definitive human performance. There are many animals that can express their happiness, but only the human animal has the genius to express a magnificent sadness. And for me it is something special; a daily meditation. Sadness is my one and my only art.’
He pouted for a few moments, too peeved to proceed, but then raised his eyes to meet mine and laughed out loud.
‘Have you heard from her?’ he asked.
‘No.’
‘But you know where she is?’
‘No.’
‘She has left Goa?’
‘I asked a guy I know down there, Dashrant—he owns a restaurant on the beach where she was staying—I asked him to keep an eye on her, and make sure she was okay. I called him last week, and he told me she left. He tried to talk her into staying, but she … well, you know.’
Didier pursed his lips in a reflective frown. We both watched the shuffling, idling, bustling, scurrying street only two metres away, beyond the wide entrance to Leopold’s.
‘Et bien, don’t worry yourself about Karla,’ Didier said at last. ‘At the least, she is well protected.’
I assumed that Didier meant she could take care of herself and, perhaps, that she lived under a good and lucky sign. I was wrong. There was more to the remark than that. I should’ve asked him what he meant, of course. In the long years since that conversation I’ve asked myself a thousand times how different my life might’ve been if only I’d asked him what he meant by that remark. Instead, my head full of assumptions and my heart full of pride, I changed the subject.
‘So … what happened?’
‘Happened?’ he asked, bewildered.
‘What happened to you and Rinaldo in Genova?’
‘Ah, yes. He loved me, and I loved him, it was true, but he made an error of the judgment. He gave my love a test. He allowed me to discover the secret place where he kept a large sum of cash. I could not resist the temptation that he offered to me. I took the money and ran away. I loved him, but I took his money, and I ran away. For all his wisdom, he did not know that love cannot be tested. Honesty can be tested, and loyalty. But there is no test for love. Love goes on forever, once it begins, even if we come to hate the one we love. Love goes on forever because love is born in the part of us that does not die.’
‘Did you ever see him again?’
‘Yes. Yes, I did. Another loop of fortune brought me back to Genova, almost fifteen years later. I walked on the same boulevard of sand where he had taught me to read Rimbaud and Verlaine. And then I saw him. He was sitting with a group of men of his own age—he was more than sixty then—and they were watching two elderly men play chess. He wore a grey cardigan and a black velvet scarf, although the day was not cold. His hair was almost gone. That silver crown of hair, it was … gone. His face was all hollow spaces, and his skin was a bad mix of bad colours, as if he was recovering from a serious illness. Perhaps he was succumbing to it. I do not know. I walked on past him, averting my gaze, so that he should not recognise me. I even pretended a strange, stooping walk to disguise myself. At the last moment I glanced back at him, watching as he coughed violently into a white handkerchief. There was blood, I think, staining that white handkerchief. I walked faster and faster until I ran with the haste of a man in terror.’
Once again we sat in silence and allowed our eyes to rove the passing crowds, following a man in a blue turban in one instant, and a woman in a black mask, veil, and chador the next.
‘You know, Lin, I have lived what many—or most—would call a wicked life. I have done things that could put me in prison, and things that, in some nations, could see me executed. There are many things I have done that I can say, I am not proud. But there is only one act in my whole life that I can say, I am truly ashamed of it. I hurried past that great man, and I had money enough and time enough and good health enough to help him. I hurried past him, not because I felt guilty about the theft of his money. And not because I was afraid of his sickness, or the commitment it might cost me. I hurried past that good and brilliant man who loved me, and taught me how to love, simply because he was old—because he was not beautiful any more.’
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He drained his glass, examined its emptiness for a moment, and then placed it on the table as gently and attentively as if it was about to explode.
‘Merdel Let’s drink, my friend!’ he cried at last, but my hand stayed his, preventing him from summoning the waiter.
‘I can’t, Didier. I have to meet Lisa at the Sea Rock. She asked me to ride out there and meet her. I’ll have to leave now, if I’m going to make it.’
He clenched his jaws on something—a request, perhaps, or another confession. My hand still rested on his.
‘Look, you can come, if you like. It’s not a private meeting, and it’s a nice ride out to Juhu.’
He smiled slowly, and slid his hand out from under mine. Still staring into my eyes, he raised his hand, pointing with one finger. A waiter came to the table. Without looking at him, Didier ordered another whisky. When I paid my bill and walked out to the street, he was coughing again, hunched over one hand and clutching his glass with the other.
I’d bought a bike, an Enfield Bullet, a month before. The taste of two-wheeled adrenaline that I’d experienced in Goa had nagged at me until I finally surrendered to it, and went with Abdullah to the mechanic who serviced his bike. The mechanic, a Tamil named Hussein, loved bikes, and loved Abdullah almost as much. The Enfield he sold to me was in perfect condition, and it never once let me down. Vikram was so impressed with it that he bought one from Hussein within a week. Sometimes we rode together, Abdullah, Vikram, and I, our three bikes side by side, and the sun in our laughing mouths.
On that afternoon when I left Didier at Leopold’s I rode slowly, and gave myself time and space to think. Karla was gone from the little house on Anjuna beach. I had no idea where she might be. Ulla told me that Karla had stopped writing to her, and I had no reason to think she was lying. So Karla was gone, and there was no way to find her. And every day I woke with a dream or a thought of her. Every night I slept with the knife of regret in my chest.
My thoughts drifted to Khaderbhai as I rode. He seemed well pleased with the niche role that I was playing in his mafia network. I supervised certain movements of smuggled gold through the domestic and international airports, exchanged sums of cash with agents at the five-star hotels and airline offices, and arranged to buy passports from foreigners. They were all jobs that a gora could perform more successfully and less obtrusively than an Indian. My conspicuousness was a strange and ironic form of camouflage. Foreigners were stared at in India. Somewhere in the five or more millennia of its history, the culture had decided to dispense with the casual, nonchalant glance. By the time I came to Bombay, the eye contact ranged from an ogling gaze to a gawping, goggle-eyed glare. There was nothing malicious in it. The staring eyes that found and followed me everywhere I went were innocent, curious, and almost always friendly. And that intense scrutiny had its benefits: for the most part, people stared at what I was, not what I did. Foreigners were stared into invisibility. So I wandered in and out of travel agencies or grand hotels, airline or business offices, followed in every step by eyes that saw me, but not the crimes I committed in the service of the great Khan.
I rode on past the Haji Ali Mosque, accelerating into the wide avenue of afternoon traffic, and as I rode I asked myself why Abdel Khader Khan never referred to the murder of his friend and colleague Madjid. It still nagged at me and I wanted to ask him about it, but the one time that I’d mentioned his name, soon after the murder, Khader had looked so stricken with grief that I’d let the subject lapse. And as the days had passed into weeks, and the weeks had drifted into silent months, I’d found it impossible to drag the subject into our conversations. It was as if I was the one who was keeping secrets; and no matter how thick my mind became with thoughts of the murder, I never admitted them to him. Instead, we talked business or we spoke of philosophy. And during the course of our long discussions he finally answered my big question. I remembered the excitement that had refracted in his eyes, and the pride, perhaps, when I’d proved that I understood his teaching. And as I rode from Leopold’s to my meeting with Lisa on that day of Didier’s confession, I remembered word-by-word and smile-by-smile the great Khan’s explanation.
‘And so, you understand the principle of the argument to this point?’
‘Yes,’ I answered him. I’d come to his Dongri mansion that night, a week before, to give him a report on the changes I’d recommended and initiated in the passport factory run by Abdel Ghani. With Ghani’s approval and support, we’d expanded the operation to include a full package of identity documents—driver’s licences, bank accounts, credit cards, even memberships of sports clubs. Khader was delighted with the progress of those innovations, but he soon changed the subject to talk of his favourite themes: good and evil, and the purpose of life.
‘Perhaps you can tell it back to me,’ he nodded, looking into the playful fling and splash of the fountain’s plumes of water. His elbows rested on the arms of the white cane armchair, and the temple of his fingertips peaked at his lips and the neat, silver-grey moustache.
‘Ah … sure. You were saying that the whole universe is moving toward some ultimate complexity. This has been going on since the universe began, and physicists call it the tendency toward complexity. And … anything that kicks this along and helps it is good, and anything that hinders it is evil.’
‘Very good,’ Khader said, raising one eyebrow in the smile he offered me. As was so often the case, I wasn’t sure if he was expressing approval or mockery or both. It seemed, with Khader, that he never felt or expressed any one emotion without feeling something of its opposite. That might be true for all of us, to some extent. But with him, with lord Abdel Khader Khan, it wasn’t possible to know what he really thought or felt about you. The one and only time that I saw the whole of the truth in his eyes—on a snow-covered mountain called Sorrow’s Reward—it was already too late, and I never saw it again.
‘And this final complexity’ he added, ‘it can be called God, or the Universal Spirit, or the Ultimate Complexity, as you please. For myself, there is no problem in calling it God. The whole universe is moving toward God, in a tendency toward the ultimate complexity that God is.’
‘That still leaves me with the question I asked you last time. How do you decide how any one thing is good or evil?’
‘That is true. I promised you an answer to this very good question then, young Mr. Lin, and you will have it. But, first, you must answer a question for me. Why is killing wrong?’
‘Well, I don’t think it is always wrong.’
‘Ah,’ he mused, his amber eyes glittering in the same wry smile. ‘Well, I must tell you that it is always wrong. This will become clear, later in our discussion. For now, concentrate on the type of killing that you do think is wrong, and tell me why it is wrong.’
‘Yeah, well, it’s the unlawful taking of a life.’
‘By whose law?’
‘Society’s law. The law of the land,’ I offered, sensing that the philosophical ground was slipping away beneath me.
‘Who makes this law?’ he asked gently.
‘Politicians pass laws. Criminal laws are inherited from … from civilisation. The laws against unlawful killing go all the way back—maybe all the way back to the cave.’
‘And why was killing wrong for them’
‘You mean … well, I’d say, because there’s only one life. You only get one shot at it, and to take it away is a terrible thing.’
‘A lightning storm is a terrible thing. Does that make it wrong, or evil?’
‘No, of course not,’ I replied more irritably. ‘Look, I don’t know why we need to know what’s behind the laws against killing. We have one life, and if you take a life without a good reason you do something wrong.’
‘Yes,’ he said patiently. ‘But why is it wrong?’
‘It just is, that’s all.’
‘This is the point we all reach,’ Khader concluded, more serious in his tone. He put his hand on my wrist as it rested on the arm of my chair
beside him, and he tapped out the important points with his fingers. ‘If you ask people why killing, or any other crime, is wrong, they will tell you that it is against the law, or that the Bible, or the Upanishads, or the Koran, or the Buddha’s eight-fold path, or their parents, or some other authority tells them it is wrong. But they don’t know why it is wrong. It may be true, what they say, but they don’t know why it is true.
‘In order to know about any act or intention or consequence, we must first ask two questions. One, what would happen if everyone did this thing? Two, would this help or hinder the movement toward complexity?’
He paused as a servant entered with Nazeer. The servant brought sweet, black suleimani chai, in long glasses, and a variety of irresistible sweets on a silver tray. Nazeer brought a questioning glance for Khaderbhai and a scowl of unmitigated contempt for me. Khader thanked him and the servant, and they left us alone once more.
‘In the case of killing,’ Khader continued, after he’d sipped the tea through a cube of white sugar. ‘What would happen if everyone killed people? Would that help or hinder? Tell me.’
‘Obviously, if everyone killed people, we would wipe each other out. So … that wouldn’t help.’
‘Yes. We human beings are the most complex arrangement of matter that we know of, but we are not the last achievement of the universe. We, too, will develop and change with the rest of the universe. But if we kill indiscriminately, we will not get there. We will wipe out our species, and all the development that led to us across millions of years—billions of years—will be lost. The same can be said for stealing. What would happen if everyone stole things? Would that help us, or would it hinder us?’
Shantaram: A Novel Page 67
