Shantaram (102 page)

"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.

"You don't know, do you?"

"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."

"I think she's just loyal to him, you know? I don't think there's anything against you, Lin. She's just incredibly loyal-well, she was incredibly loyal to him. She thought of him like a father, I think. Her own father died when she was a kid. And her stepfather died when she was still pretty young. Khader came along just in time to save her, so he got to be her father."

"You said he was the first one who met her?"

"Yeah, on a plane. It's kind of a weird story, the way she told me. She didn't remember getting on the plane. She was running from something-something she did-and she was in trouble. She ended up going on a few different planes from different airports - for a few days, I think. And then she was on this plane that was going to Singapore from... I don't know... somewhere. And she must've had, like, a nervous breakdown or something, because she cracked up, and the next thing she knew, she was in this cave, in India, with Khaderbhai. And then he left her with Ahmed, who looked after her."

"She told me about him."

"Did she? She doesn't talk about it much. She liked that guy. He nursed her for near about six months until she got herself together again. He brought her back-into the light, like. They were pretty close. I think he was the closest thing to a brother she ever knew."

"Were you with her-I mean, did you know her then, when he was killed?"

"I don't know that he was killed, Lin," Khaled stated, frowning hard as the knot of recollections turned in his memory. "I know Karla believes it-that Madame Zhou killed him, and the girl..."

"Christine."

"Yeah, Christine. But I knew Ahmed pretty well. He was a very gentle guy-a very simple, soft kind of a guy. He was just the type to take poison with his girlfriend, like in a romantic movie, if he thought he couldn't ever be free with her. Khader looked into it, real close, because Ahmed was one of his guys, and he was sure Zhou had nothing to do with it. He cleared her."

"But Karla wouldn't accept it?"

"No, she didn't buy it. And coming on top of everything else, it really fucked her up. Did she ever tell you she loves you?"

I hesitated, partly from reluctance to surrender the little advantage I might've had over him if he believed that she did say it, and partly from loyalty to Karla-because it was her business, after all. In the end, I answered him: I had to know why he'd asked me the question.

"No."

"That's too bad," he said flatly. "I thought you might be the one."

"The one?"

"The one to help her-to break through, I guess. Something really bad happened to that girl. A lot of bad things happened to her.

Khader made it worse, I think."

"How?"

"He put her to work for him. He saved her, when he met her, and he protected her from what she was scared of, back in the States.

But then she met this guy, a politician, and he fell for her pretty hard. Khader needed the guy, so he got her to work for him, and I don't think she was cut out for it."

"What kind of work?"

"You know how beautiful she is-those green eyes, and that white, white skin."

"Ah, fuck," I sighed, remembering a lecture Khader had given me once, about the amount of crime in the sin, and the sin in the crime.

"I don't know what was in Khader's head," Khaled concluded, shaking his own head in doubt and wonder. "It was... out of character, to say the least. I honestly don't think he saw it as ... damaging her. But she, kind of, froze up, inside. It was like her own father... was getting her to do that shit. And I don't think she forgave him for it. But she was incredibly loyal to him, all the same. I never understood it. But that's how I got together with her-I saw all that happening, and I felt kind of sorry for her, if you know what I mean. After a while, one thing led to another. But I never really got through to her. And you didn't, neither. I don't think anyone will. Ever." "Ever is a long time."

"Okay, you got a point. But I'm just trying to warn you. I don't want you to get hurt any more, brother. We've been through too much, na? And I don't want her to get hurt."

He fell silent again. We stared at the rocks and the frosty ground, avoiding one another's eyes. A few shivering minutes passed. At last he took a deep breath and stood up, slapping at the chill in his arms and legs. I stood as well, trembling with cold and stamping my numb feet. At the last possible moment, and with an impulsive rush as if he was breaking through a tangle of vines, Khaled flung his arms around me and hugged me. The strength in his arms was fierce, but his head slowly came to rest against mine as tenderly as the lolling head of a sleeping child.

When he pulled away from me, his face was averted and I couldn't see his eyes. He walked off, and I followed more slowly, hugging my hands under my arms to fight off the cold. It was only when I was alone that I recalled what he'd said to me: I got a bad feeling, Lin. A real bad feeling...

I resolved to talk to him about it, but just at that moment Habib stepped out of a shadow beside me, and I jumped in fright.