Shantaram: A Novel

by Gregory David Roberts

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’m talking about Maurizio, the enemy of my blood.’

  ‘I didn’t kill Maurizio,’ I said, frowning down into the red-walled caves of his eyes.

  His perfect mouth widened into an accomplice’s leer. The expression dragged harder on the Y-shaped scars that once were the lower lids of his eyes. The gape of those eyes was so unnerving in the flame-lit lane that I had to steel myself not to flinch or draw back when he reached out to put his palm on my chest.

  ‘Do not worry, Lin. The secret is safe with me. I am glad that you killed him. Not just for me. I knew him. I was his best friend—his only friend. If he lived, after he did this to me, there was no limit to his evil. That is how a man destroys his own soul—he loses the last limit to his evil. And I watched him, when he cut me with his knife, and when he walked away the last time, and I knew that he lost his soul. It cost him his soul, what he did … the things he did to me.’

  ‘You don’t have to talk about it.’

  ‘No, it is okay, now, to talk about him. Maurizio was afraid. He was always afraid. He lived all his life in fear of … everything. And he was cruel. That is what gave him his power. I have known a lot of powerful men in my life, and this much I know—all the powerful men I knew were afraid, and cruel. That is the … mix … that gave them power over other men. I was not afraid. I was not cruel. I had no power. I was … you know, it was like the feeling for my Ulla—I was in love with Maurizio’s power. And then, after he left me there, on the bed, and Ulla came into the room, I saw the fear in her eyes. He put his fear into her. He made her so afraid, when she saw what he did to me, that she ran away and left me there. And when I watched her leave, and shut the door …’

  He hesitated, swallowing hard, the full, unmarked lips trembling on the words. I wanted to stop him, to spare him the memory of it and maybe save myself from it as well. But as I began to speak he put a little more pressure in the palm that he held against my chest, silencing me, and looking up into my eyes once more.

  ‘I hated Maurizio for the first time, then. My people, the people of my blood, we do not want to hate, because when we do hate, it is with the whole of the soul, and it can never forgive the hated one. But I hated Maurizio, and I wished him dead, and I cursed him with that wish. Not for what he did to me, but for what he did to my Ulla, and for what he would do in the future as a man without a soul. So, do not worry, Lin. I do not speak of it to anyone, what you did. And I am glad, I am truly grateful that you killed him.’

  A clear voice within me said that I should tell him what had really happened. He had a right to know the truth. And I wanted to tell him. An emotion that I couldn’t fully understand—the last vestige of anger at Ulla, perhaps, or a jealous contempt for his faith in her—made me want to shake him, and shout the truth at him, and hurt him with it. But I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t move. And as his eyes reddened and simmered into tears that ran, exactly, in the channelling scars that pierced his cheeks I held the stare, and nodded my head, and said nothing at all. He nodded his head, slowly, in reply. He misread me, I think, or I misread him. I’ll never know.

  Silences can wound as surely as the twisting lash, the poet Sadiq Khan once wrote. But sometimes, being silent is the only way to tell the truth. I watched Modena turn and limp away, and I knew that the wordless minute we’d shared, with his hand on my chest and his breached and weeping eyes close to mine, would always be more precious and even more honest for both of us, no matter how errable or misunderstood, than the cold, unloving truth of his world alone, or of mine.

  And maybe he’s right, I thought. Maybe his way of remembering Maurizio and Ulla was right. Certainly, he’d dealt with the pain they’d caused him a lot better than I’d dealt with that kind of pain when it had happened to me. When my marriage fell apart in betrayal and bitterness, I became a junkie. I couldn’t bear it that love was broken, and that happiness had cindered so suddenly into sorrow. So I ruined my life, and hurt a lot of people on the long way down. Modena, instead, had worked and saved and waited for love to return. And thinking about that—how he’d lived with what had been done to him—and wondering at it on the long walk back to Abdullah and the others, I discovered something that I should’ve known, as Modena did, right from the start. It was something simple: so simple that it took a pain as great as Modena’s to shake me into seeing it. He’d been able to deal with that pain because he’d accepted his own part in causing it. I’d never accepted my share of responsibility—right up to that moment—for the way my marriage had failed or for the heartache that had followed it. That was why I’d never dealt with it.

  And then, as I entered the bright, bartering bustle of the market, I did: I did accept that blame, and I felt my heart expand and unfold as it released its burdens of fear, resentment, and self-doubt. I walked back between the busy stalls and, by the time I joined Abdullah, Vikram, and the Georges, I was smiling. I answered their questions about Modena, and I thanked Abdullah for his surprise. He was right—I did forgive him everything, after that. And although I couldn’t find the words to tell him of the change that had happened to me, he sensed, I think, that the difference in the smile I shared with him came from a new peace that was born in me that day, and slowly began to grow.

  The cloak of the past is cut from patches of feeling, and sewn with rebus threads. Most of the time, the best we can do is wrap it around ourselves for comfort or drag it behind us as we struggle to go on. But everything has its cause and its meaning. Every life, every love, every action and feeling and thought has its reason and significance: its beginning, and the part it plays in the end. Sometimes, we do see.

  Sometimes, we see the past so clearly, and read the legend of its parts with such acuity, that every stitch of time reveals its purpose, and a kind of message is enfolded in it. Nothing in any life, no matter how well or poorly lived, is wiser than failure or clearer than sorrow. And in the tiny, precious wisdom that they give to us, even those dread and hated enemies, suffering and failure, have their reason and their right to be.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  MONEY STINKS. A stack of new money smells of ink and acid and bleach like the fingerprinting room in a city police station. Old money, vexed with hope and coveting, smells stale like dead flowers kept too long between the pages of a cheap novel. When you put a lot of money, new and old, into one room—millions of rupees counted twice and snapped into bundles with rubber bands—it stinks. I love money, Didier once said to me, but I hate the smell of it. The more happiness I get from it, the more thoroughly I have to wash my hands afterwards. I knew exactly what he meant. In the counting-room for the mafia money-change racket, an airless cavern in the Fort area where the hot lights were bright enough to search through the best counterfeit, and the overhead fans never turned fast enough to lift a stray note from the counting tables, the smell of money was like the sweat and the dirt on a gravedigger’s boots.

  Some weeks after the meeting with Modena, I pushed my way out through the door of Rajubhai’s counting room, shoving the goondas aside with the kind of childish rough play we all enjoyed, and gasped at the fresher air in the stairway. A voice called my name, and I stopped on the third step, my hand on the wooden rail. I looked up to see Rajubhai leaning out of the doorway. The short, fat, bald currency-controller for Khader’s—no, Salman’s—mafia council was dressed, as always, in a dhoti and a white singlet. He leaned out of the doorway, I knew, because he never actually left the room until he sealed it, at close to midnight, every night. When he needed to relieve himself, he used a private facility that was fitted with a one-way mirror so that he could watch the room. He was a dedicated accountant—the mafia’s best—but it wasn’t just the duty of his profession that held Rajubhai to the activity on his counting tables. Away from the busy room he was a grumpy, suspicious, and strangely wizened man. In the counting room he was plumper, somehow, and expansively self-assured. It was as if the physical attachment linked him to a psychic force: so long a
s a part of his body was still in the room, he was still connected to the energy, the power, the money.

  ‘Linbaba!’ he shouted down at me, with the lower part of his body hidden by the door frame. ‘Don’t forget the wedding! You are coming, isn’t it?’

  ‘Sure,’ I smiled back at him. ‘I’ll be there!’

  I did the quick walk-fall down three flights of the stairway, teasing and shoving the goondas on duty at every level, and bumped past the men at the street door. At the end of the street I acknowledged the smiles of two more men watching the door. There were some exceptions, but for the most part the young mafia gangsters liked me. I wasn’t the only foreigner working with the Bombay mafia—there was an Irish gangster in the Bandra council, an American freelancer making a name in major drug deals, a Dutchman working with a gang in Khar, and there were other men across the city—but I was the only gora in the Salman council. I was their foreigner. And those years, as Indian pride was rising like new green, white, and orange vines from the scorched post-colonial earth, were the last years when being foreign, being British, or looking and sounding British was enough to win hearts and intrigue minds.

  Rajubhai’s invitation to his daughter’s wedding was significant: it meant that I was accepted as one of them. For months I’d worked side by side with Salman, Sanjay, Farid, Rajubhai, and others on the council. My work in the passport section was bringing in almost as much money as the entire currency operation. My own contacts on the streets threw large sums into the gold, goods, and money-change pots. I worked out in the boxing gym with Salman Mustaan and Abdullah Taheri every other day. Using my friendship with Hassaan Obikwa, I’d forged a new alliance with his men in the black ghetto. It was a useful connection which had brought us new men, money, and markets. At Nazeer’s request, I’d joined the delegation that had struck an arms agreement with Afghan exiles in the city—a deal that had ensured a steady supply of weapons to the Salman council from the semi-autonomous tribal regions on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. I had friendship and respect and more money than I cared to spend, but it wasn’t until Rajubhai invited me to his daughter’s wedding that I knew I was truly accepted. He was a senior man on the Salman council. His invitation was the endorsement that welcomed me into the inner circle of trust and affection. You can work with the mafia, and for the mafia, and do the kind of job that earns high esteem, but you’re not really one of them until they invite you home to kiss the babies.

  I walked out through the invisible boundaries of the Fort area and approached Flora Fountain. A roving taxi slowed beside me, the driver gesturing aggressively for my fare. I waved him away. Not realising that I could speak Hindi, he drove up beside me at a crawling pace and leaned from the window to talk.

  ‘Hey white sisterfucker, can’t you see the taxi’s empty? What are you doing? Walking in the hot afternoon like somebody’s lost white goat?’

  ‘Kai paijey turn?’ I asked in rude Marathi. Whaddaya want?

  ‘Kaipaijey?’ he repeated, stunned to hear the Marathi phrase.

  ‘What’s your problem?’ I asked, speaking in the rough Marathi dialect of Bombay’s back streets. ‘You don’t understand Marathi? This is our Bombay, and Bombay is ours. If you can’t speak Marathi, what are you doing in Bombay? Have you got a goat’s brain inside your sisterfucking head?’

  ‘Arrey!’ he grinned, switching to English. ‘You speak Marathi, baba?’

  ‘Gora chierra, kala maan,’ I said in answer, making circling gestures over my face and my heart. White face, black heart. I moved into Hindi, using the most polite form of the word you to put him at ease. ‘I’m white on the outside, brother, but full Hindustani on the inside. I’m just taking a walk, passing time. Why don’t you look for some real tourists, and leave poor Indian fuckers like me alone, na?’

  He laughed aloud and passed his hand across the window of his cab to shake mine gently, and then sped away.

  I walked on, avoiding the crowded footpaths to join the swifter lines on the road beside the passing cars. Deep breaths of the city finally drove the smell of the currency-room from my nostrils. I was heading back toward Colaba, to Leopold’s, to meet Didier. I wanted to walk because I was glad to be back in the part of the city I loved most. Work for Salman’s mafia council took me to every distant suburb of the great city, and there were many favoured places: from Mahalaxmi to Malad; from Cotton Green to Thana; from Santa Cruz and Andheri to the Lakes District on the Film City Road. But the real seat of his council’s power was in the long peninsula that began in the sweeping curve of Marine Drive and followed the scimitar shore all the way to the World Trade Centre. And it was there in those thriving streets, never more than a few bus stops from the sea, that I’d lost my heart to the city and learned to love her.

  It was hot on the street, hot enough to burn all but the deepest thoughts from troubled minds. Like every other Bombayite, every other Mumbaiker, I’d made that walk from Flora Fountain to the Causeway a thousand times, and like them I knew where to find the cool breezes and refreshing shades on the way. My scalp, my face, and my shirt were wet with sweat in any few seconds of bare sunlight—the baptism in every daylight walk—and then cooled all the way to dry again in a minute of shaded wind.

  My thoughts, as I moved between the traffic and the browsing shoppers, were on the future. Paradoxically, even perversely, just as I was being accepted into the secret heart of Bombay, I also felt the strongest urge to leave. I understood the two forces, contradictory as they seemed. So much of what I’d loved about Bombay had been in the hearts and minds and words of human beings—Karla, Prabaker, Khaderbhai, and Khaled Ansari. They were all gone, in one way or another, yet there was a constant, melancholy sense of them in every street, shrine, and strip of sea-coast that I loved in the city. Still, there were new sources of love and inspiration—new beginnings rising from the fallow fields of loss and disillusion. My position with Salman’s mafia council was secure. Business opportunities were opening up in the Bollywood film industry and the newer fields of television and multi-media: I received offers of work every other week. I had a good apartment, with a view of the Haji Ali Mosque, and plenty of money. And night by night I grew a little closer in loving affection for Lisa Carter.

  A sadness that lingered in all my favourite places was pressing me to leave the city, just as new love and acceptance pulled me closer to her heart. And I couldn’t decide, as I walked that long, baptismal stretch from Flora to the Causeway, which way to jump. No matter how often or deeply I thought about the struggled past or the sorrow and promise of the present, I couldn’t make that leap of confidence or trust or faith into the future. There was something missing: some calculation, some piece of evidence or parallax view of my life that would make it all clear to me, I was sure, but I didn’t know what it was. So I moved between the frantic flow of cars, bikes, buses, trucks, and push-carts, and the meandering progress of tourists and shoppers, and let my thoughts drift into the heat and the street.

  ‘Lin!’ Didier shouted as I stepped through the wide arch and up to his long raft of joined tables. ‘Direct from your training, non?’

  ‘No, I’ve been walking. Thinking. More of a workout for the mind—and maybe the soul.’

  ‘Do not fear!’ he commanded, signalling for the waiter. ‘I cure this sickness every day of every week. Or every night, at the least. Make a place for him, Arturo. Move down a little, and let him sit next to me.’

  Arturo, a young Italian hiding in Bombay from an undisclosed problem with the police in Naples, was Didier’s new infatuation. He was a short, slight man with a doll-like face that many a girl might’ve envied. He spoke very little English and reacted to every approach, no matter how friendly, with the same petulantly surly shudder of irritation. Consequently, Didier’s many friends ignored him and set the alarms in their mental clocks to give the relationship from a few months, at most, to a few weeks, before it collapsed.

  ‘You just missed Karla,’ Didier told me more quietly when I shook his hand. �
��She will be upset. She wanted to—’

  ‘I know,’ I smiled. ‘She wanted to see me.’

  The drinks arrived, and Didier clattered his glass against mine. I took a sip from it and put it down on the table next to him.

  Several people from the movie crowd that worked with Lisa Carter were at the long table, joining in a party with some of Kavita Singh’s press group. Sitting next to Didier were Vikram and Lettie. They were both happier and healthier than I’d ever known them to be. They’d bought the new apartment in the heart of Colaba near the market only months before. While the commitment had exhausted their savings and forced them to borrow from Vikram’s parents, it was proof of their faith in one another and the future of their burgeoning movie business, and they were still excited with the change.

  Vikram greeted me warmly, rising from his chair to give me a hug. His gunslinger’s clothes had disappeared, item by item, under Lettie’s persuasion and his own maturing taste. All that remained of the Clint Eastwood costume were the silver belt and the black cowboy boots. His beloved hat, surrendered with no little reluctance when he’d found himself more frequently in the boardrooms of major companies than in the stuntmen’s corral, was hanging from a hook in my apartment. It was one of my most treasured possessions.

  When I leaned over to kiss Lettie, she seized the shoulder of my shirt and pulled me closer to whisper in my ear.

  ‘Keep your cool, lad,’ she murmured inscrutably. ‘Keep your cool.’

  Sitting next to Lettie were the movie producers Cliff De Souza and Chandra Mehta. As sometimes happens with close friends, Cliff and Chandra seemed to exchange the substance of their bodies between them over time, so that Cliff had become slightly thinner and more angular, while Chandra had gained weight in almost perfect proportion. The more they differed physically, however, the more they resembled one another in other ways. In fact, the close colleagues, who often worked and played together for forty hours at a stretch, used so many of the same gestures, facial expressions, and phrases that they were known on the sets of the movies they produced as Fat Uncle and Skinny Uncle.