Shantaram (112 page)

"Did Karla tell you why she left the States?" she asked, knowing the answer.

"No," I replied, choosing not to repeat the little that Khaled had told me on the night that he walked into the snow.

"I didn't think so. She told me she wasn't going to tell you about it. I said she was crazy. I said she had to level with you.

But she wouldn't. It's funny how it goes, isn't it? I wanted her to tell you, then, because I thought it might put you off her.

Now, I'm telling you, so that you can give her one more chance- if you want to. Anyway, here it is. Karla left the States because she had to. She was running away... because she killed a guy."

I laughed. It was a small chuckle, at first, but it rolled and rumbled helplessly into a belly laugh. I doubled over, leaning on my thighs for support.

"It's really not that funny, Lin." Lisa frowned.

"No," I laughed, struggling to regain control. "It's not... that. It's just... _shit! If you knew how many times I worried about bringing my crazy, fucked up life to _her! I kept telling myself I had no right to love her because I was on the run. You gotta admit, it's pretty funny."

She stared at me, rocking slightly as she hugged her knees. She wasn't laughing.

"Okay," I exhaled, pulling myself together. "Okay. Go on."

"There was this guy," she continued, in a tone that made it clear how serious she considered the subject. "He was the father of one of the kids she used to baby-sit for, when she was a kid herself."

"She told me about it."

"She did? Okay, then you know. And nobody did anything about it.

And it messed her up pretty bad. And then, one day, she got herself a gun, and she went to his house when he was alone, and she shot him. Six times. Two in the chest, she said, and four in the crotch."

"Did they know it was her?"

"She's not sure. She knows she didn't leave any prints there, at the house. And nobody saw her leave. She got rid of the gun. And she scrammed out of there, right out of the country, real fast.

She's never been back, so she doesn't know if there's a sheet on her or not."

I sat back in the chair and let out a long, slow breath. Lisa watched me closely, her blue eyes narrowing slightly and reminding me of the way she'd looked at me on that night, years before, in Karla's apartment.

"Is there any more?"

"No," she answered, shaking her head slowly, but holding my eyes in the stare. "That's it."

"Okay," I sighed, running a hand over my face, and standing to leave. I went to her, and knelt on the bed beside her, with my face close to hers. "I'm glad you told me, Lisa. It makes a lot of things... clearer... I guess. But it doesn't change anything in how I feel. I'd like to help her, if I could, but I can't forget... what happened... and I can't forgive it, either. I wish I could. It'd make things a lot easier. It's bad, loving someone you can't forgive."

"It's not as bad as loving someone you can't have," she countered, and I kissed her.

I rode the elevator down to the foyer alone with the crowd of my mirror selves: beside and behind me, still and silent, not one of them was able to meet my eye. Once through the glass doors, I walked down the marble steps and across the wide forecourt of the Gateway Monument to the sea. Beneath the arched shadow I leaned on the sea wall and looked out at the boats carrying tourists back to the marina. How many of those lives, I wondered, watching the travellers pose for one another's cameras, are happy and carefree and... simply free? How many of them are sorrowing? How many are...

And then the full darkness of that long-resisted grieving closed around me. I realised that for some time I'd been gritting my teeth and that my jaw was cramped and stiff, but I couldn't unlock the muscles. I turned my head to see one of the street boys, someone I knew well, doing business with a young tourist.

The boy, Mukul, sent his eyes left and right, lizard quick, and passed a small, white packet to the tourist. The man was about twenty years old: tall and fit and handsome. I guessed him to be a German student, and I had a good eye. He hadn't been in the city long. I knew the signs. He was new blood, with money to burn and the whole world of experience open to him. And there was a spring in his step as he walked away to join his friends. But there was poison in the packet in his hand. If it didn't kill him outright, in a hotel room somewhere, it would deepen in his life, maybe, as it did once in mine, until it poisoned every breathing second.

I didn't care-not about him or me or anyone. I wanted it. I wanted the drug, just then, more than anything in the world. My skin remembered the satin-flush of ecstasy and the lichen stippled creep of fever and fear. The smell-taste was so strong that I felt myself retching it. The hunger for oblivion, painless, guiltless, and unsorrowing, swirled in me, shivering from my spine to the thick, healthy veins in my arms. And I wanted it: the golden minute in heroin's long leaden night.

Mukul caught my eye and smiled from habit, but the smile twitched and crumbled into uncertainty. And then he knew. He had a good eye, too. He lived on the street, and he knew the look. So the smile returned, but it was different. There was seduction in it- It's right here... I've got it right here... It's good stuff ... Come and get it-and the dealer's tiny, vicious, little sneer of triumph. You're no better than me... You're not much at all ... And sooner or later, you'll beg me for it...

The day was dying. Each jewelled shimmer, dazzling from the waves in the bay, turned from glittering white to pink, and weak, blood red. Sweat ran into my eyes as I stared back at Mukul. My jaws ached, and my lips quivered with the strain of it: the strain of not responding, not speaking, not nodding my head. I heard a voice or remembered it:
All
you have to do is nod your head, that's all you have to do, and it'll all be _over... And grieving tears boiled up in me, relentless as the gathering tide that slapped against the sea wall. But I couldn't cry them, those tears, and I felt that I was drowning in a sorrow that was bigger than the heart that tried to hold it. I pressed my hands down on the little mountain range of the faceted bluestones on the top of the sea wall, as if I could drive my fingers into the city and save myself by clinging to her.

But Mukul... Mukul smiled, promising peace. And I knew there were so many ways to find that peace-I could smoke it in a cigarette, or chase it on a piece of foil, or snort it, or puff it in a chillum, or spike it into my vein, or just eat it, just swallow it and wait for the creeping numbness to smother every pain on the planet. And Mukul, reading the sweating agony like a dirty page in a dirty book, inched his way closer to me, sliding along the wet stone wall. And he knew it. He knew everything.

A hand touched my shoulder. Mukul flinched as if he'd been kicked, and backed away from me, his dead eyes dwindling to nothing in the burning splendour of the setting sun. And I turned my head to stare into the face of a ghost. It was Abdullah, my Abdullah, my dead friend, killed in a police ambush too many suffering months before. His long hair was cut short and thick like a movie star's. His black clothes were gone. He wore a white shirt and grey trousers with a fashionable cut. And they seemed strange, those different clothes-almost as strange as seeing him standing there. But it was Abdullah Taheri, his ghost, as handsome as Omar Sharif on his thirtieth birthday, as lethal as a big cat prowling, a black panther, and with those eyes the colour of sand in the palm of your hand a half-hour before sunset. Abdullah.

"It is so good to see you, Lin brother. Shall we go inside and drink some chai?"

That was it. Just that.

"Well, I... I can't do that."

"Why not?" the ghost asked, frowning.

"Well, for starters," I mumbled, shielding my eyes from the late afternoon sun with my hand as I stared up at him, "because you're dead."

"I am not dead, Lin brother."

"Yes..."

"No. Did you speak to Salman?"

"Salman?"

"Yes. He arranged it, for me to meet with you, in the restaurant.

It was a surprise."

"Salman... told me... there was a surprise."

"And I am the surprise, Lin brother," the ghost smiled. "You were coming to meet me. He was supposed to be making it a surprise for you. But you left the restaurant. And the others, they have been waiting for you. But you didn't come back, so I went to find you.

Now the surprise is really a shocks."

"Don't say that!" I snapped, remembering something Prabaker had once said to me, and still reeling, still confused.

"Why not?"

"It doesn't matter! Fuck, Abdullah... this is... this is a fuckin' weird dream, man."

"I am back," he said calmly, a little frown of worry creasing his brow. "I am here, again. I was shot. The police. You know about it."

The tone of the conversation was matter-of-fact. The fading sky behind his head, and the passers-by on the street, were unremarkable. Nothing matched the blur and streak of a dream. Yet it had to be a dream. Then the ghost lifted his white shirt to reveal his many wounds, healed and healing into dark-skinned rings, whirls, and thumb-thick gashes.

"Look, Lin brother," the dead man said. "I was shot, yes, many times, but I did live. They took my body from the Crawford Market police station. They took me to Thana for the first two months.

Then they took me to Delhi. I was in hospital for one year. It was a private hospital, not far from Delhi. It was a year of many operations. Not a good year, Lin brother. Then it was almost another year to become well, Nushkur'allah."

"Abdullah," I said, reaching out to hug him. The body was strong.

Warm. Alive. I held him tightly, clamping my hand to my wrist behind his back. I felt the press of his ear against my face, and smelt the soap on his skin. I heard his voice passing from his chest to mine like ocean sonancies, sounding and resounding, wave on wave through shores of tight-wet sand at night. Eyes closed, and clinging to him, I floated on the dark water of the sorrowing I'd done for him, for both of us. Heart-crippled with fear that I was mad, that it really was a dream, a nightmare, I held him until I felt the strong hands push me gently to the length of his extended arms.

"It is okay, Lin," he smiled. The smile was complex, shifting from affection to solace, and a little shocked, perhaps, at the emotion in my eyes. "It is okay."

"It's not okay!" I growled, breaking away from him. "What the fuck happened? Where the fuck have you been? And why the fuck didn't you _tell me?"

"No. I could not tell you."

"Bullshit! Of course you could! Don't be so stupid!"

"No," he insisted, running a hand through his hair and squinting his eyes to fix me with a determined stare. "Do you remember, one time, we were riding the motorcycles, and we saw some men? They were from Iran. I told you to wait at the motorcycles, but you did not. You followed me, and we fought those men together. Do you remember?"

"Yes."

"They were enemies of mine. And they were Khader Khan's enemies, also. They had a connect to the Iran secret police, the new Savak."

"Can we-wait a minute," I interrupted, reaching backwards to support myself against the sea wall. "I need a cigarette."

I flipped open the box to offer him one.

"Did you forget?" he asked, grinning happily. "I do not smoke the cigarettes. And you should not also, Lin brother. I only smoke the hashish. I have some, if you would like?"

"Fuck that," I laughed, lighting up. "I'm not getting stoned with a ghost."

"Those men-the men we fought-they did some business here.

Mostly drugs business, but sometimes guns business and sometimes passports. And they were spies against us, reporting about any of us from Iran who ran away from the Iraq war. I was one man who ran away from the Iraq war. Many thousands ran away to here, India, and many thousands who hate Ayatollah Khomeini. The spies from Iran, they made reports about us to the new Savak in Iran.

And they hate Khader because he want to help the mujaheddin in Afghanistan and because he did help so many of us from Iran. You understand this business, Lin brother?"

I understood it. The Iranian expatriate community in Bombay was huge, and I had many friends who'd lost their homeland and their families, and were struggling to survive. Some of them worked in existing mafia gangs like Khader's council. Others had formed their own gangs, hiring themselves out to do the wet work, in a business that got a little bloodier every working day. I knew that the Iranian secret police had spies circulating among the exiles, reporting on them and sometimes getting their own hands a little damp.

"Go on," I said, taking a gulp of smoky air from my cigarette.

"When those men, those spies, made their reports, our families in Iran had very bad suffering. Some mothers, brothers, fathers, they put them into the secret police prison. They torture people in that place. Some of the people, they died. My own sister-they torture and rape her because of the reports about me. My own uncle, he is killed when my family cannot pay to the secret police quick enough. When I find out about that, I told to Abdel Khader Khan that I want to leave him, so I can fight them, those men who are spies from Iran. He told me not to leave. He said to me that we will fight them together. He told me that we will find them, one by one, and he promise me that he will help me to kill them all."

"Khaderbhai..." I said, breathing smoke.

"And we found them, some of them, Farid and me, with Khader's help. There was nine men, at the start. We found six men. Those men, we finished. The other three of them did live. Three men. And they knew something about us-they knew that there is a spy in the council, very close to Khader Khan."

"Abdul Ghani."

"Yes," he said, turning his head to spit at the mention of the traitor's name. "Ghani, he came from Pakistan. He had many friends in the Pakistan secret police. The ISI. They work in secret with the Iran secret police, the new Savak, and with CIA, and with Mossad."

I nodded, listening to him, and thinking about something Abdul Ghani had said to me once: All the secret police of the world work together, Lin, and that is their biggest secret.