Shantaram (50 page)

Are we ever justified in what we do? That question ruined my sleep for a long time after I saw the tortured little mouse. When we act, even with the best of intentions, when we interfere with the world, we always risk a new disaster that mightn't be of our making, but that wouldn't occur without our action. Some of the worst wrongs, Karla once said, were caused by people who tried to change things. I looked at the slum children dancing like a movie chorus and capering like temple monkeys. I was teaching some of those children to speak, read, and write English. Already, with just the little they'd learned in three months, a few of them were winning work from foreign tourists. Were those children, I wondered, the mice that fed from my hand? Would their trusting innocence be seized by a fate that wouldn't and couldn't have been theirs without me, without my intervention in their lives?

What wounds and torments awaited Tariq simply because I'd befriended and taught him?

"Joseph beat his wife," Prabaker explained as the couple drew near. "Now the people are a big celebration."

"If they parade like this when a man beats his wife, what parties they must throw when one is killed," Didier commented, his eyebrows arched in surprise.

"He was drunk, and he beat her terribly," I said, shouting above the din. "And a punishment was imposed on him by her family and the whole community."

"I gave to him a few good whacks with the stick my own self!"

Prabaker added, his face aglow with happy excitement.

"Over the last few months, he worked hard, stayed sober, and did a lot of jobs in the community," I continued. "It was part of his punishment, and a way of earning the respect of his neighbours again. His wife forgave him a couple of months ago. They've been working and saving money together. They've got enough, now, and they're leaving today on a holiday."

"Well, there are worse things for people to celebrate," Didier decided, permitting himself a little shoulder and hip roll in time to the throbbing drums and snake-flutes. "Oh, I almost forgot. There is a superstition, a famous superstition attached to that Hassaan Obikwa. You should know about it."

"I'm not superstitious, Didier," I called back over the thump and wail of the music.

"Don't be ridiculous!" he scoffed. "Everyone in the whole world is superstitious."

"That's one of Karla's lines," I retorted.

He frowned, pursing his lips as he strained his memory to recall.

"It is?" "Absolutely. It's a Karla line, Didier."

"Incredible," he muttered. "I thought it was one of mine. Are you sure?"

"I'm sure."

"Well, no matter. The superstition, about him, is that everyone who meets Hassaan Obikwa, and exchanges names with him in a greeting, will one day find himself a client of his-either a living client or a dead one. To avoid this fate, you don't tell him your name when you meet him the first time. No-one ever does.

You didn't tell him your name, did you?"

A roar went up from the crowd surrounding us. Joseph and Maria were close. As they approached, I saw her radiant, hopeful, brave smile and his competing expressions of shame and determination.

She was beautiful, with her thick hair trimmed short and styled to match the modern cut of her best dress. He'd lost weight, and looked fit, healthy, and handsome. He wore a blue shirt and new trousers. Husband and wife pressed against one another tightly, step for step, all four hands balled into a bouquet of clenched fingers. Family members followed them, holding a blue shawl to catch notes and coins thrown by the crowd.

Prabaker couldn't resist the call to dance. He leapt off the bench and joined the thick tangle of jerking, writhing bodies that preceded Joseph and Maria on the track. Stumbling and tottering on his platform shoes, he skipped to the centre of the dancers. His arms were outstretched for balance as if he was crossing a shallow river on a path of stones. His yellow shirt flashed as he whirled and lurched and laughed in the dance.

Didier, too, was drawn into the avalanche of revelry that ploughed through the long lane to the street. I watched him glide and sway gracefully into the party, swept along in the rhythmic dance until only his hands were visible above his dark, curly hair.

Girls threw showers of flower petals plucked from chrysanthemums.

They burst in brilliant white clusters, and settled on all of us in the converging crowd. Just before the couple passed me, Joseph turned to look into my eyes. His face was fixed between a smile and a frown. His eyes were burning, glistening beneath the tight brows of his frown, while his lips held a happy smile. He nodded twice before looking away.

He couldn't know it, of course; but with that simple nod of his head, Joseph had answered the question that had remained with me, as a dull ache of doubt, since the prison. Joseph was saved. That was the look simmering in his eyes as he nodded his head. It was the fever of salvation. That look, that frowning smile, combined shame and exultation because both are essential-shame gives exultation its purpose, and exultation gives shame its reward. We'd saved him as much by joining in his exultation as we had by witnessing his shame. And all of it depended upon our action, our interference in his life, because no man is saved without love.

What characterises the human race more, Karla once asked me, cruelty, or the capacity to feel shame for it? I thought the question acutely clever then, when I first heard it, but I'm lonelier and wiser now, and I know it isn't cruelty or shame that characterises the human race. It's forgiveness that makes us what we are. Without forgiveness, our species would've annihilated itself in endless retributions. Without forgiveness, there would be no history. Without that hope, there would be no art, for every work of art is in some way an act of forgiveness. Without that dream, there would be no love, for every act of love is in some way a promise to forgive. We live on because we can love, and we love because we can forgive.

The drums staggered toward the distant street. Moving away from us, the dancers romped and rolled on the rhythm, their swaying heads like a field of wildflowers weaving back and forth on waves of wind. As the music dwindled to an echo in our minds, the day to-day and minute-to-minute of slum life slowly reclaimed the lanes. We gave ourselves to our routines, our needs, and our harmless, hopeful scheming. And for a while, a little while, ours was a better world because the hearts and smiles that ruled it were almost as pure and clean as the flower petals fluttering from our hair, and clinging to our faces like still, white tears.

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CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The rocky cusp of coastline bordering the slum began in mangrove swamp, at its left, and swept through deeper water around a long new-moon curve of white-crested wavelets to Nariman Point. The monsoon was at full strength, but just at that moment no rain fell from the grey-black ocean of the lightning-fractured sky.

Wading birds swooped into the shallow swamp, and nestled among the slender, trembling reeds. Fishing boats plied their nets on the ragged waves of the bay. Children swam and played along the bouldered, pebble-strewn shoreline. On the golden crescent, across the small bay, apartment towers for the rich stood shoulder to shoulder to shoulder, all the way to the embassy district at the Point. In the large courtyards and recreation areas of those towers, the wealthy walked and took the air. Seen from the distant slum, the white shirts of the men and colourful saris of the women were like so many beads threaded by a meditating mind on the black strings of asphalt paths. The air, there, on that rocky fringe of the slum was clean and cool. The silences were large enough to swallow occasional sounds. The area was known as the Colaba Back Bay. There were few places in the city better suited to the spiritual and physical stocktaking that a wanted man worries himself with, when the omens are bad enough.

I sat alone, on a boulder that was larger and flatter than most, and I smoked a cigarette. I smoked in those days because, like everyone else in the world who smokes, I wanted to die at least as much as I wanted to live.

Sunlight suddenly pushed aside the sodden monsoon clouds, and for a few moments the windows of the apartment buildings across the bay were dazzling, brilliant mirrors of the golden sun. Then, horizon-wide, the rain clouds regrouped, and slowly sealed the splendent circle of sky, herding one against another until heaven matched the rolling sea with dark, watery waves of cloud. I lit a new cigarette with the butt of the last, and thought about love, and thought about sex. Under pressure from Didier, who permitted his friends to keep any secrets but those of the flesh, I'd admitted that I hadn't made love to anyone since I'd arrived in India. That is a very long time between the drinks, my friend, he'd said, gasping in horror, and I propose that it would be a good idea to get very drunk, if you have my meaning, and very soon. And he was right, of course: the longer I went without it, the more important it seemed to become. I was surrounded, in the slum, by beautiful Indian girls and women who provoked small symphonies of inspiration. I never let my eyes or my thoughts wander too far in their direction-it would've compromised everything that I was, and did, as the slum doctor. But there were opportunities with foreign girls, tourists, in every other deal that I did with them, every other day. German, French, and Italian girls often invited me back to their hotel rooms for a smoke, once I'd helped them to buy hash or grass. I knew that something more than smoking was usually intended. And I was tempted. Sometimes I ached with it. But I couldn't get Karla out of my mind. And deep within me-I still don't know whether it's love, or fear, or good judgement that spawns such a feeling-I sensed with all of my intuition that if I didn't wait for her, it wouldn't happen.

I couldn't explain that love to Karla, or anyone else, including myself. I never believed in love at first sight until it happened to me. Then, when it did happen, it was as if every atom in my body had been changed, somehow: as if I'd become charged with light and heat. I was different, forever, just for the sight of her. And the love that opened in my heart seemed to drag the rest of my life behind it, from that moment onward. I heard her voice in every lovely sound the wind wrapped around me. I saw her face in brilliant mirrored flares of memory, every day. Sometimes, when I thought of her, the hunger to touch her and to kiss her and to breathe a cinnamon-scented minute of her black hair clawed at my chest and crushed the air in my lungs. Clouds, heavy with their burden of monsoon rain, massed above the city, above my head, and it seemed to me in those weeks that all grey heaven was my brooding love. The very mangroves trembled with my desire. And at night, too many nights, it was my restive sleep that rolled and turned the sea in lusted dreaming, until the sun each morning rose with love for her. But she wasn't in love with me, she'd said, and she didn't want me to love her. Didier, trying to warn me, trying to help me or save me, perhaps, had said once that nothing grieves more deeply or pathetically than one half of a great love that isn't meant to be. And he was right, of course, up to a point. But I couldn't let it go, that hope of loving her, and I couldn't ignore the instinct that enjoined me to wait, and wait.

Then there was that other love, a father's love, and the son's love that I felt for Khaderbhai. Lord Abdel Khader Khan. His friend, Abdul Ghani, had called him a mooring post, with the lives of thousands tied to his life for safety. My own life seemed to be one of those harnessed to his. Yet I couldn't clearly see the means by which fate had bound me to him, nor was I completely free to leave. When Abdul had spoken of his search for wisdom, and the answers to his three big questions, he'd unwittingly described my own private search for something or someone to believe. I'd walked that same dusty, broken road toward a faith. But every time I'd heard the story of a belief, every time I'd seen some new guru, the result was the same: the story was unconvincing in some way, and the guru was flawed.

Every faith required me to accept some compromise. Every teacher required me to close my eyes to some fault. And then there was Abdel Khader Khan, smiling at my suspicions with his honey coloured eyes. Is he the real thing, I began to ask myself. Is he the one?

"It is very beautiful, isn't it?" Johnny Cigar asked, sitting beside me and staring out at the dark, impatient restlessness of the waves.

"Yeah," I answered, passing him a cigarette.

"Our life, it probably began inside of the ocean," Johnny said quietly. "About four thousand million years before now. Probably near hot places, like volcanoes, under the sea."

I turned to look at him.

"And for almost all of that long time, all the living things were water things, living inside the sea. Then, a few hundred million years ago, maybe a little more-just a little while, really, in the big history of the Earth-the living things began to be living on the land, as well."

I was frowning and smiling at the same time, surprised and bewildered. I held my breath, afraid that any sound might interrupt his musing.

"But in a way you can say that after leaving the sea, after all those millions of years of living inside of the sea, we took the ocean with us. When a woman makes a baby, she gives it water, inside her body, to grow in. That water inside her body is almost exactly the same as the water of the sea. It is salty, by just the same amount. She makes a little ocean, in her body. And not only this. Our blood and our sweating, they are both salty, almost exactly like the water from the sea is salty. We carry oceans inside of us, in our blood and our sweat. And we are crying the oceans, in our tears."

He fell silent, and at last I spoke my amazement.

"Where the hell did you learn that?" I snapped, perhaps a little harshly.

"I read it in a book," he replied, turning to me with shy concern in his brave, brown eyes. "Why? Is it wrong? Have I said it wrongly? I have the book, in my house. Shall I get it for you?"

"No, no, it's right. It's... perfectly right."

It was my turn to lapse into silence. I was furious with myself.

Despite my intimate knowledge of the slum-dwellers, and the debt I owed them-they'd taken me in, and given me all the support and friendship their hearts could hold-I still fell into the bigot's trap. Johnny shocked me with his knowledge because, somewhere in my deepest appraisal of the slum-dwellers, there was a prejudice that they had no right to such knowledge. In my secret heart I'd judged them as ignorant, even though I knew better, simply because they were poor.

"Lin! Lin!" my neighbour Jeetendra called out in a frightened shriek, and we turned to see him clambering over the rocks toward us. "Lin! My wife! My Radha! She is very sick!"

"What is it? What's the matter?"

"She has bad loose motions. She is very hot with fever. And she is vomiting," Jeetendra puffed. "She's looking bad. She's looking very bad."

"Let's go," I grunted, jumping up and leaping from stone to stone until I reached the broken path leading back to the slum.

We found Radha lying on a thin blanket in her hut. Her body was twisted into a knot of pain. Her hair was wet, saturated with sweat, as was the pink sari she wore. The smell in the hut was terrible. Chandrika, Jeetendra's mother, was trying to keep her clean, but Radha's fever rendered her incoherent and incontinent.

She vomited again violently as we watched, and that provoked a new dribble of diarrhoea.

"When did it start?"

"Two days ago," Jeetendra answered, desperation drawing down the corners of his mouth in a grimace. "Two days ago?"

"You were out some place, with tourists, very late. Then you were at Qasim Ali, his house, until late last night. Then you were also gone today, from very early. You were not here. At the first I thought it was just a loose motions. But she is very sick, Linbaba. I tried three times to get her in the hospital, but they will not take her."

"She has to go back to hospital," I said flatly. "She's in trouble, Jeetu."

"What to do? What to do, Linbaba?" he whined, tears filling his eyes and spilling on his cheeks. "They will not take her. There are too many people at the hospital. Too many people. I waited for six hours today altogether-six hours! In the open, with all other sick peoples. In the end, she was begging me to come back to here, to her house. So ashamed, she was. So, I came back, just now. That's why I went searching for you, and called you only.

I'm very worried, Linbaba."

I told him to throw out the water in his matka, wash it out thoroughly, and get fresh water. I instructed Chandrika to boil fresh water until it bubbled for ten minutes and then to use that water, when it cooled, as drinking water for Radha. Jeetendra and Johnny came with me to my hut, where I collected glucose tablets and a paracetamol-codeine mixture. I hoped to reduce her pain and fever with them. Jeetendra was just leaving with the medicine when Prabaker rushed in. There was anguish in his eyes and in the hands that grasped me.

"Lin! Lin! Parvati is sick! Very sick! Please come too fast!"

The girl was writhing in the spasm of an agony that centred on her stomach. She clutched at her belly and curled up in a ball, only to fling her arms and legs outward in a back-arching convulsion. Her temperature was very high. She was slippery with sweat. The smells of diarrhoea and vomit were so strong in the deserted chai shop that the girl's parents and sister held cloths to their mouths and noses. Parvati's parents, Kumar and Nandita Patak, were trying to cope with the illness, but their expressions were equally helpless and defeated. It was a measure of their despondency and their fear that dread had banished modesty, and they allowed the girl to be examined in a flimsy undergarment that revealed her shoulders and most of one breast.

Terror filled the eyes of Parvati's sister, Sita. She hunched in a corner of the hut, her pretty face pinched and cramped by the horror she felt. It wasn't an ordinary sickness, and she knew it.

Johnny Cigar spoke to the girl in Hindi. His tone was harsh, almost brutal. He warned her that her sister's life was in her hands, and he admonished her for her cowardice. Moment by moment, his voice guided her out of the forest of her black fear. At last she looked up and into his eyes, as if seeing him for the first time. She shook herself, and then crawled across the floor to wipe her sister's mouth with a piece of wet towelling. With that call to arms from Johnny Cigar, and the simple, solicitous gesture from Sita, the battle began.

Cholera. By nightfall there were ten serious cases, and a dozen more possible. By dawn the next day there were sixty advanced cases, and as many as a hundred with some symptoms. By noon, on that day, the first of the victims died. It was Radha, my next door neighbour.

The official from the Bombay Municipal Corporation's Department of Health was a tired, astute, condolent man in his early forties named Sandeep Jyoti. His compassionate eyes were almost the same shade of dark tan as his glistening, sweat-oily skin. His hair was unkempt, and he pushed it back frequently with the long fingers of his right hand. Around his neck there was a mask, which he lifted to his mouth whenever he entered a hut or encountered one of the victims of the illness. He stood together with Doctor Hamid, Qasim Ali Hussein, Prabaker, and me near my hut after making his first examination of the slum.

"We'll take these samples and have them analysed," he said, nodding to an assistant who filed blood, sputum, and stool samples in a metal carry case. "But I'm sure you're right, Hamid.

There are twelve other cholera outbreaks, between here and Kandivli. They're small, mostly. But there's a bad one in Thane- more than a hundred new cases every day. All the local hospitals are overcrowded. But this is not bad, really, for the monsoon. We hope we can keep a cap on it at fifteen or twenty infection sites."

I waited for one of the others to speak, but they simply nodded their heads gravely.

"We've got to get these people to hospital," I said at last.

"Look," he replied, glancing around him and drawing a deep breath, "we can take some of the critical cases. I'll arrange it.

But it's just not possible to take everyone. I'm not going to tell you any lies. It's the same in ten other hutments. I've been to them all, and the message is the same. You have to fight it out here, on your own. You have to get through it." "Are you out of your fucking mind?" I snarled at him, feeling the fear prowl in my gut. "We already lost my neighbour Radha this morning. There's thirty thousand people here. It's ridiculous to say we have to fight it out ourselves. You're the health department, for God's sake!"

Sandeep Jyoti watched his assistant close and secure the sample cases. When he turned back to me, I saw that his bloodshot eyes were angry. He resented the indignant tone, especially coming from a foreigner, and was embarrassed that his department couldn't do more for the slum-dwellers. If it hadn't been so obvious to him that I lived and worked in the slum, and that the people liked me as much as they relied on me, he would've told me to go to hell. I watched all those thoughts shift across his tired, handsome face and then I saw the patient, resigned, almost affectionate smile that replaced them as he ran a hand through his untidy hair.