Shantaram (49 page)

"Oh, Lin!" he called out, hobbling across the broken ground on his platform shoes. He clung to me, as much for balance as in friendly greeting. "There is someone, a fellow you know, he is waiting for you, in your house. But one minute please, what happened on your face? And your shirts? Have you been having it some fights, with some bad fellow? Arrey! Some fellow gave you a solid pasting. If you want me, I will go with you, and tell that fellow he is a bahinchudh."

"It's nothing, Prabu. It's okay," I muttered, striding toward the hut. "Do you know who it is?"

"Who it... is? You mean, who it is, who was hitting your face?"

"No, no, of course not! I mean, the man who's waiting in my hut.

Do you know who it is?"

"Yes, Lin," he said, stumbling along beside me and clutching my sleeve for support.

We walked on for a few more seconds in silence. People greeted us on every side, calling out invitations to share chai, food, or a smoke.

"Well?" I asked, after a while.

"Well? What well?"

"Well, who _is it? Who's in my hut?"

"Oh!" he laughed. "Sorry, Lin. I thought you want some surprises, so I didn't tell you." "It's hardly a surprise, Prabu, because you told me there was someone waiting for me in my hut."

"No, no!" he insisted. "You don't know it his name yet, so still you get the surprise. And that is a good things. If I don't tell you there is somebody, then you go to your hut, and you get the shocks. And that is a bad things. A shocks is like a surprise, when you are not ready."

"Thank you, Prabu," I replied, my sarcasm evaporating as it was uttered.

He needn't have concerned himself with sparing me the shock. The closer I came to my hut, the more often I was informed that a foreigner was waiting to see me. Hello, Lin baba! There's a gora in your house, waiting for you!

We arrived at my hut to find Didier sitting in the shade of the doorway on a stool, and fanning himself with a magazine.

"It's Didier," Prabaker informed me, grinning happily.

"Yes. Thank you, Prabu," I turned to Didier, who rose to shake hands. "This is a surprise. It's good to see you."

"And good to see you, my dear friend," Didier replied, smiling despite the distressing heat. "But, I must be honest, you look a little worse for wear, as Lettie would say."

"It's nothing. A misunderstanding, that's all. Give me a minute to wash up."

I stripped off my torn, bloody shirt, and poured a third of a bucket of clean water from the clay matka. Standing on the flattened pile of stones beside my hut, I washed my face, arms, and chest. Neighbours passed me as I washed, smiling when they caught my eye. There was an art to washing in that way, with no wasted drop of water and no excess of mess. I'd mastered that art, and it was one of the hundred little ways my life imitated theirs, and folded into the lotus of their loving, hoping struggle with fate.

"Would you like a chai?" I asked Didier as I slipped on a clean, white shirt in the doorway of my hut. "We can go to Kumar's."

"I just had one full cup," Prabaker interjected before Didier could reply. "But one more chai will be okay, for the friendship sake, I think so."

He sat down with us in the rickety chai shop. Five huts had been cleared to make space for a single, large room. There was a counter made from an old bedroom dresser, a patchwork plastic roof, and benches for the customers made from planks resting precariously on piles of bricks. All the materials had been looted from the building site beside the slum. Kumar, the chai shop owner, fought a running guerrilla war with his customers, who tried to pilfer his bricks and planks for their own houses.

Kumar came to take our order himself. True to the general rule of slum life that the more money one made, the more poverty-stricken one had to look, Kumar's appearance was more dishevelled and ragged than the meanest of his customers. He dragged up a stained wooden crate for us to use as a table. Appraising it with a suspicious squint, he slapped at the crate with a filthy rag and then tucked the cloth into his singlet.

"Didier, you look terrible," I observed, when Kumar left to prepare our tea. "It must be love."

He grinned back at me, shaking his head of dark curls and raising the palms of his hands.

"I am very fatigued, it is true," he said, managing a shrug of elaborate self-pity. "People do not understand the truly fantastic effort required in the corruption of a simple man. And the more simple the man, the more effort it requires. They do not realise what it takes out of me to put so much decadence into a man who is not born to it."

"You might be making a rod for your own back," I mocked.

"Each thing in its own time," he replied, smiling thoughtfully.

"But you, my friend, you look very well. Only a little, how shall I say it, lonely for information. And to that end, Didier is here. I have all the latest news and gossip for you. You know the difference between news and gossip, don't you? News tells you what people did. Gossip tells you how much they enjoyed it."

We both laughed, and Prabaker joined in, laughing so loudly that everyone in the chai shop turned to look at him.

"Well then," Didier continued, "where to start? Oh yes, Vikram's pursuit of Letitia proceeds with a certain bizarre inevitability.

She began by loathing him-"

"I think loathing is bit strong," I argued.

"Ah, yes, perhaps you're right. If she loathes me-and it is completely certain that she does, the dear and sweet English Rose - then her feeling for Vikram was indeed something less. Shall we say detest?"

"I think detest would cover it," I agreed.

"Et bien, she began by detesting him but, through the persistence of his devoted romantic attentions, he has managed to arouse in her what I can only describe as an amiable revulsion."

We laughed again, and Prabaker slapped at his thigh, hooting with such hilarity that every head turned toward him. Didier and I inspected him with quizzical looks of our own. He responded with an impish smile, but I noticed that his eyes darted away quickly to his left. Following the glance, I saw his new love, Parvati, preparing food in Kumar's kitchen. Her thick, black plait of hair was the rope by which a man might climb to heaven. Her petite figure-she was tiny, shorter even than Prabaker-was the perfect shape of his desire. Her eyes, when she turned in profile to look at us, were black fire.

Looking over Parvati's shoulder, however, was her mother, Nandita. She was a formidable woman, three times the combined width and weight of her petite daughters, Parvati and Sita, and she glowered at us, her expression managing to combine greed for our custom with contempt for our male sex. I smiled at her, and wagged my head. Her smile, in return, was remarkably similar to the fierce grimace that Maori warriors affect to intimidate their enemies.

"In his last episode," Didier continued, "the good Vikram hired a horse from the handlers on Chowpatty Beach, and rode it to Letitia's apartment on Marine Drive to serenade her outside her window."

"Did it work?"

"Unfortunately non. The horse left a package of merde on the front pathway-during an especially moving part of the song, no doubt-and the many other residents of the apartment building expressed their outrage by pelting the poor Vikram with rotting food. Letitia, it was noticed, threw more offensive missiles, and with a more deadly aim, than any of the neighbours."

"C'est l'amour," I sighed.

"Exactly-merde and bad food, c'est l'amour," Didier agreed quickly. "I do think that I must involve myself in this romance, if it is to succeed. The poor Vikram-he is a fool for love, and Lettie despises a fool above all else. But things are much more successful for Maurizio in the last time. He had some business venture with Modena, Ulla's paramour, and he is in the chips, as our dear Lettie would say. He is now a significant dealer, in Colaba."

I forced my face to remain impassive while jealous thoughts of hand- some Maurizio, flushed with success, spiked their way into my mind. The rain started again, and I glanced outside to see people running, hitching up their pants and their saris to avoid the many puddles.

"Just yesterday," Didier went on, carefully tipping his tea from the cup into the saucer, and sipping it from the saucer as most of the slum-dwellers did, "Modena arrived in a chauffeured car, at Leopold's, and Maurizio is wearing a ten-thousand-dollar Rolex watch. But..."

"But?" I prompted, when he paused to drink.

"Well, there is terrible risk in their business. Maurizio is not always... honourable... in his business dealings. If he should upset the wrong people, there will be great violence."

"And what about you?" I asked, changing the subject because I didn't want Didier to see the serpent of spite rising in me when he spoke of the trouble that might be finding its way to Maurizio. "Aren't you flirting with danger yourself? Your new... interest... is one string short of the full marionette, or so I'm told. He's got a very bad temper, Lettie says, and a hair trigger controlling it."

"Oh, him?" he sniffed dismissively, turning down the corners of his expressive mouth. "Not at all. He is not dangerous. Although he is annoying, and annoying is worse than dangerous, n'est-ce pas? It is easier to live with a dangerous man than an annoying one."

Prabaker went to buy three beedie cigarettes from Kumar's shop counter, and lit them with the same match, holding them in one hand and burning the ends with the other. He passed one each to Didier and me, and sat down again, smoking contentedly.

"Ah, yes, there is another piece of news-Kavita has taken a new job at a newspaper, The Noonday. She is a features writer. It is a job with much prestige, I understand, and a fast track to a sub-editor's position. She won it in a field of many talented candidates, and she is very happy."

"I like Kavita," I felt moved to say.

"You know," Didier offered, staring at the glowing end of his beedie and then looking up at me, genuinely surprised, "so do I."

We laughed again, and I deliberately included Prabaker in the joke. Parvati watched us from the corners of her smouldering eyes.

"Listen," I asked, seizing the momentary pause in our conversation, "does the name Hassaan Obikwa mean anything to you?"

Didier's mention of Maurizio's new, ten-thousand-dollar Rolex had reminded me of the Nigerian. I fished the gold-and-white business card from my shirt pocket, and handed it over.

"But, of course!" Didier replied. "This is a famous Borsalino.

They call him The Body Snatcher, in the African ghetto."

"Well, that's a good start," I muttered, a wry smile twisting my lips. Prabaker slapped at his thigh, and doubled over with near hysterical laughter. I put a hand on his shoulder to calm him down.

"They say that when Hassaan Obikwa snatches a body away, not even the devil himself can find it. They are never again seen by living men. Jamais! How do you come to know him? How did you get his card?"

"I sort of, bumped into him, earlier today," I answered, retrieving the card and slipping it into my pocket.

"Well, be careful, my dear friend," Didier sniffed, clearly hurt that I hadn't provided the details of my encounter with Hassaan.

"This Obikwa is like a king, a black king, in his own kingdom.

And you know the old saying-a king is a bad enemy, a worse friend, and a fatal family relation."

Just then a group of young men approached us. They were labourers from the construction site, and most of them lived on the legal side of the slum. They'd all passed through my small clinic during the last year, most of them wanting me to patch up wounds they'd received in work accidents. It was payday at the site, and they were flushed with the excited optimism that a full pay packet puts into young, hard-working hearts. They shook hands with me, each in turn, and paused long enough to see the new round of chai and sweet cakes they'd bought for us delivered to our table. When they left, I was grinning as widely as they were.

"This social work seems to suit you," Didier commented through an arch smile. "You look so well and so fit-underneath the bruises and scratches, that is. I think you must be a very bad man, in your heart of hearts, Lin. Only a wicked man would derive such benefit from good works. A good man, on the other hand, would simply be worn out and bad tempered."

"I'm sure you're right, Didier," I said, still grinning. "Karla said you're usually right, about the wrong you find in people."

"Please, my friend!" he protested, "You will turn my head!"

The sudden crash of many drums exploded, thumping music directly outside the chai shop. Flutes and trumpets joined the drums, and a wild, raucous music began. I knew the music and the musicians well. It was one of the jangling popular tunes that the slum musicians played whenever there was a festival or a celebration. We all went to the open front of the shop. Prabaker stood on a bench beside us to peer over the shoulders of the crowd.

"What is it? A parade?" Didier asked as we watched a large troupe slowly walk past the shop.

"It's Joseph!" Prabaker cried, pointing along the lane. "Joseph and Maria! They're coming!"

Some distance away, we could see Joseph and his wife, surrounded by relatives and friends, and approaching us with ceremonially slow steps. In front of them was a pack of capering children, dancing out their unself-conscious and near-hysterical enthusiasm. Some of them adopted poses from their favourite movie dance scenes, and copied the steps of the stars. Others leapt about like acrobats, or invented jerky, exuberant dances of their own.

Listening to the band, watching the children, and thinking of Tariq-missing the boy already-I remembered an incident from the prison. In that other world-within-a-world, back then, I moved into a new prison cell and discovered a tiny mouse there. The creature entered through a cracked air vent, and crept into the cell every night. Patience and obsessional focus are the gems we mine in the tunnels of prison solitude. Using them, and tiny morsels of food, I bribed the little mouse, over several weeks, and eventually trained it to eat from the edge of my hand. When the prison guards moved me from that cell, in a routine rotation, I told the new tenant-a prisoner I thought I knew well-about the trained mouse. On the morning after the move, he invited me to see the mouse. He'd captured the trusting creature, and crucified it, face down, on a cross made from a broken ruler. He laughed as he told me how the mouse had struggled when he'd tied it by its neck to the cross with cotton thread. He marvelled at how long it had taken to drive thumbtacks into its wriggling paws.