Shantaram (33 page)

"How long have you been there?" I asked, laughing.

"Long enough to see this weird faith-healing system of yours in operation. Are you curing people by telepathy now?"

"Indian women are very obstinate when it comes to having their breasts handled by strangers," I replied when the patient and her relatives had filed past Karla, and left the hut.

"Nobody's perfect, as Didier would say," she drawled, with a smirk that fluttered just short of a smile. "He misses you, by the way. He asked me to say hello to you. In fact, they all miss you. We haven't seen much of you at Leopold's, since you started this Red Cross routine."

I was glad that Didier and the others hadn't forgotten me, but I didn't look her in the eye. When I was alone, I felt safe and satisfyingly busy in the slum. Whenever I saw friends from beyond those sprawling acres, a part of me shrivelled in shame. Fear and guilt are the dark angels that haunt rich men, Khader said to me once. I wasn't sure if that was true, or if he simply wanted it to be true, but I did know from experience that despair and humiliation haunt the poor.

"Come in, come in. This is a real surprise. Sit... sit here, while I just... clean up a bit."

She came over and sat on the wooden stool as I gathered a plastic bag containing used swabs and bandages, and swept the last of the litter into it. I washed my hands with spirit once more, and packed the medicines into the little rack of shelves.

She looked around the small hut, examining everything with a critical eye. As my gaze followed hers, I saw my little house for the shabby, threadbare hovel that it really was. Because I lived alone in the hut, I'd come to think of it as luxuriously spacious, in contrast to the crowding that was everywhere around me. With her beside me, it seemed mean and cramped.

The bare earth floor was cracked, and formed in lumpy undulations. Holes as big as my fist punctured every wall, exposing my life to the brawl and business of the bustling lane outside. Children peeped in through the holes at Karla and me, emphasising how unprivate my life there was. The reed matting of the roof sagged, and had even given way in a few places. My kitchen consisted of a single-burner kerosene stove, two cups, two metal plates, a knife, a fork, a spoon, and a few containers of spices. The whole of it fitted into a cardboard box, and was stored in one corner.

I was in the habit of buying only enough for a single meal at a time, so there was no food. The water was stored in an earthenware matka. It was slum water. I couldn't offer it to her because I knew Karla couldn't drink it. My only furniture was a cupboard for medicines, a small table, a chair, and a wooden stool. I remembered how delighted I'd been when those sticks of furniture were given to me; how rare they were in the slum. With her eyes, I saw the cracks in the wood, the stains of mildew, the repairs made with wire and string.

I looked back to where she sat on the stool, lighting a cigarette and blowing the smoke out through the side of her mouth. A rush of irrational resentment seized me. I was almost angry that she'd made me see the unlovely truth of my house.

"It's... it's not much. I..."

"It's fine," she said, reading my heart. "I lived in a little hut like this in Goa for a year once. And I was happy. There isn't a day goes by when I don't feel like going back there. I sometimes think that the size of our happiness is inversely proportional to the size of our house."

She raised her left eyebrow in a high arch as she said it, challenging me to respond and meet her on her level, and with that gesture it was all right between us. I wasn't resentful any more. I knew, I was certain somehow, that wanting my little house to be bigger or brighter or grander than it was had been in my mind, not hers. She wasn't judging. She was only looking, seeing everything, even what I felt.

My neighbour's twelve-year-old son, Satish, came into the hut, carrying his tiny, two-year-old cousin on his hip. He stood close to Karla, staring unselfconsciously. She stared back at him just as intently, and I was struck by how similar they were in that instant, the Indian boy and the European woman. Both had full lipped, expressive mouths, and hair that was night-sky black; and although Karla's eyes were sea-green and the boy's were dark bronze, each pair wore the same grave expression full of interest and humour.

"Satish, chai bono," I said to him. Make some tea.

He gave me a quick smile, and hurried out. Karla was the first foreign miss he'd ever seen in the slum, so far as I knew. He was excited to have the task of serving her. I knew he would talk about it to the other kids for weeks afterwards.

"So, tell me, how did you find me? How did you even get in here?"

I asked her when we were alone.

"Get in?" she frowned. "It's not illegal to visit you, is it?"

"No," I laughed, "but it's not common either. I don't get many visitors here."

"Actually, it was easy. I just stepped off the street and asked people to take me to you."

"And they brought you here?"

"Not exactly. They're very protective of you, you know. They took me to your friend, Prabaker, first, and he brought me to you."

"Prabaker?"

"Yes, Lin, you want me?" Prabaker said, popping through the doorway from his eavesdropping post outside.

"I thought you were going to drive your taxi," I muttered, adopting the stern expression that I knew amused him the most.

"My cousin Shantu's taxi," he said, grinning. "Was driving, yes, but now my other cousin, Prakash, he is driving, while I am taking it my two hours of lunch breaks. I was at Johnny Cigar, his house, when some people came there with Miss Karla. She wants to see you, and I came here. It is very good, yes?"

"It's good, Prabu," I sighed.

Satish returned, carrying a tray with three cups of hot, sweet tea. He handed them to us, and tore open a small packet containing four Parle Gluco biscuits, which he presented to us with a solemn sense of ceremony. I expected him to eat the fourth biscuit himself, but he placed it on his palm instead, marked it off into even sections with his grubby thumb nail, and then broke it into two pieces. Measuring the fragments against one another, he picked the one that was minutely larger and handed it to Karla. The other went to his baby cousin, who sat in the doorway of the hut and nibbled at the biscuit happily.

I was sitting on the straight-backed chair, and Satish came over to squat on the floor beside my feet. He rested his shoulder against my knee. I was big enough to know that the rare show of affection was a breakthrough with Satish. At the same time I was small enough to hope that Karla had noticed it, and was impressed by it.

We finished the tea, and Satish gathered the empty cups, leaving the hut without a word. At the door, he gave Karla a long-lashed, lingering smile as he took his cousin's hand to lead her away.

"He's a nice kid," she remarked.

"He is. My next-door neighbour's son. You really sparked something in him today. He's normally very shy. So, what brings you to my humble home, anyway?"

"Oh, I just happened to be in the area," she said nonchalantly, looking at the gaps in my wall, where a dozen little faces stared in at us. The voices of other children could be heard, questioning Satish about her. Who is she? Is she Linbaba's wife?

"Passing by, huh? It couldn't be, maybe, that you missed me, just a little bit?"

"Hey don't push your luck," she mocked.

"I can't help it. It's a genetic thing. I come from a long line of luck-pushers. Don't take it personally."

"I take everything personally-that's what being a person is all about. And I'll take you to lunch, if you're finished with your patients."

"Well, I have a lunch date, actually-"

"Oh. Okay, then-"

"No, no. You're welcome to come, if you like. It's kind of an open invitation. We're having a celebration lunch today, right here. I'd be very happy if you'd... be our guest. I think you'll like it. Tell her she'll like it, Prabu."

"We will have it a very nice lunches!" Prabaker said. "My good self, I have kept it a complete empty stomach for filling up to fat. So good is the food. You will enjoy so much, the people will think you are having a baby inside your dress."

"Okay," she said slowly, and then looked at me. "He's a persuasive guy, your Prabaker."

"You should meet his father," I replied, shaking my head in a resigned shrug.

Prabaker's chest swelled with pride, and he wagged his head happily. "So, where are we going?"

"It's at the Village in the Sky," I told her.

"I don't think I've heard of it," she said, frowning.

Prabaker and I laughed, and the vaguely suspicious furrows in her brow deepened.

"No, you won't have heard of it, but I think you'll like it.

Listen, you go on ahead with Prabaker. I'll wash up, and change my shirt. I'll just be a couple of minutes, okay?"

"Fine," she said.

Our eyes met, and held. For some reason, she lingered, watching me expectantly. I couldn't understand the expression, and I was still trying to read it when she stepped close to me and quickly kissed my lips. It was a friendly kiss, impulsive and generous and light-hearted, but I let myself believe that it was more. She walked out with Prabaker, and I spun around on one foot, whispering a shout of joy while I did an excited little dance. I looked up to see the children peering through the holes in the hut and giggling at me. I made a scary face at them, and they laughed harder, breaking into little whirling parodies of my dance. Two minutes later, I loped through the slum lanes after Prabaker and Karla, tucking my clean shirt into my pants as I ran, and shaking the water from my hair.

Our slum, like many others in Bombay, came into being to serve the needs of a construction site-two thirty-five-floor buildings, the World Trade Centre towers, being built on the shore of the Colaba Back Bay. The tradesmen, artisans, and labourers who built the towers were housed in hutments, tiny slum-dwellings, on land adjacent to the site. The companies that planned and constructed large buildings, in those years, were forced to provide such land for housing. Many of the tradesmen were itinerant workers who followed where their skills were needed, and whose real homes were hundreds of kilometres away in other states. Most of the workers who were native to Bombay simply had no homes, other than those they found with their jobs.

In fact, many men accepted the risks of that hard and dangerous work for no other reason than to gain the security of one of those shelters.

The companies were happy enough to comply with the laws that made land and huts available because the arrangement was eminently suitable to them in other ways. The kinship fostered in workers' slums guaranteed a sense of unity, familial solidarity, and loyalty to the company, which served employers well. Travelling time to and from work was eliminated when men lived on the site. The wives, children, and other dependants of employed workers provided a ready source of additional labourers. They were hired from that pool and put to work, from day to day, at a moment's notice. And the entire work force of several thousand people were much more easily influenced, and to some extent even controlled, when they lived in a single community.

When the World Trade Centre towers were first planned, a large area was set aside and marked off into more than three hundred hut-sized plots. As workers signed on, they received one of the plots and a sum of money with which to buy bamboo poles, reed matting, hemp rope, and scrap timber. Each man then built his own house, assisted by family and friends. The sprawl of fragile huts spread outward like a shallow, tender root-system for the huge towers that were to come. Vast underground wells were sunk to provide water for the community. Rudimentary lanes and pathways were scraped flat. Finally, a tall, barbed wire fence was erected around the perimeter to keep out squatters. The legal slum was born.

Drawn by the regular wages that those workers had to spend, and no less by the plentiful supply of fresh water, squatters soon arrived and settled outside the fence-line. Entrepreneurs establishing chai shops and small grocery stores were the first, attaching their tiny shops to the fence. Workers from the legal compound stooped to crouch through gaps in the wire, and spend their money. Vegetable shops and tailor shops and little restaurants were next. Gambling dens and other dens for the sale of alcohol or charras soon followed. Each new business clung to the fence of the compound until at last there was no space left on the fence-line. The illegal slum then began to grow outward into the surrounding acres of open land leading to the sea.

Homeless people joined in ever-larger numbers, picking out squares for their huts. New holes were stretched in the fence.

Squatters used them to enter the legal slum to collect water, and workers used them to make purchases in the illegal slum, or visit new friends.

The squatters' slum grew rapidly, but with a haphazard, needs driven planlessness that was a disorderly contrast to the neater lanes of the workers' slum. In time there were eight squatters for every person in the workers' compound, more than twenty-five thousand people in all, and the division between legal and illegal slums became blurred, camouflaged by the crowding. Although the Bombay Municipal Corporation condemned the illegal slum, and construction company officers discouraged contact between workers and squatters, the people thought of themselves as one group; their days and dreams and drives were entangled in the ravel of ghetto life. To workers and squatters alike, the company fence was like all fences: arbitrary and irrelevant. Some of the workers who weren't permitted to bring more than immediate family into the legal slum invited their relatives to squat near them, beyond the wire. Friendships flourished among the children of both sides, and marriages of love or arrangement were common.

Celebrations on one side of the wire were well attended by residents from both sides. And because fires, floods, and epidemics didn't recognise barbed-wire boundaries, emergencies in one part of the slum required the close co-operation of all.

Karla, Prabaker, and I bent low to step through an opening in a section of fence, and we passed into the legal slum. A covey of children trooped along beside us, dressed in freshly washed T-shirts and dresses. They all knew Prabaker and me well. I'd treated many of the young children, cleaning and bandaging cuts, abrasions, and rat bites. And more than a few of the workers, afraid that they might be stood down from work when they received minor injuries on the construction site, had visited my free clinic rather than the company's first-aid officer.