Shantaram (42 page)

There was a metal gate made from hinged, concertina-style lattices behind him. Beyond the gate, the faces of a dozen prisoners watched us with intense interest. The guard turned his broad back on them, and held out his hand.

"He wants you to-" Prabaker began.

"I know," I stopped him, fishing into the pocket of my jeans. "He wants baksheesh. How much?"

"Fifty rupees," Prabaker grinned, looking up with his biggest smile into the face of the tall officer.

I handed over a fifty-rupee note, and the watchman palmed it. He turned his back to me and approached the metal gate. We followed him. More men had gathered there, all wide awake and chattering, despite the late hour. The watchman stared at them, one by one, until all were silent. Then he called me forward. When I faced the bars of the steel gate, the crowd of men parted and two fantastic figures pushed their way to the front. They were the bear-handlers, the blue-skinned men who'd brought Kano the bear to my slum at Abdullah's request. They reached the gate and grasped at the bars, chattering at me so quickly and urgently that I only caught every fourth or fifth word.

"What's going on, Prabu?" I asked, completely mystified. When Prabaker told me that my friend was in jail, I'd assumed that he'd meant Abdullah. I was expecting to find Abdullah behind the bars, and I moved left and right, trying to see beyond the bear-handlers and the other men crowding at the gate.

"These are your friends, isn't it?" Prabaker asked. "Don't you remember, Lin? They came with Kano to have your bear hugs."

"Yes, sure, I remember them. Did you bring me to see them?"

Prabaker blinked at me, and then turned quickly to check the expressions on the faces of the watchman and the bear-handlers.

"Yes, Lin," he said quietly. "These men were asking you to come.

Do you... do you want to leave?"

"No, no. I just... never mind. What do they want? I can't make out what they're saying."

Prabaker asked them to explain what they wanted, and the two blue-skinned men shouted their story, clutching at the lattices of the gate as if they were the boards of a raft on the open sea.

"They say, they tell it, that they are staying near to the Navy Nagar, and they found there some other fellows, who also are bear handling fellows, and having it one very sad and skinny bear,"

Prabaker explained, urging the men to be calm and to speak more slowly. "They say that these others were not treating their bear with respect. They were beating that bear with a whip, and that bear was crying, with pains all over him."

The bear-handlers spoke in a rush of words that kept Prabaker silent, listening and nodding, with his mouth open to speak.

Other prisoners approached the gate to listen. The corridor beyond the gate had long windows on one side covered by a metal grille. On the other side of the crowded prison corridor there were several rooms. Men streamed from those rooms, swelling the throng at the gate to a hundred or more prisoners, all of them listening with fascination to the bear-handler's story.

"So hard, those bad fellows were beating their poor bear,"

Prabaker translated. "And even when it cried, those fellows didn't stop beating it, that bear. And, you know, it was a girl bear!"

The men at the gate reacted with outraged, angry shouts and sympathetic cries.

"Our fellows here, they were very upset about the others, beating that other bear. So, they went up to those others, and they told them they must not be beating any bear. But they were very bad and angry, those fellows. There was a lot of shouting, and pushing, and bad language. One of those fellows, he called our fellows the sisterfuckers. Our fellows, they called the other ones the arse-holes. The bad ones, they called our fellows motherfucking bastards. Our fellows, they called them brotherfuckers. The other ones, they said a lot more about something-and-anything-fucking. Our fellows, they said back a lot about-"

"Get to the point, Prabu."

"Yes, Lin," he said, listening intently. There was a lengthy pause.

"Well?" I demanded.

"Still a lot of bad language, Lin," he replied, shrugging helplessly. "But some of it, I have to say, is very, very fine, if you want to hear it?"

"No!"

"Okay," he said, at last, "at the end, somebody called it the police to come. Then there was a big fight."

He paused again, listening to the next instalment of the story. I turned to look at the watchman, and saw that he was as deeply engrossed in the unfolding saga as the prisoners were. He chewed paan as he listened, his thorn-bush of a moustache twitching up and down, and unconsciously emphasising his interest. A roar of approval for something in the story went up from the attentive prisoners, and the watchman was united with them in the appreciative shout.

"At first, the other fellows were winning that big fight. So much fighting there was, Lin, like in Mahabharata. Those bad fellows had a few friends, who all made a contribution of punches and kicking and slapping with slippers. Then, Kano the bear, he got upset. Just before the police arrived, Kano the bear got into that fight, to help his bear-handling fellows. He stopped that fight too fast. He was knocking those other fellows right, and left also. That Kano is a very good fighting bear. He beat those bad fellows, and all their friends, and gave them a solid pasting!"

"And then the blue guys got arrested," I concluded for him.

"Sad to say it, yes. Arrested, they were, for the charge of Breaking the Peaces."

"Okay. Let's talk."

Prabaker, the watchman, and I took two steps away from the gate and stood at the bare metal desk. Over my shoulder, I could see that the men at the gate were straining to hear our conversation.

"What's the Hindi word for bail, Prabu? Find out if we can bail the guys out of jail." Prabaker asked, but the watchman shook his head, and told us that it was out of the question.

"Is it possible for me to pay the fine?" I asked in Marathi, using the commonly accepted euphemism for a police bribe.

The watchman smiled, and shook his head. A policeman was hurt in the scuffle, he explained, and the matter was out of his hands.

Shrugging my helplessness, I turned back to the gate and told the men that I couldn't bail or bribe them out of the jail. They rattled away at me in such a swift and garbled Hindi that I couldn't understand them.

"No, Lin!" Prabaker announced, beaming a smile at me. "They don't worry for themselves. They worry for Kano! He is arrested also, that bear. They are very worried for their bear. That is what they want you to help them for!"

"The bear is arrested?" I asked the watchman, in Marathi.

"Ji, ha!" he replied, a flourish of pride rippling in his wild moustache. Sir, yes! "The bear is in custody downstairs!"

I looked at Prabaker, and he shrugged.

"Maybe we should see it that bear?" he suggested.

"I think we should see it that bear!" I replied.

We took the steel steps down to the ground-floor level, and were directed to a row of cells directly beneath the rooms we'd seen upstairs. A ground-level watchman opened one of the rooms, and we leaned inside to see Kano the bear sitting in the middle of a dark and empty cell. It was a large room, with a keyhole toilet in the floor in one corner. The huge muzzled bear was chained at his neck and on his paws, and the chains passed through a metal grille at one of the windows. He sat with his broad back against a wall, and his lower legs splayed out in front of him. His expression-and I have no other way of describing the set of his features, other than as an expression-was disconsolate and profoundly distressed. He let out a long, heart-wrenching sigh, even as we watched him.

Prabaker was standing a little behind me. I turned to ask him a question, and found that he was crying, his face contorted with miserable sobbing. Before I could speak, he moved past me toward the bear, evading the outstretched hand of the watchman. He reached Kano, with his arms before him in a wide embrace, and pressed himself to the creature, resting his head against Kano's and stroking the shaggy fur with murmurs of tenderness. I exchanged glances with the ground-level watchman. The man raised his eyebrows, and wagged his head from side to side energetically. He was clearly impressed.

"I did that first, you know," I found myself saying, in Marathi.

"A few weeks ago. I hugged that bear first."

The watchman wrinkled his lips in a pitying and contemptuous sneer.

"Of course you did," he mocked. "Absolutely, you did."

"Prabaker!" I called out. "Can we get on with this?"

He pulled himself away from the bear and approached me, wiping tears from his eyes with the backs of his hands as he walked. His wretchedness was so complete that I was moved to put my arm around him to comfort him.

"I hope you are not minding, Lin," he cautioned. "I smell quite much like bears."

"It's okay," I answered him softly. "It's okay. Let's see what we can do."

Ten more minutes of discussion with the watchmen and the other guards resolved that it was impossible for us to bail out the handlers or their bear. There was nothing to be done. We returned to the metal gate and informed the bear-handlers that we were unable to help them. They broke into another animated dialogue with Prabaker.

"They know all that we cannot be helping," Prabaker clarified for me, after a few minutes. "What they want is to be in that lock-up cell with Kano. They are worried for Kano because he is lonely.

Since a baby, he has never been sleeping alone, even one night.

For that only, they are a big worried. They say that Kano, he will be frightened. He will have a bad sleep, and have too many bad dreams. He will be crying, for his loneliness. And he will be ashamed, to be in the jail, because he is normally a very fine citizen, that bear. They want only to go down to that lock-up cell with Kano, and keep him some good companies."

One of the bear-handlers stared into my eyes when Prabaker finished his explanation. The man was distraught. His face was creased with worry. Anguish drew his lips back into something that resembled a snarl. He repeated one phrase again and again, hoping that with repetition and the force of his emotion he might make me understand. Suddenly, Prabaker burst into tears once more, sobbing like a child as he grasped the metal bars of the gate.

"What's he saying, Prabu?"

"He says a man must love his bear, Lin," Prabaker translated for me. "He says like that. A man must love his bear."

Negotiations with the watchmen and the other guards were spirited once we presented them with a request that they could grant without bending the rules to their breaking point. Prabaker thrived in the theatrically energetic barter, protesting and pleading with equal vigour. At last he arrived at an agreed sum- two hundred rupees, about twelve American dollars-and the moustachioed watchman unlocked the gate for the bear-handlers while I handed over the bundle of notes. In a strange procession of people and purposes, we filed down the steel stairs, and the ground-floor watchman unlocked the cell that housed Kano. At the sound of their voices, the great bear rose from his seated position, and then fell forward on all fours, dragged downward by the chains. The bear swayed its head from side to side in a joyful dance, and pawed at the ground. When the bear-handlers rushed to greet him, Kano drove his snout into their armpits, and nuzzled in their long, dread-locked hair, snuffling and sniffing at their scent. For their part, the blue men smothered him in affectionate caresses, and sought to ease the stress of the heavy chains. We left them in the enclosure of that embrace. When the steel cell door slammed shut on Kano and his handlers the sound rattled through the empty parade ground, gouging echoes from the stone. I felt that sound as a shiver in my spine as Prabaker and I walked out of the police compound.

"It is a very fine thing that you have done tonight, Linbaba,"

Prabaker gushed. "A man must love his bear. That is what they said, those bear-handling fellows, and you have made it come true. It is a very, very, very fine thing that you have done."

We woke a sleeping cab driver outside the police station, on Colaba Causeway. Prabaker joined me in the back seat, enjoying the chance to play tourist in one of the cabs he frequently drove. As the taxi pulled out from the kerb, I turned to see that he was staring at me. I looked away. A moment later, I turned my head and found that he was still staring. I frowned at him, and he wagged his head. He smiled his world-embracing smile for me, and placed his hand over his heart.

"What?" I asked irritably, although his smile was irresistible, and he knew it, and I was already smiling with him in my heart.

"A man..." he began, intoning the words with sacramental solemnity.

"Not again, Prabu." "... must love his bear," he concluded, patting at his chest and wagging his head frantically.

"Oh, God help me," I moaned, turning again to look at the awkward stir and stretch of the waking street.

At the entrance to the slum, Prabaker and I separated as he made his way to Kumar's chai shop for an early breakfast. He was excited. Our adventure with Kano the bear had given him a fascinating new story-with himself cast in an important role-to share with Parvati, one of Kumar's two pretty daughters. He hadn't said anything to me about Parvati, but I'd seen him talking to her, and I guessed that he was falling in love. In Prabaker's way of courtship, a young man didn't bring flowers or chocolates to the woman he loved: he brought her stories from the wider world, where men grappled with demons of desire, and monstrous injustice. He brought her gossip and scandals and intimate secrets. He brought her the truth of his brave heart, and the mischievous, awe-struck wonder that was the wellspring of his laughter, and of that sky-wide smile. And as I watched him scurry toward the chai shop, I saw that already his head was wagging and his hands were waving as he rehearsed the story that he brought to her as the new day's gift.

I walked on into the grey pre-morning as the slum murmured itself awake. Smoke swirling from a hundred small fires roved the lanes.

Figures wrapped in coloured shawls emerged, and vanished in the misty streams. The smells of rotis cooking on kerosene stoves, and chai boiling in fragrant pots joined the people-smells of coconut hair oil, sandalwood soap, and camphor-soaked clothing.