Shantaram: A Novel

by Gregory David Roberts

  Abdullah and I shook hands all round and, as we sat down on the row of sacks, Scorpio George signalled a chai-runner to bring two more glasses. The passport work was often keeping me busy at night because Krishna and Villu—both of them with young children in their growing families—had taken to staggering their shifts, giving themselves valuable hours at home during the day. That work with the books, and other commitments to the Salman council, prevented me from going to Leopold’s as often as I once had. Whenever I could, I’d met with Vikram and the Georges near Vikram’s apartment on the edge of the Colaba Market. Vikram was there most days, after his lunch with Lettie. He kept me up to date with the news from Leopold’s—Didier had fallen in love, again, and Ranjit, Karla’s new boyfriend, was becoming popular—and the Georges filled me in on what was going down on the streets.

  ‘We thought you weren’t coming today, man,’ Vikram said as the chai arrived.

  ‘Abdullah gave me a lift,’ I replied, frowning at my friend’s mysterious smile, ‘and we got stuck in traffic. It was worth it, though. I had a front row seat for Taj Raj and Indra doing their stumble routine on MG Road. It was quite a show.’

  ‘He’s not what he used to be, our Taj Raj,’ Gemini commented, hurling South London at us in the vowels of the last two words. ‘Not as nimble, like. Since the accident, y’know, his timing’s a bit off. I mean, it’s only reasonable, innit? His whole bleedin’ head was damn near off, an’ all, so it’s no wonder his timing’s got a kink in it.’

  ‘At this point,’ Scorpio George interrupted, lowering his head and assuming the solemn piety we all knew well and dreaded more, ‘I think we should all bow our heads in prayer.’

  We glanced at one another, our eyes widening with alarm. There was no escape. We were too comfortable to move, and Scorpio knew it. We were trapped.

  ‘Oh, Lord,’ Scorpio began.

  ‘Oh, Gawd,’ Gemini grumbled.

  ‘And Lady’ Scorpio continued, ‘infinite yin-yang spirit in the sky, we humbly ask you to hear the prayers, today, of five souls that you put into the world, and left in the temporary care of Scorpio, Gemini, Abdullah, Vikram, and Lin.’

  ‘What does he mean, temporary?’ Vikram whispered to me, and I shrugged in reply.

  ‘Please help us, Lord,’ Scorpio intoned, his eyes shut and his face raised to heaven, which seemed, roughly, to be in the middle of the balcony on the third floor of the Veejay Premnaath Academy of Hair Colouring and Ear Boring. ‘Please guide us to know what’s right, and to do the right thing. And you can start, God, if you’re of a mind, by helping out with the little business deal we’re doing with the Belgian couple tonight. I don’t have to tell you, Lord and Lady, how tricky it is to supply customers with good-quality cocaine in Bombay. But, thanks to your providence, we managed to find ten grams of A-grade snow—and, given the real bad drought on the streets, that was a mighty slick piece of work on your part, God, if you’ll accept my professional admiration. Anyway, Gemini and me, we sure could use the commission on that deal, and it would be kinda nice not to get ripped off, or beaten up, or maimed, or killed—unless, of course, that’s in your plan. So, please light the way, and fill our hearts with love. Signing off now, but keeping the line open, as always, I’ll say Amen.’

  ‘Amen!’ Gemini responded, clearly relieved that the prayer was far shorter than Scorpio’s more usual efforts.

  ‘Amen,’ Vikram sobbed, nudging a tear from his eye with the knuckles of a balled fist.

  ‘Astagfirullah,’ Abdullah muttered. Forgive me, Allah.

  ‘So how about a bite to eat then?’ Gemini suggested cheerily. ‘There’s nothing like a bit of religion to put you in the frame of mind to make a pig of yourself, is there?’

  At that moment Abdullah leaned forward to whisper into my left ear.

  ‘Look slowly—no, slowly! Look over there, behind the peanuts shop, near the corner. Do you see him? Your surprise, brother Lin. Do you see him?’

  And then, still smiling, my eyes were drawn to a stooped figure watching us from the shadows beneath an awning.

  ‘He is here every day,’ Abdullah whispered. And not only here—in some other places that you go, also. He watches you. He waits, and he watches you.’

  ‘Vikram!’ I mumbled, wanting some other testament to what I was seeing. ‘Look! There, on the corner!’

  ‘Look at what, man?’

  With my attention upon him, the figure drew back into the shadows and then turned and loped away, limping, as if the whole left side of his body was damaged.

  ‘Didn’t you see him?’

  ‘No, man. See who?’ Vikram complained, standing with me to squint in the direction of my frantic stare.

  ‘It’s Modena!’ I shouted, running after the limping Spaniard. I didn’t look back at Vikram, Abdullah, and the Zodiacs. I didn’t answer Vikram’s call. I didn’t think about what I was doing or why I was pursuing him. My mind was only one thought, one image, and one word. Modena …

  He was fast, and he knew the streets well. It occurred to me, as he ducked into hidden doorways and all but invisible gaps between buildings, that I was probably the only foreigner in the city who knew those streets as well as he did. For that matter, there were few Indians—only touts and thieves and junkies—who could’ve kept up with him. He scrambled into a hole that someone had knocked through a high stone wall to create an access hatch from one street to another. He stepped around a partition that seemed as solid as brick, but was made from stretched and painted canvas. He took short cuts through improvised shops in sheltering archways, and weaved his way along the labyrinth lines of washed, brightly coloured saris hung out to dry.

  And then he made a mistake. He ran into a narrow lane that had been commandeered by homeless pavement dwellers and extended families that were crowded out of local apartments. I knew it well. About a hundred men, women, and children were living in the converted lane. They slept in shifts, in a loft space they’d built above the cobbled lane and between the walls of adjacent buildings. They did everything else in the long, dark, narrow room that the lane had become. Modena dodged between the seated and standing groups; between cooking stoves and bathing stalls and a blanket of card players. Then, at the end of the lane-room, he turned left instead of right. It was a cul-de-sac surrounded by high sheer walls. It was completely dark, and it ended in a little dogleg where the space curved around the blind corner of another building. We’d used it, sometimes, to make buys with drug dealers we didn’t completely trust, because there was only one way in or out. I rounded the corner, only a few steps behind him, and stood there, panting and straining my eyes to pierce the darkness. I couldn’t see him, but I knew he had to be in there.

  ‘Modena,’ I said softly into the black echoes. ‘It’s Lin. I just want to talk to you. I’m not trying to … I know you’re in here. I’ll just put my bag down, and light us up a beedie, okay? One for you. One for me.’

  I put the bag down slowly, expecting him to make a rush past me. I took a bundle of beedies from my shirt pocket, and extracted two from the pack. Holding them between my third and fourth fingers, thick ends inwards, as every poor man in the city did, I worked open a box of matches and struck one. With the flame playing over the ends of the cigarettes, I allowed myself a glimpse upward and I saw him, cringing away from the little arc of light thrown by the match. Just as the match died, I extended my arm to offer him one of the glowing beedie cigarettes. In the new dark, after the match failed, I waited for a second, two seconds, three seconds, and then I felt his fingers, softer and more delicate in their grasp than I would’ve believed, close around my own and accept the cigarette.

  When he puffed at the beedie I saw his face clearly for the first time. It was grotesque. Maurizio had sliced and slashed so much suffering into the soft skin that it was almost frightening simply to look at it. In the faint orange light, I saw the sneering smile that gleamed in Modena’s eyes as he recognised the horror in my own. How many times, I wondered, had he seen that horror in
the eyes of others—that wide, white dread as they imagined his scars on their own faces and his torment in their souls? How many times had he seen others flinch, as I’d flinched, and shrink away from his wounds as if from the open sores of a disease? How many times had he seen men ask themselves: What did he do? What did he do to deserve this?

  Maurizio’s knife had opened both cheeks beneath the dark brown eyes. The cuts had healed into long Y-shaped scars that dragged down the lower lids of his eyes and ran like the trails of hideous, mocking tears. The lower lids, permanently red and raw, gaped open in little trenches of agony that revealed the whole globe of each eye. The wings and septum of his nose had been cut through to the bone. The skin, when it closed together, had fused in jagged whorls at the sides but not at all in the centre, where the laceration was too deep. The wide hole where his nostrils had been resembled the snout of a pig, and flared with every inward breath. There were many more cuts beside the eyes, around the jaw, and along the full width of his brow below the hairline.

  It looked as though Maurizio had tried to peel off the whole layer of Modena’s face, and the hundred scars that encircled his features were puckered, here and there, into little mounds of flesh that might’ve matched the outstretched fingers of a man’s hands. I knew that there had to be other scars and injuries beneath his clothes: the movements of his arm and leg on the left side of his body were awkward, as if the hinges at elbow, shoulder, and knee had stiffened around wounds that had never really healed.

  It was a monstrous mutilation; a disfigurement so calculated in its cruelty that I felt numbed by it and unable to respond. I noticed that there were no marks on or near his mouth. I wondered at the fortune that had left his sensuous and finely sculpted lips so perfect, so flawlessly unscarred. Then I remembered that Maurizio had gagged him when he’d tied him to the bed, only lifting the twisted cloth from time to time as he’d commanded him to speak. And it seemed to me, as I watched Modena puff at the cigarette, that his smooth, unblemished mouth was the worst and most terrible wound of them all.

  We smoked the beedies down to stubs in silence, and my eyes adjusted to the darkness. I became aware, gradually, of how small he was; how much smaller he’d become with the shrivelling effect of the wounds on his left side. I felt that I was towering over him. I stepped back a pace into the light, picked up my bag, and wagged my head encouragingly.

  ‘Garam chai pio?’ I asked. Shall we drink hot tea?

  ‘Thik hain,’ he replied. Okay.

  I led the way back through the converted lane and into a chai shop where workers from a local flourmill and bakery were resting between shifts. The men, several of them, shuffled along the wooden bench to make room for us. They were powdered with white flour in their hair and over the whole of their bodies. They looked like phantoms or so many stone statues come to life. Their eyes, no doubt irritated by the dusty flour, were as red as coals from the fiery pit beneath their ovens. Their wet lips, where they sipped the tea, were black leeches against the ghostly white of their skin. They stared at us with the usual frank, Indian curiosity, but looked away quickly when Modena raised his gaping eyes to them.

  ‘I’m sorry for running away,’ he said quietly, his eyes fixed on his hands as they fidgeted in his lap.

  I waited for him to say something more, but he locked his mouth in a tight little grimace and breathed loudly, evenly, through his wide, flaring nose.

  ‘Are you … are you okay?’ I asked, when the tea arrived.

  ‘Jarur,’ he answered, with a little smile. Certainly. ‘Are you okay?’

  I thought he was being facetious, and I didn’t hide the irritation in my frown.

  ‘I do not mean to offend you,’ he said, smiling again. It was a strange smile, so perfect in the curve of the mouth, and so deformed in the stiffened cheeks that dragged the lower lids of his eyes down into little wells of misery. ‘I am only offering my help, if you need it. I have money. I always carry ten thousand rupees with me.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I always carry—’

  ‘Yes, yes, I heard you.’ He was speaking softly, but still I glanced up at the bakery men to see if they’d heard him as well. ‘Why were you watching me today in the market?’

  ‘I watch you very often. Almost every day. I watch you and Karla and Lisa and Vikram.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I must watch you. It is one of the ways I will know how to find her.’

  ‘To find who?’

  ‘Ulla. When she returns. She won’t know where I am. I don’t go … I don’t go to Leopold’s any more or any of the other places we used to be together. When she looks for me, she will come to you or to one of the others. And I will see her. And we will be together.’

  He made the little speech so calmly, and then sipped at his tea with such contented abstraction, that it exaggerated the weirdness of his delusion. How could he think that Ulla, who’d left him on the bloody bed to die, would return from Germany to be with him? And even if she were to return, how could she react to his face, deformed into that mourner’s mask, with anything but horror?

  ‘Ulla … went to Germany, Modena.’

  ‘I know,’ he smiled. ‘I am glad for her.’

  ‘She won’t be coming back.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ he said flatly. ‘She’ll come back. She loves me. She’ll come back for me.’

  ‘Why—’ I began, and then abandoned the thought. ‘How do you live?’

  ‘I have a job. A good job. It pays good money. I work with a friend, Ramesh. I met him when … after I was hurt. He looked after me. At the houses of the rich, when a son is born, we go there, and I put on my special clothes. I put on my costume.’

  The dire emphasis he’d put on the last word, and the fractured little smile that accompanied it, sent a creeping unease along the skin of my arms. Some of that disquiet croaked into my voice as I repeated the word.

  ‘Costume?’

  ‘Yes. It has a long tail and sharp ears, and a chain of little skulls around the neck. I make it that I am a demon, an evil spirit. And Ramesh, he makes that he is a holy sadhu, looking like a holy man, and he beats me away from the house. And I come back, and I make it that I am trying to steal the baby. And the women scream when I come near the baby. And Ramesh, he beats me away again. Again I come back, and again he beats me until, at the very last, he beats me so badly that I make like I am dying, and I run away. The people pay us good money for the show.’

  ‘I never heard of it before.’

  ‘No. It is our own idea, Ramesh and me. But after the first rich family paid us, all the others wanted to be sure to beat the evil spirit away from their new baby son. And they pay us good money, all of them. I have an apartment. I don’t own it, of course, but I have paid more than a year of rent in advance already. It is small, but it is comfortable. It will be a good place for Ulla and me to live together. You can see the waves of the sea from the main window. My Ulla, she loves the sea. She always wanted a house near to the sea …’

  I stared at him, fascinated no less by the fact of his speech than its meaning. Modena had been one of the most taciturn men I’d ever known. When we’d both been regulars at Leopold’s he’d gone for weeks at a time, and sometimes as long as a month, without uttering a word in my presence. But the new Modena, the scarred survivor, was a talker. I’d been forced to run him down in a blind alley to get him to talk at all, it was true; but once he started, he became disconcertingly chatty. As I listened to him, as I reoriented myself to the disfigured, voluble version of the man, I became aware of the melodies that his Spanish accent made as it moved fluently between Hindi and English, mixing the two seamlessly, and incorporating words from each into a hybrid language that was his own. Adrift on the softness in his voice, I asked myself if that was the key to the mysterious bond that had existed between them, Ulla and Modena: if they’d talked to one another, for hours, when they were alone, and if that tender euphony, that voice music, had held them together.

  An
d then, with a suddenness that caught me off-guard, the meeting with Modena was over. He stood to pay the bill and walked out into the lane, waiting for me just beyond the doorway.

  ‘I must go,’ he said, looking nervously to his left and right before raising his wounded eyes to mine. ‘Ramesh is there by now, outside the President Hotel. When she comes back, Ulla will be there, she will stay there. She loves that hotel. It is her favourite. She loves the Back Bay area. And there was a plane this morning from Germany. A Lufthansa plane. She might be there.’

  ‘You check … after every flight?’

  ‘Yes. I do not go in,’ he murmured, lifting his hand as if to touch his face, but running it through his short, greying hair instead. ‘Ramesh goes in the hotel for me. He checks her name—Ulla Volkenberg—to see if she is there. One day she will be there. She will be there.’

  He began to walk away from me, but I stopped him with a hand on his shoulder.

  ‘Listen, Modena, don’t run away from me next time, okay? If you need anything, if there’s anything I can do, just ask me. Is it a deal?’

  ‘I will not run away again,’ he said solemnly. ‘It is just my habit to run. And it was just my habit that was running away from you. It was not me running, just my habit. I am not afraid of you. You are my friend.’

  He turned to leave, but I stopped him again, drawing him closer to me so that I could whisper into his ear.

  ‘Modena, don’t tell anyone else that you keep so much money on you. Promise me.’

  ‘Nobody else knows that, Lin,’ he assured me, smiling that deep-eyed grimace at me. ‘Only you. I would not say that to anyone. Not even Ramesh knows that I have money with me. He does not know that I save my money. He does not even know about my apartment. He thinks that I spend my share of the money that we earn together on drugs. And I do not take any drugs, Lin. You know that. I never did any drugs. I just let him think that I do. But you are different, Lin. You are my friend. I can tell you the truth. I can trust you. Why should I not trust the man who killed the devil himself?’