Shantaram: A Novel

by Gregory David Roberts

  ‘While we’re on the subject, have you had any more trouble with Maurizio?’

  ‘Not a thing from him, but I’m worried about Ulla. She’s been gone for a whole day and night. She took a call from Modena the night before last, and left in a hurry. It was the first time he surfaced in weeks. I haven’t heard from her since, and she promised to call.’

  I rubbed the frown from my forehead, up through my untidy hair.

  ‘Ulla knows what she’s doing,’ I growled. ‘She’s not your problem, and she’s not mine. I helped her because she asked me to. Because I like her. But I’m getting tired of this Ulla-Maurizio-Modena thing, you know what I mean? Did Modena say anything to her about the money?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe.’

  ‘Well, it’s still missing, and so is Modena. The boys on the street have been telling me. Maurizio’s going around all over the place looking for Modena. He won’t give up until he finds him. And Ulla’s no better. Sixty thousand bucks—it’s not all that much, but people have been killed for less. If Modena’s got it, he better stay clear of Ulla while Maurizio’s still after him.’

  ‘I know. I know.’

  Her eyes were suddenly glazed and apprehensive.

  ‘I’m not worried about Ulla,’ I said more softly. ‘I worry about you. If Modena’s back, you should stay close to Abdullah for a while. Or me.’

  She looked at me with her lips pressed to white rims around what she wanted to say but couldn’t or wouldn’t.

  ‘Tell me about the scene,’ I suggested, trying to shift us from the cold, black whirlpool that Ulla’s life was becoming. ‘What’s going on in this movie?’

  ‘It’s a nightclub, or at least it’s a movie version of one. The hero steals a jewel from a rich politician, I think—something like that—and he runs in here to hide. He watches the girl, Kimi, doing a big dance number, and he falls for her. When the cops show up, he hides the jewel in her wig. The rest of the movie is about how he tries to get close to her, to get the jewel back.’

  She paused, studying my face, and trying to read the expression in my eyes.

  ‘It’s … I guess you think it’s kinda stupid.’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ I laughed. ‘I like it. I like all this. In the real world, the guy would just beat her up and take his jewel back. He might even shoot her. I like the Bollywood version better.’

  ‘So do I,’ she said, laughing. ‘I love it. They put it all together from painted canvas and skinny pieces of wood and it’s … it’s like they’re making dreams or something. I know that sounds corny, but I mean it. I love this world, Lin, and I don’t want to go back to the other one.’

  ‘Hey, Lin!’ a voice called out from behind me. It was Chandra Mehta, one of the producers. ‘You got a minute?’

  I left Lisa with the German tourists and joined Chandra Mehta beneath a metal gantry that supported a complex tree of bright lights. He wore a baseball cap backwards, and the press of the tight band made his plump face seem rounder. Faded blue Levis were buttoned up under his expansive paunch, and a long kurtah shirt almost covered it from above. He was sweating in the mildly humid air of the closed set.

  ‘Hey, man. How is it? I’ve been wanting to see you, yaar.’ His voice was breathy with conspiracy. ‘Let’s go outside and get some air. I’m boiling my fuckin’ bonus off in here, yaar.’

  As we strolled between the metal-domed buildings, actors in costume crossed our path, together with men carrying props and pieces of equipment. At one point, a group of nine pretty dancing girls dressed in exotic, feathered costumes passed us on their way to a sound stage. They turned my head around, forcing my body to follow it until I was walking backwards for a while. Chandra Mehta never gave them so much as a glance.

  ‘Listen, Lin, what I wanted to talk to you about …’he said, touching my arm at the elbow as we walked. ‘I have this friend, you know, and he’s a business fellow, with a lot of dealings in the USA. Achaa, what to say … he has a problem of his rupees-to-dollars cash flow, yaar. I was kind of hoping that you … a little bird told me that you are a helpful fellow when the cash is not flowing.’

  ‘I assume this cash should be in U.S. dollars, when it’s flowing correctly?’

  ‘Yes,’ he smiled. ‘I’m very glad that you understand his problem.’

  ‘Just how badly is the flow backed up?’

  ‘Oh, I think that about ten thousand should move things along very nicely.’

  I told him Khaled Ansari’s current rate for U.S. dollars, and he agreed to the terms. I arranged to meet him on the set the following day. He was to have the rupees—a much larger bundle of notes than the American currency made—in a soft backpack, ready for me to collect on my bike. We shook on the deal. Mindful of the man I represented, lord Abdel Khader Khan, a man whose name would never be mentioned by Mehta or by me, I put a slightly uncomfortable pressure in the handshake. It was a tiny pain I inflicted on him, the merest twinge, but it reinforced the hard eye-contact above my amiable smile.

  ‘Don’t start this if you’re going to mess it up, Chandra,’ I warned, as the handshake pulsed from his pinched hand to his eyes. ‘Nobody likes to get jerked around—my friends least of all.’

  ‘Oh, of course not, baba]’ he joked, not quite smothering the blip of alarm that spiked in his eyes. ‘No problem. Koi bakt nahil] Don’t worry] I’m very grateful that you can help me, my … what to say, help my friend, with his problem, yaar.’

  We strolled back to the sound stage, and I found Lisa with Mehta’s fellow producer, Cliff De Souza.

  ‘Hey, man! You’ll do!’ Cliff said in greeting, seizing me by the arm and dragging me toward the tables on the nightclub set. I looked at Lisa, but she just raised her hands in a gesture that said You‘re on your own, buddy.

  ‘What’s going on, Cliff?’

  ‘We need another guy, yaar. We need a guy, a gora, sitting between these two lovely girls.’

  ‘Oh, no you don’t.’ I resisted him, trying to wrestle myself out of his grip without actually hurting him. We were at the table. The two German girls stood and reached out to drag me into the seat between them. ‘I can’t do this! I don’t act! I’m camera shy! I don’t do this!’

  ‘Na, komm’ schonl Hor’ aufi’ one of the girls said. ‘You are the one who told us yesterday how easy it is to do this, na?’

  They were attractive women. I’d selected their group precisely because they were all healthy and attractive men and women. Their smiles were challenging me to join them. I thought about what it would mean: taking a part in a movie that about three hundred million people in ten or more countries would see while I was on the run as my country’s most wanted man. It was foolish. It was dangerous.

  ‘Oh, why the hell not,’ I shrugged.

  Cliff and the stagehands backed away as the cast members took their places on the set. The star, Chunkey Pandey, was a handsome, athletic, young Bombay guy. I’d seen him in a few of the movies I’d watched with my Indian friends, and I was surprised to discover that he was considerably more handsome and charismatic in person than he was on the screen. A make-up assistant held up a mirror while Chunkey combed and fretted at his hair. The intensity of the gaze that he focused on the mirror was as steadfast as a surgeon’s might be in the midst of a complex and critical procedure.

  ‘You missed the best part,’ one of the German girls whispered to me. ‘It took this guy a big time to learn his dancing moves for this scene. He crapped it up quite a few many times. And every time he crapped it up, this little guy with the Spiegel … the mirror, he pops out, and we watch him, with the hair combing, all again. If they just used all that stuff of him crapping it up and combing his hair while the little guy holds the mirror, I tell you, this would be a big comedy hit.’

  The director of the film stood beside his cinematographer, poised with one eye to the lens of the camera, and then gave his last instructions to the lighting crew. At a signal, the director’s assistant called for all-quiet on the set. The cinematograph
er announced that the film was rolling.

  ‘Cue sound!’ the director commanded. ‘And … action!’

  Music hammered into the set from large stadium speakers. It was the loudest that I’d ever heard Indian movie music played, and I loved it. The dancers, including the star, Kimi Katkar, pranced onto the artificial stage. Working the set and the crowd of extras, Kimi sashayed across the stage and made her way from table to table, dancing and miming her number all the while. The hero joined in the dance, and then ducked under a table when the actors playing the cops arrived. The whole sequence lasted only five minutes in the film, but it took all the morning to rehearse and most of the afternoon to shoot. My first taste of show business resulted in two brief sweeps of the camera that captured my wide smile as Kimi paused, in her seductive routine, at the back of my chair.

  We sent the foreign tourists home in two cabs, and Lisa rode back to town with me on the Bullet. It was a warm evening and she removed her jacket to ride, pulling the clip from her long hair. She wrapped her arms around my waist and pressed her cheek into my back. She was a good passenger: the kind who surrenders her will in unconditional trust, and blends her body to the nuance of the rider. Through my thin white shirt I felt the press of her breasts against my back. The shirt was open in the warm wind, and her hands clung to the tight skin of my waist. I never wore a helmet on the bike. There was a helmet clipped to the back of the seat for a passenger, but she chose not to wear it. Occasionally, when we stopped for the flow of traffic or to make a turn, a gust of wind whipped her long, curly blonde hair over my shoulder and into my mouth. The perfume of verbena flowers lingered on my lips. Her thighs clung to me, gently, and with a promise or a threat of the strength they possessed. I remembered those thighs, the skin as soft as moonlight on the palm of my hand that night at Karla’s house. And then, as if she was reading my thoughts or joining them, she spoke when the bike stopped at a traffic signal.

  ‘How’s the kid?’

  ‘The kid?’

  ‘That little kid you had with you that night, you remember, at Karla’s place.’

  ‘He’s fine. I saw him last week, at his uncle’s. He’s not so little any more. He’s growing fast. He’s at a private school. He doesn’t like it much, but he’ll do okay.’

  ‘Do you miss him?’

  The signal changed and I kicked the bike into gear, twisting the throttle to send us into the intersection on the staccato throbbing of the engine’s growl. I didn’t answer her. Of course I missed him. He was a good kid. I missed my daughter. I missed my mother and all of my family. I missed my friends: I missed them all and I was sure, in those desperate years, that I would never see them again. Missing the people I loved was a kind of grieving for me, and it was worse, much worse, for the fact that—so far as I knew—they weren’t dead. My heart, sometimes, was a graveyard full of blank stones. And when I was alone in my apartment, night after night, that grieving and missing choked me. There was money in bundles on the dressing table, and there were passports freshly forged that could send me … anywhere. But there was nowhere to go: nowhere that wasn’t emptied of meaning and identity and love by the vacuum of those who were missing and lost forever.

  I was the fugitive. I was the vanished one. I was the one who was missing; missing in action. But inside the slipstream of my flight, they were the missing ones. Inside my exile, it was the whole world I once knew that was missing. The fugitive kind run, trying against their hearts to annihilate the past, and with it every tell-tale trace of what they were, where they came from, and those who once loved them. And they run into that extinction of themselves, to survive, but they always fail. We can deny the past, but we can’t escape its torment because the past is a speaking shadow that keeps pace with the truth of what we are, step for step, until we die.

  And from the pink and purple palette of the perished evening, a blue-black night rose up around us as we rode. We plunged with the sea-wind into tunnels of light. The robe of sunset slipped from the shoulders of the city. Lisa’s hands moved on my hard skin like the sea; like the surging, swarming caress of the sea. And for a moment, as we rode together, we were one: one desire, one promise dissolving into compromise, one mouth tasting the trickle of danger and delight. And something—it might’ve been love, or fear—goaded me to the choice, putting whispers in the warming wind: This is as young, and as free, as you’ll ever be.

  ‘I better go.’

  ‘Don’t you want a coffee or something?’ she asked, her hand on the key in the door to her apartment.

  ‘I better go.’

  ‘Kavita’s really into this story you gave her, about the girls from the slum. The girls who came back from the dead. It’s all she talks about. The Blue Sisters, she calls them. I don’t know why she calls them that, but it’s a pretty cool name.’

  She was making conversation, holding me there. I looked into the sky that was her eyes.

  ‘I better go.’

  Two hours later, fully awake, and still feeling the press of her lips in the good-night kiss, I wasn’t surprised when the phone rang.

  ‘Can you come over right away?’ she said when I answered the call.

  I was silent, struggling to find a way to say no that sounded like yes.

  ‘I’ve been trying to find Abdullah, but he doesn’t answer,’ she went on, and then I heard the flattened, frightened, shell-shocked drone in her voice.

  ‘What is it? What’s happened?’

  ‘We had some trouble … there was some trouble …’

  ‘Was it Maurizio? Are you okay?’

  ‘He’s dead,’ she mumbled. ‘I killed him.’

  ‘Is anyone there?’

  ‘Anyone?’ she repeated vaguely.

  ‘Is anyone else there, in the apartment?’

  ‘No. I mean, yes—Ulla’s here, and him, on the floor. That’s …’

  ‘Listen!’ I commanded, ‘Lock the door. Don’t let anyone in.’

  ‘The door’s busted,’ she murmured, her voice weakening. ‘He smashed the lock off the wall when he busted in here.’

  ‘Okay. Push something up against the door—a chair or something. Keep it closed until I get there.’

  ‘Ulla’s a mess. She … she’s pretty upset.’

  ‘It’ll be okay. Just block the door. Don’t phone anyone else. Don’t speak to anyone, and don’t let anyone in. Make two cups of coffee, with lots of milk and sugar—four spoons of sugar—and sit down with Ulla to drink them. Give her a stiff drink, as well, if she needs it. I’m on my way. I’ll be there in ten minutes. Hang in there, and stay cool.’

  Riding the night, cutting into crowded streets, winding the bike into the web of lights, I felt nothing: no fear, no dread, no shiver of excitement. Red-lining a motorcycle means opening the throttle so hard, with every change of gears, that the needle on the rev-counter is twisted all the way round to the red zone of maximum revolutions. And that’s what we were doing, all of us, in our different ways, Karla and Didier and Abdullah and I: we were red-lining our lives. And Lisa. And Maurizio. Twisting the needle to the red zone.

  A Dutch mercenary in Kinshasa once told me that the only time he ever stopped hating himself was when the risk he faced became so great that he acted without thinking or feeling anything at all. I wished he hadn’t said it to me because I knew exactly what he meant. And I rode that night, I soared that night, and the stillness in my heart was almost like being at peace.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  IN MY FIRST KNIFE FIGHT I learned that there are two kinds of people who enter a deadly conflict: those who kill to live, and those who live to kill. The ones who like killing might come into a fight with most of the fire and fury, but the man or woman who fights just to live, who kills just to survive, will usually come out of it on top. If the killer-type begins to lose the fight, his reason for fighting it fades. If the survivor-type begins to lose, his reason for fighting it flares up fiercer than ever. And killing contests with deadly weapons, unlike common fistfights, are lo
st and won in the reasons that remain when the blood begins to run. The simple fact is that fighting to save a life is a better and more enduring reason than fighting to end one.

  My first knife fight was in prison. Like most prison fights, it started trivially and ended savagely. My adversary was a fit, strong veteran of many fights. He was a stand-over man, which meant that he mugged weaker men for money and tobacco. He inspired fear in most of the men and, not burdened with judiciousness, he confused that fear with respect. I didn’t respect him. I detest bullies for their cowardice, and despise them for their cruelty. I never knew a tough man who preyed on the weak. Tough men hate bullies almost as much as bullies hate tough men.

  And I was tough enough. I’d grown up in a rough, working-class neighbourhood, and I’d been fighting all my life. No-one in the prison system knew that then because I wasn’t a career criminal, and I had no history. I began my prison experience as a first offender. What’s more, I was an intellectual, and I sounded and acted like one. Some men respected that and some ridiculed it, but none of them feared it. Nevertheless, the long prison sentence that I was serving—twenty years at hard labour for armed robberies—gave most of them pause. I was a dark horse. No-one knew how I would respond to a real test, and more than a few were curious about it.

  The test, when it did come, was flashing steel, and broken teeth, and eyes rolling wide and wild as a frenzied dog. He attacked me in the prison laundry, the one place not observed directly by guards patrolling catwalks between the gun towers. It was the kind of unprovoked surprise attack that’s known in prison slang as a sneak-go. He was armed with a steel table knife, sharpened with endlessly malignant patience on the stone floor of his cell. Its edge was sharp enough to shave a man or cut his throat. I’d never carried a knife or used one in my life before prison. But in there, where men were attacked and stabbed every other day, I’d followed the advice of the hard men who’d survived long years there. It’s better to have a weapon and not need it, they’d told me more than once, than need it and not have it. My knife was a sharpened spike of metal about as thick as a man’s finger and a little longer than a hand. The hilt was formed with packing tape, and fitted into my hand without bunching the fingers. When the fight began he didn’t know that I was armed, but we both, in our separate ways, expected that it was a fight to the death. He wanted to kill me, and I was sure that I had to kill him to survive.