Shantaram: A Novel

by Gregory David Roberts

  ‘Well, he comes back from the hospital, and he tells her he’s got good news and bad news. The good news is that they definitely want a kidney. The bad news is that they don’t want a man’s kidney—they want a woman’s kidney.’

  ‘Okay’ Kavita sighed, shaking her head.

  ‘Yeah. The guy was a prince. Anyway, his wife balks at this, understand-ably, but Rasheed convinces her, and she goes off to have the operation.’

  ‘Do you know where this took place?’ Kavita asked.

  ‘Yeah. Anand Rao checked into it all, and told Qasim Ali, the head man in the slum. He’s got the details. So, anyway, Anand Rao hears about this, when Rasheed’s wife returns from the hospital, and he’s furious. He knows Rasheed well—they shared the hut together for two years, remember—and he knows that Rasheed is a con man. He has it out with Rasheed, but it comes to nothing. Rasheed gets all indignant. He spills kerosene on himself, and tells Anand Rao to light it, if he doesn’t trust him, and if he thinks he’s such a bad guy. Anand just warns him to look after the women, and leaves it at that.’

  ‘When did this happen?’

  ‘The operation was six months ago. Well, the next thing is, Rasheed tells his wife that he’s been down to the hospital twenty times to sell his own kidney, but they don’t want it. He tells her the money they got for her kidney was only half as much as they need to buy their business. He tells her that they still want women’s kidneys, and he starts working on her to sell her sister’s kidney. The wife is against it, but Rasheed works on the young sister, telling her that if she doesn’t sell her kidney, then the wife will have sold her kidney for nothing. Finally, the women give in. Rasheed packs the younger sister off to the hospital, and she returns, minus one of her kidneys.’

  ‘This is some guy’ Kavita muttered.

  ‘Yeah. Well, I never liked him. He was one of those guys who smile as a tactic, you know, and not because they actually feel anything worth smiling about. Kind of like the way a chimpanzee smiles.’

  ‘And what happened? He took off with the money, I suppose?’

  ‘Yeah. Rasheed took the money and ran. The two sisters were devastated. Their health deteriorated. They went downhill fast. They ended up in hospital. First one, and then the other—they both fell into a coma. Lying together in their hospital beds, they were pronounced dead within minutes of each other. Anand was there, with a few others from the slum. He stayed long enough to see the sheets pulled over their faces. Then he ran out of the hospital. He went out of his mind with anger and … guilt, I suppose. He went looking for Rasheed. He knew every one of Rasheed’s drinking dives. When he tracked him down, Rasheed was lying in a rubbish pit, sleeping off a binge. He’d paid some kids to keep the rats off his drunken body. Anand chased the kids off and sat down beside Rasheed, and listened to him snore. Then he cut his throat, and waited there until the blood stopped flowing.’

  ‘Pretty messy’ Kavita muttered, not looking up from her pad.

  ‘It was. It is. Anand gave himself up, and made a full confession. He’s been charged with murder.’

  ‘And you want me to …?’

  ‘I want you to make it a front-page story. I want you to build some kind of popular movement around him, so that if they do convict him—which they will, for sure—they’ll have to go a little easy on him. I want him to have support while he’s in prison, and I want to keep his prison time down to as little as possible.’

  ‘That’s a lot of I want.’

  ‘I know.’

  Well,’ she frowned, ‘it’s an interesting story, but I’ve got to tell you, Lin, we get too many stories like this every day. Wife-burning, dowry murders, child prostitution, slavery, female infanticide—it’s a war against women in India, Lin. It’s a fight to the death, and mostly it’s the women dying. I want to help your guy, but I don’t see this as page one, yaar. And anyway, I don’t have any pull with page one. I’m new there myself, don’t forget.’

  ‘There’s more,’ I pressed her. ‘The kicker in the story is that the sisters didn’t die. Half an hour after they were pronounced dead, Rasheed’s wife stirred beneath the sheet. A few minutes later, her sister moved and groaned. They’re alive and well today. Their hut, in the slum, has become a kind of shrine. People come from all over the city to see the miracle sisters who returned from the dead. It’s the best thing that’s ever happened to the businesses in the slum. They’re doing a roaring trade with the pilgrims. And the sisters are richer than they could ever have dreamed. People are throwing money at them, a rupee or two at a time, and it’s really adding up. The sisters have set up a charity for abandoned wives. And I think their story—back from the dead, you know—is enough to jump this to page one.’

  ‘Arrey yaar, baba!’ Kavita yelped. ‘Okay first you have to get me together with the women. They’re the key to this. Then I have to interview Anand Rao in prison.’

  ‘I’ll take you there.’

  ‘No,’ she insisted. ‘I have to speak to him alone. I don’t want him prompted by you, or responding to you. I have to see how he’ll hold up on his own. If we’re going to build a campaign around him, he’ll have to stand alone, yaar. But you can speak to him first and prepare the way before my interview. I’ll try to get to see him in the next two or three weeks. We’ve got a lot to do.’

  For two hours we discussed the campaign, and I answered her many questions. I left her in a happy, enthusiastic whirl of pressure and purpose. I rode straight out to Nariman Point, and bought a sizzling meal from one of the fast-food vans parked on the beach. But my appetite wasn’t as good as I’d thought, and I ate less than half. I went down to the rocks to rinse my hands in the seawater, within sight of the spot where Abdullah had introduced himself to me three years before.

  Khader’s words floated on the swift, shallow stream of my thoughts once again: the wrong thing, for the right reasons … I thought of Anand Rao, in Arthur Road Prison, in the big dormitory room with the overseers and the body lice. I shivered the thought off into the breeze. Kavita had asked me why the Anand Rao case was so important to me. I didn’t tell her that he’d come to me before he committed the murder, only a week before he cut Rasheed’s throat. I didn’t tell her that I’d brushed him off, and insulted him, demeaning his dilemma with an offer of money. I smudged an answer to her question, and let her think that I was just trying to help a friend, just trying to do the right thing.

  Khaderbhai once said that every virtuous act is inspired by a dark secret. It mightn’t be true of everyone, but it was true enough about me. The little good that I’ve done in the world has always dragged behind it a shadow of dark inspiration. What I do know now, and didn’t know then is that, in the long run, motive matters more with good deeds than it does with bad. When all the guilt and shame for the bad we’ve done have run their course, it’s the good we did that can save us. But then, when salvation speaks, the secrets we kept, and the motives we concealed, creep from their shadows. They cling to us, those dark motives for our good deeds. Redemption’s climb is steepest if the good we did is soiled with secret shame.

  But I didn’t know that then. I washed my hands in the cold, uncaring sea, and my conscience was as silent and remote as the mute, unreachable stars.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  USED PASSPORTS, known as books to us, the counterfeiters and smugglers who traded in them, had to be checked before they could be sold or used by black marketeers. It was always possible that the junkies, runaways, or indigent foreigners who’d sold their passports to our agents were wanted for some serious offence in their own or some other country. More than a few smugglers had been caught out in that way. They’d bought passports, changed them to suit, and set out on a mission, only to find themselves arrested at a foreign airport because the original owners were wanted for murder, or robbery, or different smuggling charges. To ensure the satisfaction of our customers and the safety of our couriers, Abdul Ghani subjected every new passport that he bought or stole to two levels of scrutiny.
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  A customs officer with access to a computer at Bombay’s international airport provided the first filter. At a time and place of his choosing, the officer was given a sheet bearing the country of origin, passport number, and original name on each passport to be checked. A day or two later he returned the sheet with a line drawn through those that were flagged in his computer. Some of the passports were flagged because international arrestwarrants had been issued for the original owners. Some passports were flagged because suspicion attached itself to the owner: a hint of involvement in the illegal drugs or arms trade, or some political connection that made security services uneasy. Whatever the reason, flagged passports couldn’t be sold on the black market or used by Ghani’s couriers.

  Flagged books still had their uses. It was possible to cannibalise them by pulling apart the stitching to furnish fresh pages for other, usable books. There were also other uses within India. Although foreigners had to show their passports for C-Form entries when they registered at hotels, every city had its share of places that weren’t fastidiously precise about the resemblance, or lack of it, between a passport and its bearer. For those hotels, any passport did the job. Although unable to travel out of India with such a flagged passport, a man or woman could use one to move around within the country safely, and satisfy the minimum legal requirements that an obliging hotel manager had to observe.

  Unflagged books that did pass the customs check were sent through a second filter at airline offices. All the major airlines kept their own lists of hot or flagged passports. Inclusion of a passport name and number on the list was prompted by anything from a bad credit rating or fraudulent dealings with an airline to any incident involving violent behaviour as a passenger on a plane. Naturally enough, when smugglers were going about the business of their crimes they were eager to avoid any but the most superficial and routine attention from airline staff, customs personnel, or police. A passport that was flagged, for any reason, was useless to them. Abdul Ghani’s agents at the offices of most of the major airlines in Bombay checked the numbers and names of the passports we’d acquired, and reported those that were flagged. The clean books that passed through both filters—a little less than half of all those obtained—were sold, or used by Khader’s couriers.

  The clients who bought Ghani’s illegal passports fell into three main categories. The first were economic refugees, people forced from their land by famine or driven to seek a better life in a new country. There were Turks wanting to work in Germany, Albanians wanting to work in Italy, Algerians wanting to work in France, and people from several Asian countries who wanted to work in Canada and the United States. A family, a group of families, and sometimes a whole village community pooled their meagre earnings to purchase one of Abdul’s passports and send a favoured son to one of the promised lands. Once there, he worked to repay their loan and eventually buy new passports for other young men and women. The passports sold for anything between five and twenty-five thousand dollars. Khaderbhai’s network issued about a hundred of those poverty passports every year, and his annual profit, after all the overheads, was more than a million dollars.

  Political refugees made up the second category of clients. The upheavals that sent those people into exile were often violent. They were victims of wars, and of conflicts based on community, religion, or ethnicity. Sometimes the upheaval was legislated: thousands of Hong Kong residents who weren’t recognised as British citizens became potential clients, with the stroke of a pen, when Britain decided in 1984 to return its colonial possession to China in a thirteen-year resolution of sovereignty. Around the world, at any one time, there were twenty million refugees living in camps and safe havens. Abdul Ghani’s passport agents were never idle. A new book cost those people anywhere from ten to fifty thousand dollars. The higher price was determined by the greater risks involved in smuggling into war zones, and the greater demand to escape from them.

  The third group of clients for Abdul’s illegal books was criminals. Occasionally, those criminals were men like me—thieves, smugglers, contract killers—who needed a new identity to stay one step ahead of the police. For the most part, however, Abdul Ghani’s special clients were the kind of men who were more likely to build and fill prisons than to serve time in them. They were dictators, military coup leaders, secret policemen, and bureaucrats from corrupt regimes forced to take flight when their crimes were uncovered or the regime fell. One Ugandan fugitive—a man I dealt with personally—had stolen more than a million dollars, allocated by international monetary agencies for essential service constructions, including a children’s hospital. The hospital was never built. Instead, the sick, injured, and dying children were transported to a remote camp and left to fend for themselves. At a meeting that I set up in Kinshasa, Zaire, the man paid me two hundred thousand dollars for two books—a perfect, unblemished Swiss passport, and a virgin, original Canadian passport—and travelled safely to Venezuela.

  Abdul’s agents in South America, Asia, and Africa established contact with embezzlers, torturers, mandarins, and martinets who’d supported fallen tyrannies. Dealing with them gave me more angry shame than anything else I ever did in Khaderbhai’s service. In the young life I’d known as a free man, I was a dedicated writer of newspaper articles and pamphlets. I’d spent years researching and exposing the crimes and violations perpetrated by such men. I’d put my body on the line, supporting their victims in a hundred violent protest clashes with the police. And I still felt some of the old hatred and a choking sense of outrage when I dealt with them. But that life I’d known was gone. The revolutionary social activist had lost his ideals in heroin and crime. And I, too, was a wanted man. I, too, had a price on my head. I was a gangster, and I lived from one day to the next with only Khader’s mafia council standing between me and prison torture.

  So, I played my part in Ghani’s network, helping mass-murderers to escape from the death sentences they’d passed on so many others and had finally earned from their countrymen in return. But I didn’t like it, and I didn’t like them, and I let them know it. I drove them to the wall on every deal, taking a little solace from the rage I provoked in them. And they haggled infuriatingly, those human-rights abusers, self-righteously indignant about spending the money they’d gouged from people’s mouths. But in the end, they all caved in and agreed to our terms. In the end, they paid well.

  No-one else in Khaderbhai’s network seemed to share my sense of out-rage or my shame. There’s probably no single group of citizens who are more cynical about politics and politicians than professional criminals. In their view, all politicians are ruthless and corrupt, and all political systems favour the powerful rich over the defenceless poor. And in time, and in a sense, I began to share their view because I knew the experience in which it was grounded. Prison had given us an intimate acquaintance with human-rights violations, and every day the courts confirmed what we’d learned about the law: the rich in any country, and any system, always got the best justice money could buy.

  On the other hand, the criminals in Khader’s network displayed a kind of egalitarianism that would’ve filled communists and Gnostic Christians with admiring envy. They didn’t care about the colour, creed, race, or political orientation of clients, and they didn’t judge them when asking about their past. Every life, no matter how innocent or evil, reduced to only one question: How bad do you need the book? The answer established the going rate, and every customer who had the money to pay it was born again, with no history and no sin, in the moment of the deal. No client was better than any other, and none was worse.

  Abdul Ghani, propelled by the purest amoral spirit of market forces, serviced the needs of generals, mercenaries, misappropriators of public funds, and murderous interrogators without a hint of censure or dismay. Their freedom brought in about two million dollars each year in clear profit. But although he wasn’t ethically squeamish about the source of the income, or receiving it, Abdul Ghani was religiously superstitious about spending it. Eve
ry dollar earned in saving that poisonous clientele went to a refugee rescue program that Khaderbhai had established for Iranians and Afghans displaced by war. Every passport bought by one of the war-lords or their apparatchiks bought fifty more books, identity cards, or travel documents for Iranian and Afghan refugees. Thus, in one of those psychic labyrinths that fate likes to build around greed and fear, the high prices paid by tyrants rescued many of those made wretched by tyranny.

  Krishna and Villu taught me everything they knew about the passport business, and in time I began to experiment, creating new identities for myself with American, Canadian, Dutch, German, and British books. My work wasn’t as good as theirs, and never would be. Good forgers are artists. Their artistic vision must encompass the deliberate creative smudge that gives each page its counterfeit authenticity, no less than the accuracy of altered or manufactured details. Each page that they create is a miniature painting, a tiny expression of their art. The precise angle of one slightly skewed stamp or the casual blurring of another are as significant to those small canvasses as the shape, position, and colour of a fallen rose might be in a grand master’s portrait. The effect, no matter how skilfully achieved, is always born in the artist’s intuition. And intuition can’t be taught.

  My skills, instead, found expression in the stories that had to be invented for every newly created book. There were often gaps of months, or even years, in the record of travel contained within the books that we got from foreigners. Some had overstayed their visas, and that lapse had to be expunged from the book before it could be used. Stamping an exit from Bombay airport before the last visa’s expiry date, as if the passport holder had left the country within the life of the visa, I then set about establishing a history of movement from one country to another for every book, using the bank of exit and entry stamps that Villu had created. Little by little, I brought each book up to date, and finally supplied it with a new visa for India and an entry stamp at Bombay airport.