Shantaram (41 page)

I knew. Khaderbhai had dazzled us with the wisdom of his un- common sense, and the cleverness of his talent for expressing it.

His definition was sharp, and barbed enough-suffering is happiness, backwards-to hook a fish of memory. But the truth of what human suffering really means, in the dry, frightened mouth of life, wasn't in Khaderbhai's cleverness that night. It belonged to Khaled Ansari, the Palestinian. His was the definition that stayed with me. His simple, unbeautiful words were the clearest expression of what all prisoners, and everyone else who lives long enough, know well-that suffering, of every kind, is always a matter of what we've lost. When we're young, we think that suffering is something that's done to us. When we get older-when the steel door slams shut, in one way or another-we know that real suffering is measured by what's taken away from us.

Feeling small and alone and lonely, I walked by memory and touch through the dark, lightless lanes of the slum. As I turned into the last gully where my own empty hut waited, I saw lamplight. A man was standing not far from my door with a lantern in his hand.

Beside him was a small child, a little girl, with knotted, teased hair. I drew near and saw that the man with the lantern was Joseph, the drunkard who'd beaten his wife, and that Prabaker was with him in the shadows.

"What's going on?" I whispered. "It's late."

"Hello, Linbaba. Nice clothes you're wearing for changes,"

Prabaker smiled, his round face floating in the yellow light. "I love it, your shoes-so clean and shining. Just in time you are.

Joseph is doing it good things. He has paid money, to have it the good luck sign put on everybody his doors. Since not being a badly drinking fellow any more, he has been working full overtimes, and with some of his extra money he paid for this, to help us all with good luck."

"The good luck sign?"

"Yes, look here at this child, look at her hand." He lifted the little girl's wrists, and exposed the hands. In the feeble light, it wasn't clear what I was supposed to see. "Look, here, only four fingers she has. See that! Four fingers only. Very good luck, this thing."

I saw it. Two fingers on the child's hands were joined, imperceptibly, to make just one thick finger between the index and middle fingers. Her palms were blue. Joseph held a flat dish of blue paint. The child had been dipping her hands into it, and making handprints on the door of every hut in our lane to bring protection against the many afflictions attributed to the Evil Eye. Superstitious slum-dwellers apparently deemed her to be especially blessed because she was born with the rare difference of only four fingers on each hand. As I watched, the child reached over to press her small hands against my flimsy door. With a brief, serious nod, Joseph led the girl away to the next hut.

"I am helping that used-to-be-beating-his-wife-and-badly drinking-fellow, that Joseph," Prabaker said, in a stage whisper that could be heard twenty metres away. "You are wanting any things, before I'm going?"

"No. Thanks. Good night, Prabu."

"Shuba ratri, Lin," he grinned. Good night. "Have it sweet dreams for me, yes?"

He turned to leave, but I stopped him.

"Hey, Prabu."

"Yes, Lin?"

"Tell me, what is suffering? What do you think? What does it mean, that people suffer?"

Prabaker glanced along the dark lane of ramshackle huts to the hovering glow-worm of Joseph's lamp. He looked back at me, only his eyes and his teeth visible, although we were standing quite close together.

"You're feeling okay, Lin?"

"I'm fine," I laughed.

"Did you drink any daru tonight, like that badly-drinking Joseph?"

"No, really, I'm fine. Come on, you're always defining everything for me. We were talking about suffering tonight, and I'm interested to know, what do you think about it?"

"Is easy-suffering is hungry, isn't it? Hungry, for anything, means suffering. Not hungry for something, means, not suffering.

But everybody knows that."

"Yes, I guess everybody does. Good night, Prabu."

"Good night, Lin."

He walked away, singing, and he knew that none of the people sleeping in the wretched huts around him would mind. He knew that if they woke they would listen for a moment, and then drift back to sleep with a smile because he was singing about love.

____________________

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

"Wake up, Lin! Hey, Linbaba, you must awake up now!"

One eye opened, and focused on a hovering, brown balloon that had Johnny Cigar's face painted on it. The eye closed again.

"Go away, Johnny."

"Hello to you, too, Lin," he chuckled, infuriatingly happy. "You have to get up."

"You're an evil man, Johnny. You're a cruel and evil man. Go away."

"One fellow has an injury, Lin. We need your medicine box, and your good medical self also."

"It's still dark, man." I groaned. "It's two o'clock in the morning. Tell him to come back in the daylight, when I'm alive."

"Oh, certainly, I will tell him, and he will go, but I think you should know that he is bleeding very swiftly. Still, if you must have more sleep, I will beat him away from your door, this very instant, with three-four good shots from my slipper."

I was leaning out over the deep pool of sleep but that word, bleeding, pulled me back from the edge. I sat up, wincing at the numbed stiffness of one hip. My bed, like most of the beds in the slum, was a blanket, folded twice and placed on the hard-packed earth. Kapok mattresses were available, but they were impractical. They took up too much space in the small huts, they quickly became infested with lice, fleas, and other vermin, and rats found them irresistible. After long months of sleeping on the ground, I was as used to it as a man gets, but there wasn't much flesh on my hips, and I woke up sore every morning.

Johnny was holding a lamp quite close to my face. I blinked, pushing it aside to see another man squatting in the doorway with his arm held out in front of him. There was a large cut or gash on the arm, and blood seeped from it, drip, drip, drop, into a bucket. Only half awake, as I was, I stared stupidly at the yellow plastic bucket. The man had brought his own bucket with him to stop the blood from staining the floor of my hut, and that seemed more disturbing, somehow, than the wound itself.

"Sorry for trouble, Mr. Lin," the young man said.

"This is Ameer," Johnny Cigar grunted, whacking the injured man on the back of the head with a resounding slap. "Such a stupid fellow he is, Lin. Now he's sorry for trouble. I should take my slipper and beat your black, and beat some of your blue also."

"God, what a mess. This is a bad cut, Johnny." It was a long, deep slash from the shoulder almost to the tip of the elbow. A large, triangular flap of skin, shaped like the lapel of an overcoat, was beginning to curl away from the wound. "He needs a doctor. This has to be stitched up. You should've taken him to the hospital."

"Hospital naya!" Ameer whined. "Nahin, baba!"

Johnny slapped him on the ear.

"Shut up, you stupid! He won't go to a hospital or a doctor, Lin.

He's a cheeky fellow, a goonda. He's afraid of police. Aren't you, hey, you stupid? Afraid of police, na?"

"Stop hitting him, Johnny. It's really not helping. How did this happen?"

"Fighting. His gang, with the other gang. They fight, with swords and choppers, these street gangsters, and this is the result."

"The other fellows started it. They were doing the Eve-teasing!"

Ameer complained.
Eve-teasing
was the name given to the charge of sexual harassment, under Indian law, and it covered a range of offences from insulting language to physical molestation. "We warned them to stop it. Our ladies were not walking safely. For that reason only we did fight them."

Johnny raised his broad hand, silencing Ameer's protest. He wanted to strike the young man again, but my frown gave him reluctant pause.

"You think this is a reason to fight with swords and choppers, you stupid? Your mummy will be very happy that you stop the Eve teasing, and get yourself hacked up into teeny pieces, na? Very happy she'll be! And now you want Linbaba to sew you up, and make nice repairs to your arm. Shameful, you are!"

"Wait a minute, Johnny. I can't do this. It's too big, too messy ... it's too much."

"You have the needles and cotton in your medical boxes, Lin." He was right. The kit contained suture needles and silk thread.

But I'd never used them.

"I've never used them, Johnny. I can't do it. He needs a professional-a doctor or a nurse."

"I told you, Lin. He won't go to a doctor. I tried to force him.

Someone in the other gang was hurt even more seriously than this stupid boy. Maybe he will die also, this other fellow. It is a police matter now, and they are asking questions. Ameer won't go to any doctor or hospital."

"If you give me, I will do myself," Ameer said, swallowing hard.

His eyes were huge with fright and horror-struck resolve. I looked at him full in the face for the first time, and I saw how young he was: sixteen or seventeen years old. He was wearing Puma sneakers, jeans, and a basketball singlet with the number printed on the front. The clothes were Indian copies of famous western brands, but they were considered fashionably hip by his peers in the slum, other young men with lean bellies and heads full of scrambled foreign dreams; young men who went without food to buy clothes that they imagined made them look like the cool foreigners in magazines and films.

I didn't know the kid. He was one of thousands I'd never seen, although I'd been there for almost six months, and no-one in the place lived more than five or six hundred metres from my hut.

Some men, such as Johnny Cigar and Prabaker, appeared to know everyone in the slum. It seemed extraordinary to me that they should know intimate details from the lives of so many thousands of people. It was even more remarkable that they cared-that they encouraged and scolded and worried about all of them. I wondered how that young man was connected to Johnny Cigar. Ameer shivered in the swirling chill of night, pressing his lips into a wide, noiseless whine as he contemplated taking needle and thread to his own flesh. I wondered how it was that Johnny, standing above him, knew him well enough to be sure he would do it; to nod at me with the message, Yes, if you give him the needle, he will do it himself.

"Okay, okay, I'll do it," I surrendered. "It's going to hurt. I haven't got any anaesthetic."

"Hurt!" Johnny boomed happily. "Pain is no problem, Lin. Good you have pains, Ameer, you chutia. Pains in your brains, you should be having."

I sat Ameer down on my bed, covering his shoulders with another blanket. Pulling the kerosene stove from my kitchen box, I pumped it up, primed it, and set a pot of water on it to boil. Johnny hurried off to ask someone to make hot, sweet tea. I washed my face and hands hurriedly, in the dark, at the open bathroom-space beside my hut. When the water boiled, I put a little into a dish, and threw two needles into the pot to sterilise them with further boiling. Using antiseptic and warm soapy water, I washed the wound and then dried it off with clean gauze. I bound the arm tightly with gauze, leaving it in place for ten minutes to press the wound together, in the hope that it would make the stitching easier.

Ameer drank two large mugs of sweet tea at my insistence, as a counter to the symptoms of shock that had begun to show. He was afraid, but he was calm. He trusted me. He couldn't know that I'd only done the procedure once before, and under ironically similar circumstances. A man had been stabbed during a prison fight. The problem between the two antagonists, whatever it was, had been resolved in the violent encounter, and the matter was finished so far as they were concerned. But if the stabbed man had reported to the prison infirmary for treatment, the authorities would've placed him in an isolation unit for prisoners on protection. For some men, child molesters and informers particularly, there was no alternative to being placed on protection because they wouldn't otherwise have survived. For others, men placed there against their will, the protection unit was a curse: the curse of suspicion, slanders, and the company of men they despised. The stabbed man had come to me. I'd stitched his wound closed with a leatherwork needle and embroidery thread. The wound healed, but it left an ugly, rippling scar. The memory of it never left me, and I wasn't confident about the attempt to stitch Ameer's arm.

The sheepish, trusting smile that the young man offered me was no help. People always hurt us with their trust, Karla said to me once. The surest way to hurt someone you like, is to put all your trust in him.

I drank tea, smoked a cigarette, and then set to work. Johnny stood in the doorway, ineffectually scolding several curious neighbours and their children away from the door. The suture needle was curved and very fine. I supposed that it should've been used with some kind of pliers. I had none in my kit. One of the boys had borrowed them to fix a sewing machine. I had to push the needle into the skin, and pull it through with my fingers. It was awkward and slippery, and the first few cross-shaped stitches were messy. Ameer winced and grimaced inventively, but he didn't cry out. By the fifth and sixth stitches I'd developed a technique, and the ugliness of the work, if not the pain involved, had diminished.

Human skin is tougher and more resilient than it looks. It's also relatively simple to stitch, and the thread can be pulled quite tightly without tearing the tissue. But the needle, no matter how fine or sharp, is still a foreign object and, for those of us who aren't inured to such work through frequent repetition, there's a psychological penalty that must be paid each time we drive that alien thing into another being's flesh. I began to sweat heavily despite the cool night. It was a measure of the distress involved that Ameer became brighter as the work progressed, while I grew more tense and fatigued.

"You should've insisted that he go to a hospital!" I snapped at Johnny Cigar. "This is ridiculous!"

"You're doing very excellent sewing, Lin," he countered. "You could make up a very fine shirt, with stitches like that."

"It's not as good as it should be. He'll have a big scar. I don't know what the fuck I'm doing here."

"Are you having trouble with toilet, Lin?"

"What?"

"Are you not going to toilet? Are you having it hard motions?"

"For Chrissakes, Johnny! What are you babbling about?"

"Your bad temper, Lin. This is not your usual behaviour. Maybe it is a problem with hard motions, I think so?"

"No," I groaned.

"Ah, then it is loose motions you're having, I think."

"He had it loose motions for three days last month," one of my neighbours chipped in from the open doorway. "My husband told me that Linbaba was going three-three-four times to toilet every day then, and again three-three-four times every night. The whole street was talking."

"Oh yes, I remember," another neighbour recalled. "Such pain he had! What faces he pulled when he was at toilet, yaar. Like he was making a baby. And it was a very runny, loose motion. Like water, it was, and it came out so fast, like when they explode the cannons on Independence Day.
Da-dung!
Like that, it was! I recommended the drinking of chandu-chai that time, and his motions became harder, and a very good colour again."

"A good idea," Johnny muttered appreciatively. "Go and get it some chandu-chai for Linbaba's loose motions." "No!" I moaned. "I don't have loose motions. I don't have hard motions. I haven't had a chance to have any motions at all yet.

I'm only half awake, for God's sake! Oh, what's the use? There, it's finished. You'll be okay, Ameer, I think. But you should have a tetanus injection."

"No need, Linbaba. I had it injections before three months, after the last fighting."

I cleaned the wound once more and dusted it with antibiotic powder. Covering the twenty-six stitches with a loose bandage, I warned him not to get it wet, and instructed him to come back within two days to have it checked. He tried to pay me, but I refused the money. No-one paid for the treatment I dispensed.

Still, it wasn't principle that made me refuse. The truth was that I felt curiously, inexplicably angry-at Ameer, at Johnny, at myself-and I ordered him away curtly. He touched my feet, and backed out of the hut, collecting a parting slap on the head from Johnny Cigar.

I was about to clean up the mess in my hut when Prabaker rushed inside, grasped at my shirt, and tried to drag me out through the door.

"So good that you are not sleeping, Linbaba," he gasped breathlessly. "We can save the time of waking you up. You must come now with me! Hurry, please!"

"For God's sake, what is it now?" I grumbled. "Let go of me, Prabu. I've got to clean up this mess."

"No time for mess, baba. You come now, please. No problem!"

"Yes problem!" I contradicted him. "I'm not going anywhere until you tell me what the hell is going on. That's it, Prabu. That's final. No problem."

"You absolutely must come, Lin," he insisted, dragging at my shirt. "Your friend is in the jail. You must help!"

We abandoned the hut and rushed out through the narrow, shadow clogged lanes of the sleeping slum. On the main street outside the President Hotel we caught a cab, and swept along the clean, silent streets past the Parsee Colony, Sassoon Dock, and the Colaba Market. The cab stopped outside the Colaba police station, directly across the road from Leopold's. The bar was closed, of course, with the wide metal shutters rolled down to the pavement.

It seemed preternaturally quiet: the haunted stillness of a popular bar, closed for business.

Prabaker and I passed the gates of the police station and entered the compound. My heart was beating fast, but I looked outwardly calm. All the cops in the station spoke Marathi-it was a requirement of their employment. I knew that if they had no special reason to suspect or challenge me, my proficiency with the Marathi language would please them as much as it surprised them. It would make me popular with them, and that small celebrity would protect me.

Still, it was a journey behind enemy lines, and in my mind I pushed the locked, heavy box of fear all the way to the back of the attic.

Prabaker spoke quietly to a havaldar, or police constable, at the foot of a long flight of metal stairs. The man nodded, and stepped to the side. Prabaker wagged his head, and I followed him up the steel steps to a landing, with a heavy door, on the first floor. A face appeared at the grille set into the door. Large brown eyes stared left and right, and then the door opened for us. We stepped into an antechamber that contained a desk, a small metal chair, and a bamboo cot. The guard who opened the door was the watchman on duty that night. He spoke briefly with Prabaker and then glared at me. He was a tall man with a prominent paunch and a large, expressively bristly moustache, tinged with grey.