Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts
‘What about Goa? You can’t tell me that was nothing.’
‘No. When you came to Goa and you found me, like I knew you would, it was … pretty good. I started to think, this is what it’s like … this is what they’re talking about … But then you wouldn’t stay. You had to go back—back to him—and I knew he wanted you, maybe even needed you. And I couldn’t tell you what I knew about him, because I owed him, and I didn’t know if I could trust you. So I let you go. And when you left, I didn’t feel anything at all. Not a thing. I didn’t want to be forgiven because of what I did. I wanted to be forgiven—and I still want it, and that’s why I’m going to Khaled and Idriss—because I don’t feel sorry for any of it, and I don’t regret a thing. I’m cold inside, Lin. I like people, and I like things, but I don’t love any of them—not even myself—and I don’t really care about them. And, you know, the strange thing is, I don’t really wish that I did care.’
And there it was. I had it all—all the truth and detail that I’d needed to know since that day on the mountain, in the withering snow, when Khader had told me about her. I think I’d expected to feel … nourished, perhaps, and vindicated, by forcing her to tell me what she’d done and why she’d done it. I think I’d hoped to be released by it, and solaced, just by hearing her tell me. But it wasn’t like that. I felt empty: the kind of emptiness that’s sad but not distressed, pitying but not broken-hearted, and damaged, somehow, but clearer and cleaner for it. And then I knew what it was, that emptiness: there’s a name for it, a word we use often, without realising the universe of peace that’s enfolded in it. The word is free.
‘For what it’s worth,’ I said, reaching out to put my hand against her cheek, ‘I forgive you, Karla. I forgive you, and I love you, and I always will.’
Our lips met like waves that crest and merge the whirl of storming seas. I felt that I was falling: free and falling at last from the love that had opened, lotus-layered, within me. And together we did fall the length of her black hair to the still-warm sand in the hollow of the sunken boat.
When our lips parted, stars rushed through that kiss into her sea-green eyes. An age of longing passed from those eyes into mine. An age of passion passed from my grey eyes into hers. All the hunger, all the fleshed and hope-starved craving, streamed from eye to eye: the moment we met; the laughing wit of Leopold’s; the Standing Babas; the Village in the Sky; the cholera; the swarm of rats; the secrets that she’d whispered near exhausted sleep; the singing boat on the flood beneath the Gateway; the storm when we made love the first time; the joy and loneliness in Goa; and our love reflecting shadows into glass, on the last night before the war.
And there were no more words. There was no more cleverness as I walked her to a taxi parked nearby. I kissed her again. A long kiss, goodbye. She smiled at me. It was a good smile, a beautiful smile, and almost her best. I watched the red lights of the taxi fuzz and blur and then vanish in the furtherness of night.
Alone on the strangely quiet street, I began to walk back to Prabaker’s slum—I always thought of it as Prabaker’s slum, and I still do—to retrieve my bike. My shadows twirled with every street light, dragging loath behind me and then rushing on ahead. Ocean songs receded. The road moved beyond the span of coast and into the wide, tree-lined streets of the new peninsula reclaimed from the sea, stone on mortared stone, by the ever-expanding island city.
Sounds of celebration streamed into the road from streets around me. The festival had ended, and the people were beginning to return. Daring boys on bicycles flashed between the walkers much too fast, but never touching so much as a flap of sleeve. Impossibly beautiful girls in bright new saris glided between the glances of young men who’d scented their shirts, as well as their skin, with sandalwood soap. Children slept on shoulders, their unwilled arms and legs hanging limp as wet washing on a line. Someone sang a love song, and a dozen voices joined the choruses for each verse. Every man and woman, walking home to slum hut or fine apartment, smiled, listening to the romantic, foolish words.
Three young men singing near me saw my smile, and raised the palms of their hands in question. I lifted my arms and sang the chorus, joining my voice to theirs, and shocking and delighting them with what I knew. They threw their strangers’ arms around me and swept our song-connected souls toward the unvanquishable ruin of the slum. Everyone in the whole world, Karla once said, was Indian in at least one past life. And I laughed to think of her.
I didn’t know what I would do. The first part of it was clear enough—there was the debt to the burly Afghan, Nazeer. He’d said to me once, when I’d talked to him of the guilt I continued to feel for Khader’s death: Good gun, good horse, good friend, good battle—you know better way that Great Khan, he can die? And a tiny fragment of that thought or feeling applied to me, too. It was right, somehow—although I couldn’t have explained it, even to myself—and fitting for me to risk my life in the company of good friends, and in the course of an important mission.
And there was so much more that I had to learn, so much that Khaderbhai had wanted to teach me. I knew that his physics teacher, the man he’d told me about in Afghanistan, was in Bombay. And the other teacher, Idriss, was in Varanasi. If I made it back to Bombay from Nazeer’s mission to Sri Lanka, there was a world of learning to discover and enjoy.
In the meanwhile, in the city, my place with Sanjay’s council was assured. There was work there, and money, and a little power. For a while there was safety, in the brotherhood, from the long reach of Australian law. There were friends on the council, and at Leopold’s, and in the slum. And, yes, maybe there was even a chance for love.
When I reached the bike I kept walking on into the slum. I wasn’t sure why. I was following an instinct, and drawn, perhaps, by the swollen moon. The narrow lanes, those writhing alleys of struggle and dream, were so familiar to me and so comfortingly safe that I marvelled at the fear I’d once felt there. I wandered without purpose or plan, and moved from smile to smile as men and women and children who’d been my patients and neighbours looked up to see me pass. I moved in mists of cooking scent and shower soap, of animal stalls and kerosene lamps, of frankincense and sandalwood streaming upward from a thousand tiny temples in a thousand tiny homes.
At a corner of one lane I bumped into a man, and as our faces rose to their apologies we recognised one another in the same instant. It was Mukesh, the young thief who’d helped me in the Colaba lock-up and the Arthur Road jail: the man whose freedom I’d demanded when Vikram had paid me out of prison.
‘Linbaba!’ he cried, seizing my upper arms in his hands. ‘So good to see you! Arrey! What’s happening?’
‘I’m just visiting,’ I answered, laughing with him. ‘What are you doing here? You look great! How the hell are you?’
‘No problem, baba! Bilkulfit, hain!’ I’m absolutely fit!
‘Have you eaten? Will you take chai?’
‘Thank you, baba, no. I am late for a meeting.’
‘Achcha?’ I muttered. Oh, yes?
He leaned in close to whisper.
‘It is a secret, but I know I can trust you, Linbaba. We are meeting with some of those fellows who are with Sapna, the king of thieves.’
‘What?’
‘Yes,’ he whispered. ‘These fellows, they actually know that Sapna. They speak to him almost of every day.’
‘That’s not possible,’ I said.
‘Oh yes, Linbaba. They are his friends. And we are making the army—the army of poor fellows. We will teach those Muslims who is the real boss here in Maharashtra! That Sapna, he killed the mafia boss, Abdul Ghani, in his own mansion, and put the pieces of his body all around his house! And the Muslims, after that they are learning how to fear us. I must go now. We will see us, before too much time, isn’t it? Goodbye, Linbaba!’
He ran off through the lanes. I turned away, to walk unsmiling into a sudden mood that was anxious and angry and forlorn. And then, as it always did, the city, Bombay, my Mumbai, held me up on the broad
At that moment I felt a tug at my shirtsleeve and I turned my head to see what seemed to be the ghost of a gigantic smile with a very small man attached to it. The ghost shook me, grinning happily, and I reached out to enclose it in a hug and then bent forward quickly to touch its feet, in the traditional greeting to a father or mother. It was Kishan, Prabaker’s father. He explained that he was in the city for a holiday with Rukhmabai, Prabaker’s mother, and Parvati, his widow.
‘Shantaram!’ he admonished me when I started speaking to him in Hindi. ‘Have you forgotten all your lovely Marathi?’
‘Sorry, father!’ I laughed, switching to Marathi. ‘I’m just so happy to see you. Where is Rukhmabai?’
‘Come!’ he answered, taking my hand as if I was a child, and leading me through the slum.
We arrived at the little group of huts, including my own, that clustered around Kumar’s chai shop near the crescent of the sea. Johnny Cigar was there, with Jeetendra, Qasim Ali Hussein, and Joseph’s wife, Maria.
‘We were just talking about you!’ Johnny cried as I shook hands and nodded my greetings. ‘We were just saying that your hut is empty again—and we were remembering the fire, on that first day. It was a big one, na?’
‘It was,’ I muttered, thinking of Raju and the others who’d died in that fire.
‘So, Shantaram,’ a voice scolded in Marathi from behind me, ‘now you are too big a fellow to speak to your simple village mother?’
I swung round to see Rukhmabai standing close to us. I bent to touch her feet, but she restrained me, and joined her hands together in a greeting. She looked sadder and older within the soft endearments of her smile, and grieving had put a swipe of grey in the black pelt of her hair. But the hair was growing back. The long hair I’d seen falling like a shadow dying was growing back, and there was living hope in the thick, upward sweep of it.
Then she directed my gaze to the woman in widow’s white standing beside her. It was Parvati, and a child, a son, was standing with her. He was clinging to her sari skirt for support. I greeted Parvati, and when I gave my attention to the boy and looked into his face I was so shocked that my jaw dropped open. I turned to the adults and they all smiled, waggling their heads in the same wonder, for the child was the image of Prabaker. More than merely resembling him, the boy was the exact duplicate of the man we’d all loved more than any other we knew. And when he smiled at me it was his smile, Prabaker’s vast, world-encompassing smile, that I saw in that small, perfectly round face.
‘Baby dijiye?’ I asked. Can I hold him?
Parvati nodded. I held my arms out to him, and he came to me without protest.
‘What’s his name?’ I asked, jigging the boy on my hip and watching him smile.
‘Prabu,’ Parvati answered. ‘We called him Prabaker.’
‘Oh Prabu,’ Rukhmabai commanded, ‘give Shantaram-uncle a kiss.’
The boy kissed me on the cheek, quickly, and then wrapped his tiny arms around my neck with impetuous strength, and squeezed me. I hugged him in return, and held him to my heart.
‘You know, Shantu,’ Kishan suggested, patting at his round belly, and smiling to fill the world, ‘your house is empty. We are all here. You could stay with us tonight. You could sleep here.’
‘Think hard, Lin,’ Johnny Cigar warned, grinning at me. The full moon was in his eyes, and pearling his strong white teeth. ‘If you stay, word will get out. First, there’ll be a party tonight, and then, when you wake up, there’ll be a damn long line of patients, yaar, waiting to see you.’
I gave the boy back into Parvati’s arms, and wiped a hand across my face and into my hair. Looking at the people, listening to the breathing, heaving, laughing, struggling music of the slum, all around me, I remembered one of Khaderbhai’s favourite phrases. Every human heartbeat, he’d said many times, is a universe of possibilities. And it seemed to me that I finally understood exactly what he’d meant. He’d been trying to tell me that every human will has the power to transform its fate. I’d always thought that fate was something unchangeable: fixed for every one of us at birth, and as constant as the circuit of the stars. But I suddenly realised that life is stranger and more beautiful than that. The truth is that, no matter what kind of game you find yourself in, no matter how good or bad the luck, you can change your life completely with a single thought or a single act of love.
‘Well, I’m out of practice sleeping on the ground,’ I said, smiling at Rukhmabai.
‘You can have my bed,’ Kishan offered.
‘Oh no you don’t!’ I protested.
‘Oh yes I do!’ he insisted, dragging his cot from outside his hut to mine while Johnny, Jeetendra, and the others hugged and mock-wrestled me into submission, and our cries and laughter rolled away toward the time-dissolving everness of the sea.
For this is what we do. Put one foot forward and then the other. Lift our eyes to the snarl and smile of the world once more. Think. Act. Feel. Add our little consequence to the tides of good and evil that flood and drain the world. Drag our shadowed crosses into the hope of another night. Push our brave hearts into the promise of a new day. With love: the passionate search for a truth other than our own. With longing: the pure, ineffable yearning to be saved. For so long as fate keeps waiting, we live on. God help us. God forgive us. We live on.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
It took me thirteen long and troubled years to write Shantaram. The first two drafts of the book—six years’ work and six hundred pages—were destroyed in prison. My hands, damaged by the residual effects of frostbite, suffered so badly during the winters in the punishment unit of the prison that many pages of the manuscript journal, which survived and which I still have with me, are stained and streaked with my blood. When I was released, the hardships were severe and unrelenting. I almost, but not quite ever, despaired of finishing the book. The fact that I did complete it, this novel written in blood and tears and exultation that you’ve just read, is a testament to the help and involvement of a great many people. In making this grateful acknowledgement to them I’m sure that, unintentionally, some names will be omitted from my personal honour roll. I ask those friends and colleagues to forgive me.
I want to thank my manager, Tammy Michaels, for whom the true beauty of art is its passionate exaltations; my editor, Margot Rosenbloom; the agent for the project, Joe Regal; the first commissioning editor in the USA, Tim Bent; and George Witte, at St. Martin’s Press, whose erudition, urbanity, and love for the world of the word are an artist’s inspiration.
I thank Jessica and Nick, for their being and their forgiveness and their love; Nick, Mary, Paris, and Blaise, for the wondrous gift of their faith in me; my best friend, Shula, who was always the first to read the words, and to speak love for them; and my mother and my stepfather, whose unflagging moral, spiritual, and financial support—beyond what I’ve ever deserved or could repay—has sustained me, and uplifted this work.
Reaching back from this moment through those thirteen years, I also want to thank the following colleagues and loved ones: Alan and Maria Almeida, Trish Anderson, Mike and Jenny Arnold, Don Arnold, Chloris and Chris Bath, Christine Boyle, Kerry Boxall, Buckley Bullock, Nick and Helen Burrows, Roger Bushell, Grant Carey, William Carey, Sarah Carroll, Tracy Carroll, Alfredo Cerda, Paul Chamberlain, Narayan Chandrashekar, Julia Chennels, Glen and Bindi Choyce, Sue Coley Celia Conor, Tom Cooper, Graeme Corcoran, Laurie Cosgrove, Peter Craven, Daniella Cripa, Malcolm Crook, Li Cunxin, Aliso