Shantaram: A Novel

by Gregory David Roberts

  I waited, but he didn’t reply, so I continued with my summary.

  ‘Okay the final or ultimate complexity—the place where all this complexity is going—is what, or who, we might call God. And anything that promotes, enhances, or accelerates this movement toward God is good. Anything that inhibits, impedes, or prevents it is evil. And if we want to know if something is good or evil—something like war and killing and smuggling guns to mujaheddin guerrillas, for example—then we ask the questions: What if everyone did this thing? Would that help us, in this bit of the universe, to get there, or would it hold us back? And then we have a pretty good idea whether it’s good or evil. What’s more important, we know why it’s good or evil. There, how was that?’

  ‘Very good,’ he said without looking at me. While I’d run through the summary of his cosmological model, he’d closed his eyes and nodded his head, pursing his lips in a half smile. When I concluded it, he turned to look at me, and the smile widened as the pleasure and the mischief sparked in his eyes. ‘You know, if you wanted to do it, you could express this idea every bit as well and as accurately as I do. And I’ve been working on it and thinking about it for almost all of my life. I cannot tell you how happy it makes me feel to hear you tell it to me in your own words.’

  ‘I think the words are yours, Khaderji. You’ve coached me often enough. But I do have a couple of problems. Do I get my question now?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Okay. We’ve got things like rocks in the world that aren’t alive, and living things like trees and fish and people. Your cosmology doesn’t tell me where life and consciousness come from. If rocks are made out of the same stuff that people are made out of, how come rocks aren’t alive, but people are? I mean, where does life come from?’

  ‘I know you well enough to be sure that you want me to give you a short, direct answer to this question.’

  ‘I think I’d like a short, direct answer to every question,’ I replied, laughing.

  He raised an eyebrow at the foolishness of my flippant response and then shook his head slowly.

  ‘Do you know the English philosopher Bertrand Russell? Have you read any of his books?’

  ‘Yeah. I read some of his stuff—at university, and in prison.’

  ‘He was a favourite of my dear Mr. Mackenzie Esquire,’ Khader smiled. ‘I do not often agree with Bertrand Russell’s conclusions, but I do like the way he arrives at them. Anyway, he once said, Anything that can be put in a nutshell should remain there. And I do agree with him about that. But now, the answer to your question is this: life is a feature of all things. We could call it a characteristic, which is one of my favourite English words. If you do not speak English as your first language, the word “characteristic” has an amazing sound—like rapping on a drum, or breaking kindling wood for a fire. To continue, every atom in the universe has the characteristic of life. The more complex way that atoms get put together, the more complex is the expression of the characteristic of life. A rock is a very simple arrangement of atoms, so the life in a rock is so simple that we cannot see it. A cat is a very complex arrangement of atoms, so the life in a cat is very obvious. But life is there, in everything, even in a rock, and even when we cannot see it.’

  ‘Where did you get this idea? Is it in the Koran?’

  ‘Actually, it is a concept that appears in one way or another in most of the great religions. I have changed it slightly to suit what we have learned about the world in the last few hundred years. But the Holy Koran gives me my inspiration for this kind of study, because the Koran commands me to study everything, and learn everything, in order to serve Allah.’

  ‘But where does this life characteristic come from?’ I insisted, sure that I had him trapped in a reductionist dead-end at last.

  ‘Life, and all the other characteristics of all the things in the universe, such as consciousness, and free will, and the tendency toward complexity, and even love, was given to the universe by light, at the beginning of time as we know it.’

  ‘At the Big Bang? Is that what you’re talking about?’

  ‘Yes. The Big Bang expansion happened from a point called a singularity—another of my favourite five-syllable English words—that is almost infinitely dense, and almost infinitely hot, and yet it occupies no space and no time, as we know those things. The point is a boiling cauldron of light energy. Something caused it to expand—we don’t know yet what caused it—and from light, all the particles and all the atoms came to exist, along with space and time and all the forces that we know. So, light gave every little particle at the beginning of the universe a set of characteristics, and as those particles combine in more complex ways, the characteristics show themselves in more and more complex ways.’

  He paused, watching my face as I struggled with the concepts and questions and emotions that looped in my mind. He got away from me again, I thought, suddenly furious with him for having an answer to my question, and yet struck with admiring respect for the same reason. There was always something eerily incongruous in the wise lectures—sometimes they were like sermons—of the mafia don Abdel Khader Khan. Sitting there against a stone wall in an all-but-Stone Age village in Afghanistan, with a cargo of smuggled guns and antibiotics nearby, the dissonance created by his calm, profound discourse about good and evil, and light and life and consciousness, was enough to fill me with exasperated irritation.

  ‘What I have just told you is the relationship between consciousness and matter,’ Khader proclaimed, pausing again until he had my eye. ‘This is a kind of test, and now you know it. This is a test that you should apply to every man who tells you that he knows the meaning of life. Every guru you meet and every teacher, every prophet and every philosopher, should answer these two questions for you: What is an objective, universally acceptable definition of good and evil? And, What is the relationship between consciousness and matter? If he cannot answer these two questions, as I have done, you know that he has not passed the test.’

  ‘How do you know all this physics?’ I demanded. ‘All this about particles and singularities and Big Bangs?’

  He stared at me, reading the full measure of the unconscious insult: How is it that an Afghan gangster like you knows so much about science and higher knowledge? I looked back at him, remembering a day at the slum with Johnny Cigar when I’d made the cruel mistake of assuming him to be ignorant simply because he was poor.

  ‘There is a saying—When the student is ready, the teacher appears—do you know it?’ he asked, laughing. It seemed that he was laughing at me, rather than with me.

  ‘Yes,’ I whistled patiently, through clenched teeth.

  ‘Well, just at the point in my studies of philosophy and religion when I came to need the special knowledge of a scientist, one appeared for me. I knew that there were many answers for me in the science of life and stars and chemistry. But, unfortunately, these were not the things that my dear Mackenzie Esquire taught to me, except in the most elementary fashion. Then I met a physicist, a man who was working at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre in Bombay. He was a very good man, but he had a weakness for gambling at that time. He found himself in big trouble. He lost a lot of money that was not his to lose. He was gambling at one of the clubs owned by a man I knew well—a man who worked for me, if I needed it. And there was more trouble. The scientist was involved with a woman—he fell in love with her, and he did stupid things for the sake of this love, and so there were many dangers. When he came to me, I solved the problems of this scientist, and kept all the matters strictly between us. No-one else ever knew the details of his indiscretions, or of my involvement in solving them. And, in exchange for this, the man has been teaching me ever since that day. His name is Wolfgang Persis, and I have arranged it that you will meet him, if you wish, soon after we return.’

  ‘How long has he been teaching you?’

  ‘We have been studying together once every week for the past seven years.’

  ‘Jesus!’ I gasped, thinking, wit
h a little curl of mean delight, that wise and mighty Khader hacked out his pound of flesh when it suited him. In another heartbeat I was ashamed of the thought: I loved Khader Khan enough to follow him into a war. Wasn’t it possible that the scientist loved him just as well? And in thinking that, I knew I was jealous of the man, the scientist I didn’t know and probably would never meet. Jealousy, like the flawed love that bears it, has no respect for time or space or wisely reasoned argument. Jealousy can raise the dead with a single, spiteful taunt, or hate a perfect stranger for nothing more than the sound of his name.

  ‘You are asking about life,’ Khader said gently, changing tack, ‘because you are thinking about death. And you are thinking about the taking of a life, if it happens that you must shoot a man. Am I right in this?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I muttered. He was right, but the killing that preoccupied me wasn’t in Afghanistan. The life I wanted to take was perched on a throne, in a secret room in a grotesque brothel called The Palace, in Bombay. Madame Zhou.

  ‘Remember,’ Khader said insistently, resting his hand on my forearm to emphasise his words. ‘Sometimes it is necessary to do the wrong thing for the right reasons. The important thing is to be sure that our reasons are right, and that we admit the wrong—that we do not lie to ourselves, and convince ourselves that what we do is right.’

  And later, as the wedding whirled and clamoured to the last wail of its rejoicing, and as we rejoined our men and scrambled, clattered, and strained our way across new mountains, I tried to unwind the wreath of thorns that Khader had coiled around my heart with his words. The wrong thing for the right reasons … Once before he’d tormented me with that phrase. I chewed at it, in my mind, as a bear will chew at a leather strap that binds it by the leg. In my life, the wrong things were almost always done for the wrong reasons. Even the right things that I did were too often goaded by the wrong reasons.

  A gloomy mood enwrapped me. It was a sullen, doubting temper that I couldn’t shake off, and as we rode into the winter I thought often of Anand Rao, my neighbour from the slum. I remembered Anand’s face smiling at me through the metal grille of the visitor’s room at Arthur Road Prison: that gentle, handsome face, so serene, and softened with the peace that had suffused his heart. He’d done the wrong thing for the right reasons, as he saw it. He’d calmly accepted the punishment that he’d earned, as he said to me, as if it was a privilege or a right. And at last, after too many thinking days and nights, I cursed Anand. I cursed him to drive him from my mind because a voice kept telling me—my own voice, or maybe it was my father’s—that I would never know that peace. I would never come to that Eden in the soul, where acceptance of punishment and acknowledgement of wrong and right roll away the troubles that lodge like stones in the barren field of an exiled heart.

  Moving north again at night, we climbed and crossed the narrow Kussa Pass in the Hada Mountains. The journey of thirty crow-kilometres was closer to one hundred and fifty climbing-and-descending-kilometres for us. Then, exposed to the wide sky, we travelled over flatter land for almost fifty kilometres to cross the Arghastan River and its tributaries three times before we reached the foothills of the Shahbad Pass. And there, with my mind still choked on its rights and wrongs, we were fired on for the first time.

  Khader’s command that we commence the climb of the Shahbad Pass without a rest saved many lives, including my own, that cold evening. We were exhausted after the headlong, trotting march across the open plain. Every man among us hoped for rest at the foothills of the pass, but Khader urged us on, riding the length of the column and shouting for us to keep on, keep on, and keep up the pace. Thus we were moving fast when the first shots were fired. I heard the sound: a hollow metal tapping, as if someone was rapping on the side of an empty gasoline can with a piece of copper pipe. Stupidly, I didn’t associate it with gunfire at first, and I kept trudging forward, leading my horse by the reins. Then the bullets found their range, and they smashed into the ground, our column, and the rock walls around us. The men scrambled for cover. I fell to the ground, grinding my face into the dust of the stony path and telling myself that it wasn’t really happening, that I hadn’t seen the man in front of me ripped open across his back as he stumbled forward. Our men began firing from all around me. And rapid-breathing the dust into my mouth, stiff with fear, I was in the war.

  I might’ve stayed there, with my face in the dirt and my heart thumping seismic terror into the earth, if it wasn’t for my horse. I’d lost the reins, and the horse was rearing in fright. Fearing that it might trample me, I scrambled to my feet and scrabbled at the flailing reins to regain control of her. The horse that had been so impressively obedient to that point was suddenly the worst of the entire column. She reared and then bucked. She stamped her hooves and tried to drag me backward. She thrashed and drove us in tight circles, trying to find an angle where she could kick backward at me. She even bit me, snapping at my forearm and causing intense pain through three layers of clothes.

  I glanced along the line, left and right. Those nearest to the pass were making a run for it, leading their animals toward the rocky shelves for shelter. Those immediately in front of me and behind me had managed to bring their horses down, and they crouched beside or behind them. Only my horse was still rearing and widely visible. Without a horseman’s skill, it’s a damn hard thing to convince a horse to lie down in a battle zone. Other horses were screaming in fear, and each whinny of terror put more panic into mine. I wanted to save her, to bring her down and make less of a target of her, but I was afraid for myself as well. The enemy fire slammed into the rocks above and beside me, and with every shattering sound I flinched like a deer nudging a thorn-hedge.

  It’s a bizarre feeling, waiting for a bullet to strike: the nearest experience I can recall that’s anything like it is falling through space, and waiting for the safety chute to open. There’s a special taste; a unique taste. There’s a different smell on your skin. And there’s a hardness in the eyes, as if they’re suddenly made of cold metal. Just when I decided to give up and let the animal fend for herself, she buckled easily and followed my dragging arms down and onto her side. I hurled myself down with her, using her swollen middle as a shield. In an attempt to calm her, I reached over to pat at her shoulder. My hand squelched in a bloody wound. Raising my head, I saw that the horse had been struck twice, once high on the shoulder and once in the belly. The wounds were streaming blood with every heaving breath, and the horse was crying—I have no other word for it. The sound was a breathy, stuttering, whining sob. I put my head against hers, and wrapped my arm around her neck.

  The men in my group concentrated their fire on a ridge about one hundred and fifty metres away. With my body pressed hard against the ground, I peeked over the mane of my horse to see dusty plumes rise and spill over the distant ridge as bullet after bullet rammed into the earth.

  And then it was over. I heard Khader shouting in three languages for the men to stop shooting. We waited for long minutes, in a stillness that groaned and moaned and sobbed. I heard footsteps crunching the stones nearby, and looked up to see Khaled Ansari running toward me at a crouch.

  ‘Are you okay, Lin?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I answered, wondering then for the first time if I, too, had been shot. I ran my hands over my legs and arms. ‘Yeah, I’m all here. I think I’m still in one piece. But they shot my horse. She’s —’

  ‘I’m doing a count!’ he interrupted me, holding up the palms of both hands to calm me and stop me speaking. ‘Khader sent me to see if you’re okay and do a head count. I’ll be back soon. Stay here and don’t move.’

  ‘But she’s —’

  ‘She’s finished!’ he hissed and then softened his tone. ‘The horse is gone, Lin. She’s done for. She’s not the only one. Habib’s gonna finish them off. Just stay here and keep your head down. I’ll be back.’

  He ran off at a crouch, stopping here and there along the column behind me. My horse was breathing hard, whimpering with every third or
fourth chugging breath. The flow of blood was slow but steady. The wound in her belly was oozing a dark fluid that was darker than blood. I tried to soothe her, stroking her neck, and then I realised that I hadn’t given her a name. It seemed grievously cruel, somehow, for her to die without a name. I searched my mind, and when I pulled the net of thought up from the blue-black deep there was a name, glittering and true.

  ‘I’m going to call you Claire,’ I whispered into the mare’s ear. ‘She was a beautiful girl. She always made me look good, wherever we went. When I was with her I always looked like I knew what I was doing. And I didn’t start to love her, really, until she walked away from me for the last time. She said I was interested in everything and committed to nothing. She said that to me once. And she was right. She was right.’

  I was babbling, raving, in shock. I know the symptoms now. I’ve seen other men under fire for the first time. A rare few know exactly what to do: their weapons are returning fire before their bodies have finished an instinctive crouch and roll. Others laugh, and can’t stop laughing. Some cry, and call for their mama, or their wife, or their God. Some get so quiet, shrinking down inside themselves, that even their friends get spooked by it. And some talk, just like I talked to my dying horse.

  Habib scrambled up to me in a slithering, zigzag run, and saw me talking into the mare’s ear. He checked her over thoroughly, running his hands over the wounds and probing under the thickly veined hide to feel for the bullets. He pulled his knife out of its scabbard. It was a long knife, with a dog’s tooth point. He positioned it over the horse’s throat and then paused. His mad eyes met mine. There was a sunburst of gold around the pupils of his eyes that seemed to pulse and whirl. They were big eyes, but the madness in them was bigger, straining and bulging at them as if it wanted to burst outward from his very brain. And yet he was sane enough to sense my helpless grief, and to offer me the knife.