Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts
‘How did you find us here, brother?’ Khaled asked, his voice as calm and remote as Habib’s.
‘I came with you. I have always been near you. Did you not see me?’
‘My friends,’ Jalalaad asked, ‘Juma and Hanif—did you see them anywhere?’
Habib didn’t reply. Jalalaad asked the question again, more forcefully.
‘Did you see them? Were they in the Russian camp? Were they captured?’
We listened in a silence thick with our fear and the poisonous smells of decayed flesh that clung to Habib. He seemed to be meditating, or perhaps listening to something no-one else could hear.
‘Tell me, bach-e-kaka,’ Suleiman asked gently, using the familiar term for nephew, ‘what did you mean, there is only one way out of here now?’
‘They are everywhere,’ Habib answered, his face deformed by its wide-mouthed, psychotic stare. Mahmoud Melbaaf was translating for me, whispering close to my ear. ‘They don’t have enough men. They have mined all the easiest ways out of the mountains. The north, the east, the west, all mined. Only the south-east is clear, because they think you will not try to escape that way. They left that way clear, so they can come up here to get you.’
‘We can’t go out that way,’ Mahmoud whispered to me when Habib stopped suddenly. ‘The Russians, they hold the valley south-east of here. It is their way to Kandahar. When they come for us, they will come from that direction. If we go that way, we will all die, and they know it.’
‘Now, they are in the south-east. But for tomorrow, for one day, they are all on the far side of the mountain, in the north-west,’ Habib said. His voice was still calm and composed, but his face was a gargoyle’s leer, and the contrast unnerved us all. ‘Only a few of them stay here tomorrow. Only a few will stay, while the rest of them put the last mines on the north-west slopes, just after dawn. If you run at them, attack them, fight them tomorrow, in the south-east, there will only be a few of them. You can break through and escape. But only tomorrow.’
‘How many are they altogether?’ Jalalaad asked.
‘Sixty-eight men. They have mortars, rockets, and six heavy machine guns. There are too many of them for you to sneak past them at night.’
‘But you sneaked past them,’ Jalalaad insisted defiantly.
‘They cannot see me,’ Habib replied serenely. ‘I am invisible to them. They cannot see me until I am pushing my knife into their throats.’
‘That’s ridiculous!’Jalalaad hissed at him. ‘They are soldiers. You are a soldier. If you can get past them, we can do it.’
‘Did your men return to you?’ Habib asked him, turning his maniac stare on the young fighter for the first time. Jalalaad opened his mouth to speak, but the words sank into the small heaving sea of his heart. He cast his eyes down, and shook his head. ‘Could you enter this camp without being seen or heard, as I did? If you try to get past them, you will die, like your friends. You cannot get past them. I can do it, but you cannot.’
‘But you think we can fight our way out of here?’ Khaled put the question to him gently, quietly, but we all heard the urgency in it.
‘You can. It is the only way. I have been everywhere on this mountain, and I have been so close to them that I can hear them scratch their skin. That is the reason why I am here. I came to tell you how to save yourselves. But there is a price for my help. All the ones you do not kill tomorrow, the ones who survive, they will be mine. You will give them to me.’
‘Yes, yes,’ Suleiman agreed soothingly. ‘Come, bach-e-kaka, tell us what you know. We want to share your knowledge. Sit with us, and tell us what you know. We have no food, so we cannot offer you a meal. I’m sorry.’
‘There is food,’ Habib interrupted, pointing beyond us to the shadows at the edge of our camp. ‘I smell food there.’
True enough, the rotting pieces of the dead goat—the haram cuts from the animal—lay in a little heap in the slushy snow. Cold as it was, and even in the snow, the bits of raw meat had long begun to decay. We couldn’t smell them from that distance, but it seemed that Habib could.
The madman’s comment provoked a long discussion of the religious rights and wrongs of eating haram food. The men weren’t rigid in the observation of their faith. They prayed every day, but not in strict adherence to the timetable of three sessions, ordained by Shia Islam, or the five sessions of the Sunni Muslims. They were good men of faith, rather than overtly religious men. Nevertheless, in a time of war, and with the great dangers we faced, the last power they wanted ranged against them was God’s. They were holy warriors, mujaheddin: men who believed that they would become martyrs at the instant that they died in battle, and that they were assured a place in the heavens, where beautiful maidens would attend them. They didn’t want to pollute themselves with forbidden foods when they were so close to the martyr’s rush for paradise. It was a tribute to their faith, in fact, that the mere discussion of the haram meat hadn’t occurred until we’d hungered for a month and then starved for five days.
For my part, I confessed to Mahmoud Melbaaf that I’d been thinking about the discarded meat almost constantly for the last few days. I wasn’t a Muslim, and the meat wasn’t forbidden to me. But I’d lived so closely with the fighters, and for so many painful weeks, that I’d linked my fate to theirs. I would never have eaten anything while they hungered. I wanted to eat the meat, but only if they agreed and ate it with me.
Suleiman delivered the decisive opinion on the matter. He reminded the men that while it was indeed evil for a Muslim to eat haram food, it was an even greater evil for a Muslim to starve himself to death when haram food was available to be eaten. The men decided that we would cook the rotting meat in a soup, before the first light. Then, fortified by that meal, we would use Habib’s information on the enemy positions to fight our way out of the mountains.
During the long weeks of hiding and waiting without heat or hot food, we’d entertained and supported one another with the stories we’d told. On that last night, after several others had spoken, it was my turn once more. For my first story, weeks before, I’d told them about my escape from prison. Although they’d been scandalised by my admissions about being a gunaa, or sinner, and being imprisoned as a criminal, they’d been thrilled by the account, and asked many questions afterwards. My second story had been about the Night of the Assassins: how Abdullah, Vikram, and I had tracked the Nigerian killers down; how we’d fought with them, defeated them, and then expelled them from the country; how I’d hunted Maurizio, the man who’d caused it all, and beat him with my fists; and how I’d wanted to kill him, but had spared his life, only to regret that pity when he’d attacked Lisa Carter and forced Ulla to kill him.
That story, too, had been very well received, and as Mahmoud Melbaaf took his place beside me to translate my third story, I wondered what might capture their enthusiasm anew. My mind scanned its list of heroes. There were many, so many men and women, beginning with my own mother, whose courage and sacrifice inspired the memory of them. But when I began to speak, I found myself telling Prabaker’s story. The words, like some kind of desperate prayer, came unbidden from my heart.
I told them how Prabaker had left his village-Eden for the city when he was still a child; how he’d returned as a teenager, with the wild street boy Raju and other friends to confront the menace of the dacoits; how Rukhmabai, Prabaker’s mother, had put courage into the men of the village; how young Raju had fired his revolver as he walked toward the boastful leader of the dacoits until the man fell dead; how Prabaker had loved feasting and dancing and music; how he’d saved the woman he loved from the cholera epidemic, and married her; and how he’d died, in a hospital bed, surrounded by our sorrowing love.
After Mahmoud finished translating the last of my words there was a lengthy silence while they considered the tale. I was just convincing myself that they were as moved by the life of my little friend as I was myself when the first questions began.
‘So, how many goats did they have in that v
‘He wants to know how many goats—’ Mahmoud began translating.
‘I got it, I got it,’ I smiled. ‘Well, near as I can tell, about eighty, maybe as many as a hundred. Each household had about two or three goats, but some had as many as six or eight.’
That information inspired a little gesticulating buzz of discussion that was more animated and partisan than any of the political or religious debates that had occasionally stirred among the men.
‘What … colour … were these goats?’ Jalalaad asked.
‘The colours,’ Mahmoud explained solemnly. ‘He wants to know the colors of those goats.’
‘Well, gee, they were brown, I guess, and white, and a few black ones.’
‘Were they big goats, like the ones in Iran?’ Mahmoud translated for Suleiman. ‘Or were they skinny, like the ones in Pakistan?’
‘Well, about so big …’ I suggested, gesturing with my hands.
‘How much milk,’ Nazeer asked, caught up in the discussion in spite of himself, ‘did they get from those goats, every day?’
‘I’m … not really an expert on goats …’
‘Try,’ Nazeer insisted. ‘Try to remember.’
‘Oh, shit. I … it’s just a wild stab in the dark, mind you, but I’d say, maybe, a couple of litres a day …’ I offered, raising the palms of my hands helplessly.
‘This friend of yours, how much did he earn as a taxi driver?’ Suleiman asked.
‘Did this friend go out with a woman, alone, before his marriage?’ Jalalaad wanted to know, causing all the men to laugh and some of them to throw small stones at him.
In that way the session moved through all the themes that concerned them, until at last I excused myself and found a relatively sheltered spot where I could stare at the misty nothing of the frozen, shrouded sky. I was trying to fight down the fear that prowled in my empty belly, and leapt up with sharp claws at my heart in its cage of ribs.
Tomorrow. We were going to fight our way out. No-one had said it, but I knew that all the others were thinking we would die. They were too cheerful, too relaxed. All the tension and dread of the last weeks had drained from them once we’d made the decision to fight. It wasn’t the joyful relief of men who know they’re saved. It was something else—something I’d seen in the mirror, in my cell, on the night before my desperate escape from prison, and something I’d seen in the eyes of the man who’d escaped with me. It was the exhilaration of men who were risking everything, risking life and death, on one throw of the dice. Some time on the next day we would be free, or we would be dead. The same resolution that had sent me over the front wall of a prison was sending us over the ridge, and into the enemy guns: it’s better to die fighting than to die like a rat in a trap. I’d escaped from prison, and crossed the world, and crossed the years, to find myself in the company of men who felt exactly as I did about freedom and death.
And still I was afraid: afraid of being wounded, afraid of being shot in the spine and paralysed, afraid of being captured alive and tortured in another prison by yet another prison guard. It occurred to me that Karla and Khaderbhai would’ve had something clever to say to me about fear. And in thinking that, I realised how remote they were from the moment, and the mountain, and me. I realised that I didn’t need their brilliance any more: it couldn’t help me. All the cleverness in all the world couldn’t stop my stomach from knotting around its prowling fear. When you know you’re going to die, there’s no comfort in cleverness. Genius is vain, and cleverness is hollow, at the end. The comfort that does come, if it comes at all, is that strangely marbled mix of time and place and feeling that we usually call wisdom. For me, on that last night before the battle, it was the sound of my mother’s voice, and it was the life and death of my friend Prabaker … God give you rest, Prabaker. I still love you, and the grieving, when I think of you, is pinned to my heart and my eyes with bright and burning stars … My comfort, on that freezing ridge, was the memory of Prabaker’s smiling face, and the sound of my mother’s voice: Whatever you do in life, do it with courage, and you won’t go far wrong …
‘Here, take one,’ Khaled said, sliding down beside me to squat on his heels, and offering me one of two half-cigarettes that he held in his bare hand.
‘Jesus!’ I gawked. ‘Where’d you get those? I thought we all ran out last week.’
‘We did,’ he said, lighting the cigarettes with a small gas lighter. ‘Except for these. I kept them for a special occasion. I think this is it. I got a bad feeling, Lin. A real bad feeling. It’s inside me, and I can’t shake it tonight.’
It was the first time that we’d spoken more than the essential word or two since the night that Khader had left. We’d worked and slept side by side, every day and night, but I almost never met his eye, and I’d avoided conversation with him so coldly that he, too, had been silent with me.
‘Look … Khaled … about Khader, and Karla … don’t feel … I mean, I’m not—’
‘No,’ he interrupted. ‘You had plenty of reason to be mad. I can see it from your side. I always could. You got a raw deal, and I told Khader that, too, on the night he left. He should’ve trusted you. It’s a funny thing—the guy he trusted most, the only guy in the whole world he really trusted all the way, turned out to be a crazy killer, and the one who sold us all out.’
The New York accent, with its Arabic swell, rolled over me like a warm, frothy wave, and I almost reached out to hug him. I’d missed the assurances I’d always found in the sound of that voice, and the honest suffering I saw in the scarred face. I was so glad to have his friendship again that I confused what he’d said about Khaderbhai. I thought, without really thinking at all, that he was talking about Abdullah. He wasn’t, and that, too, like a hundred other chances to know all the truth in the one conversation, was lost.
‘How well did you know Abdullah?’ I asked him.
‘Pretty well,’ he answered, his little smile becoming an asking frown: Where is this going?
‘Did you like him?’
‘Not really.’
‘Why not?’
‘Abdullah didn’t believe in anything. He was a rebel without a cause, in a world that doesn’t have enough rebels for the real causes. I don’t like—and I don’t really trust—people who don’t believe in anything.’
‘Does that include me?’
‘No,’ he laughed. ‘You believe in a lot of things. That’s why I like you. That’s why Khader loved you. He did love you, you know. He told me so, a couple different times.’
‘What do I believe in?’ I scoffed.
‘You believe in people,’ he replied quickly. ‘That stuff with the slum clinic and all. The story you told the guys tonight, that about the village. You’d forget that shit if you didn’t believe in people. That work in the slum, when the cholera went through the place—Khader loved that, what you did then, and so did I. Shit, for a while there, I think you even had Karla believing, too. You gotta understand, Lin. If Khader had a choice, if there was a better way to do what he had to do, he would’ve taken it. It all played out the way it had to. Nobody wanted to fuck you over.’
‘Not even Karla?’ I smiled, savouring the last puff of the cigarette and then stubbing it out on the ground.
‘Well, maybe Karla,’ he conceded, laughing the small, sad laugh. ‘But that’s Karla. I think the only guy she never fucked over was Abdullah.’
‘Were they together?’ I asked, so surprised that I couldn’t help the pinch of jealousy that pulled my brows together in a hard, little frown.
‘Well, you couldn’t say together,’ he answered evenly, staring into my eyes. ‘But I was, once. I used to live with her.’
‘You what?’
‘I lived with her—for six months.’
‘What happened?’ I asked, gritting my teeth and feeling stupid for it. I had no right to be angry or jealous. I’d never asked Karla about her lovers, and she’d never asked me about mine.
?
‘I wouldn’t ask, if I knew.’
‘She dumped me,’ he said slowly, ‘just about the time you came along.’
‘Ah, fuck, man …’
‘It’s okay,’ he smiled.
We were silent for a moment, both of us reeling back through the years. I remembered Abdullah, at the sea wall near the Haji Ali Mosque, on the night that I met him with Khaderbhai. I remembered him saying that a woman had taught him the clever phrase he’d used in English. It must’ve been Karla. Of course it was Karla. And I remembered the stiffness that was in Khaled’s manner when I first met him, and I realised, suddenly, that he must’ve been hurting then, and maybe blaming me for it. I saw clearly what it must’ve taken for him to be as friendly and kind to me as he was at the beginning.
‘You know,’ he added after a while, ‘you really got to go careful with Karla, Lin. She’s … angry … you know? And she’s hurt. She’s hurt bad, in all the places that count. They really fucked her up when she was a kid. She’s a bit crazy. She did something, in the States, before she came to India. And that fucked her up, too.’
‘What did she do?’
‘I don’t know. Something pretty serious. She never told me what it was. We talked around it, if you get my meaning. I think Khaderbhai knew about it because, you know, he was the first one to meet her.’
‘No, I didn’t know that,’ I answered him, frowning with the thought of how little I knew about the woman I’d loved for so long. ‘Why … why do you think she never told me about Khaderbhai? I knew her a long time—when we were both working for him—and she didn’t say a word. I talked about him, but she never said a word. She didn’t mention his name once.’