Shantaram (69 page)

I continued the weight training and karate with Abdullah, Salman, and Sanjay. We were fit and strong and fast. And as the days of training became weeks, Abdullah and I grew closer, as friends and brothers, just as Salman and Sanjay were with one another. It was the kind of closeness that didn't need conversation to sustain itself: quite often we would meet, travel to the gym, work out on the weights, box a few rounds, spend half an hour sparring at karate, and speak no more than ten words to one another.

Sometimes, with no more than a look in my eye or an unusual expression on his face, we would laugh, and keep on laughing so hard that we collapsed to the practice mats. And in that way, without words, I slowly opened my heart to Abdullah, and I began to love him.

I'd spoken to the head man of the slum, Qasim Ali Hussein, and to several others, including Johnny Cigar, when I'd first returned from Goa. I saw Prabaker in his taxi every other day. But there were so many new challenges and rewards in Ghani's passport workshop, and they kept me so busy and excited, that I stopped working, even occasionally, at the slum clinic I'd founded in the little hut that had been my home.

On my first visit to the slum in several weeks, I was surprised to find Prabaker in the wriggling convulsions of a dance while the slum musicians were rehearsing one of their popular songs.

The little guide was dressed in his taxi driver's khaki shirt and white trousers. He wore a purple scarf around his neck, and yellow plastic sandals. Approaching him unobserved, I watched him in silence for a while. His dance managed to combine obscenely lewd and suggestive thrusts of his hips with the facial expressions and hand-whirling gestures of a child-like innocence.

With clownish charm he held his open palms beside his smiling face one moment, and then pumped his groin back and forth with a determined little grimace the next. When he finally turned and saw me, his face exploded in that huge smile, that uniquely wide and heart-filled smile, and he rushed to greet me.

"Oh, Lin!" he cried, squeezing his head into my chest in an affectionate hug. "I have a news for you! I have it such a fantastic news! I was looking for you in every place, every hotel with naked ladies, every drinking bar with black-market peoples, every dirty slum, every-"

"I get the picture, Prabu. So, what's your news?"

"I am to be getting married! I am making a marriage on Parvati!

Can you believe it?"

"Sure, I can believe it. Congratulations. I take it you were practising, just now, for the wedding party."

"Oh, yes!" he agreed, lunging at me with his hips a few times. "I want a very sexy dancing for everybody at the party. It's a pretty good sexy, isn't it?"

"It's... sexy... sure. How are things here?"

"Very fine. No problem. Oh, Lin! I forgot! Johnny, he is making a marriage also. He will be married with Sita, the sister of my own beautiful Parvati."

"Where is he? I want to say hello."

"He is down at the seashore, you know, at the place where he sits on the rocks, for being lonely-the same place where you also enjoy a good lonely. You'll find him there."

I walked off, glancing back over my shoulder to see Prabaker encouraging the band with mechanical, piston-like thrusts of his narrow hips. At the edge of the slum, where black boulders tumbled to the sea, I found Johnny Cigar. He was dressed in a white singlet and a chequered green lungi. He braced himself with his arms, leaning back, and staring out to sea. It was almost exactly the same spot where he'd told me about seawater, sweat, and tears on the evening of the cholera outbreak, so many months before.

"Congratulations," I said, sitting beside him and offering him a beedie cigarette.

"Thanks, Lin," he smiled, shaking his head. I put the packet away, and for a while we both watched the small petulant waves smack at the rocky shore.

"You know, I was brought into this life-conceived, I mean, not born-just over there, in the Navy Nagar," he said, nodding his head toward the compound of the Indian Navy. A curve of coastline separated us from the Nagar, but a direct line of sight across the small bay gave us a clear view of the houses, huts, and barracks.

"My mother was from Delhi-side originally. Her family, they were all Christians. They made good money in the service of the British, but they lost their position, and their privileges, after the Independence. They moved to Bombay when my mother was fifteen years old. Her father took employment with the navy, working as a clerk. They lived in a zhopadpatti near here. My mother fell in love with a sailor. He was a tall, young fellow from Amritsar, with the best moustache in the whole Nagar. When she became pregnant with me, her family threw her out. She tried to get some help from the sailor who was my father, but he left the Nagar, and she never saw him or heard about him again."

He paused, breathing through his nose, with his lips pressed tightly together. His eyes squinted against the glare from the glittering sea, and the fresh, persistent breeze. Behind us we could hear the noises of the slum-hawkers' cries, the slap of clothes on stone in the washing area, children playing, a bickering complaint, and the jangling music for Prabaker's piston-hips.

"She had a tough time of it, Lin. She was heavily pregnant with me when they threw her out. She moved to a pavement-dweller settlement, across in Crawford Market area, and wore the widow's white sari, pretending that she'd had a husband, and pretending that he was dead. She had to do that-she had to become a widow, for life, before she was even married. That's why I never got married. I'm thirty-eight years old. I can read and write very well-my mother made sure I was educated-and I do the bookwork for all the shops and businesses in the slum. I do the taxes for every man who pays them. I make a good living here, and I have respect. I should've been married fifteen or even twenty years ago. But she was a widow, all her life, for me. And I couldn't do it. I just couldn't allow myself to get married. I kept hoping I would see him, the sailor with the best moustache. My mother had one very old, faded photograph of the two of them, looking very serious and stern. That's why I lived in this area. I always hoped I would see him. And I never married. And she died last week, Lin. My mother died last week."

He turned to me, and the whites of his eyes were blazing with the tears he wouldn't let them shed.

"She died last week. And now, I'm getting married." "I'm sorry to hear about your mother, Johnny. But I'm sure she'd want you to get married. I think you'll make a good father. In fact, I know you'll make a good father. I'm sure of it."

He looked at me, his eyes talking to me in a language I could feel but couldn't understand. When I left him, he was staring at the ceaselessness of the sea, irritated to chequered, white rifts by the wind.

I walked back through the slum to the clinic. A conversation with Ayub and Siddhartha, the two young men I'd trained to run the clinic, reassured me that all was well. I gave them some money to keep, as an emergency float, and left money with Prabaker for his wedding preparations. I paid a courtesy visit to Qasim Ali Hussein, allowing him to force the hospitality of chai upon me.

Jeetendra and Anand Rao, two of my former neighbours, joined us, with several other men I knew well. Qasim Ali led the conversation, referring to his son Sadiq, who was working in the Gulf. In turn, we spoke of religious and communal conflict in the city, the construction of the twin towers; still at least two years from completion, and the weddings of Prabaker and Johnny Cigar.

It was a genial, sanguine meeting, and I rose to leave with the strength and confidence that those honest, simple, decent men always inspired in me. I'd only walked a few paces, however, when the young Sikh, Anand Rao, caught up, and fell into step beside me.

"Linbaba, there is a problem here," he said quietly. He was an unusually solemn man at the best of times, but at that moment his expression was unambiguously grim. "That Rasheed, that fellow I used to be sharing with. Do you remember?"

"Yes. Rasheed. I remember him," I replied, recalling the thin, bearded face and restless, guilty eyes of the man who'd been my neighbour, with Anand, for more than a year.

"He is making a bad business," Anand Rao declared bluntly. "His wife and her sister came from their native place. I went from that hut when they came. He has been living with them alone now, for some time."

"And... what?" I asked, as we walked out on to the road together. I had no idea what Anand Rao was driving at, and I had no patience for it. It was the kind of vague, insinuated complaint that had come to me almost every day when I'd lived in the slum. Most of the time, such complaints came to nothing. Most of the time, it was in my best interests to have nothing to do with them. "Well," Anand Rao hesitated, perhaps sensing my impatience, "it is... he is... something is very bad, and I am... there must be..."

He fell silent, staring at his sandaled feet. I reached out to put a hand on his broad, proud, thin shoulder. Gradually his eyes lifted, and met mine in a mute appeal.

"Is it money?" I asked, reaching into my pocket. "Do you need some money?"

He recoiled as if I'd cursed him. He held the stare, for a moment, before turning and walking back into the slum.

I strode on through familiar streets, and told myself that it was okay. Anand Rao and Rasheed had shared a hut for more than two years. If they were falling out because Rasheed's wife and her sister had moved to the city, and Anand had been forced from the hut, it was probably to be expected. And it was no business of mine. I laughed, shaking my head as I walked, and trying to figure out why Anand Rao had reacted so badly to the offer of money. It wasn't an unreasonable thing for me to assume or to offer. On the thirty-minute walk from the slum to Leopold's, I gave money to five other people, including both of the Zodiac Georges. He'll get over it, whatever it is, I told myself. At any rate, it's got nothing to do with me. But the lies we tell ourselves are the ghosts that haunt the empty house of midnight.

And although I pushed Anand and the slum from my mind, I felt the breath of that ghosted lie on my face as I walked through the long, thronging Causeway on that hot afternoon.

I stepped up into Leopold's, and Didier seized me by the arm before I could speak or sit down, turning me about and leading me to a cab that was waiting outside.

"I have searched for you everywhere," Didier puffed as the cab pulled out from the kerb. "I have been to the most unspeakably foul places, looking for you."

"People keep telling me that."

"Well, Lin, you really must try to spend more time in places where they serve a decent alcohol. It may not make the finding of you easier, but it will make it far more pleasant."

"Where are we going, Didier?"

"Vikram's great strategy-my own superb strategy, if you please- for the capture of Letitia's cold and stony little English heart unfolds, now, even as we speak." "Yeah, well, I wish him all the best," I frowned, "but I'm hungry. I was about to make very loud noises in a plate of Leopold's pulao. You can let me off here."

"But, no! It is not possible!" Didier objected. "Letitia, she is a very stubborn woman. She would refuse gold and diamonds if someone insisted that she should take them. She will not participate in the strategy unless someone convinces her. Someone like you, my friend. And this must be achieved in the next half hour. At exactly six minutes after three o'clock."

"What makes you think Lettie will listen to me?"

"You are the only one of us she does not now hate, or has not hated at some time in the past. For Letitia, the statement I do not hate you is a poem of passionate love. She will listen to you. I am sure of it. And without you, the plan will fail. And the good Vikram-as if loving such a woman as our Letitia was not sufficient to prove his mental derangement-he has already risked his life, several times, to make the plan possible. You cannot imagine how much preparation we have made, Vikram and I, for just this moment."

"Well, nobody told me anything about it," I complained, still thinking of the delicious pulao at Leopold's.

"But that is exactly why I have searched for you all over Colaba!

You have no choice, Lin. You must help him. I know you. There is in you, as there is in me, a morbid belief in love, and a fascination for the madness that love puts in its victims."

"I wouldn't put quite that spin on it, Didier."

"You can spin it how you will," he replied, laughing for the first time, "But you have the love disease, Lin, and you know, in your heart, that you must help Vikram, just as I must help him."

"Oh God," I relented, lighting a beedie to stave off the hunger.

"I'll do what I can to help. What's the plan?"

"Ah, it is quite complicated-"

"Just a minute," I said, raising my hand to interrupt him quickly. "Is this scheme of yours dangerous?"

"Well..."

"And does it involve breaking the law?"

"Well..."

"I thought so. Then, don't tell me until we get there. I've got enough to worry about." "D'accord. I knew that we could count on you. Alors, speaking of worry, I have a little news that may be of some help to you."

"Let's have it."

"The woman who made the complaint about you, the woman who put you in the prison, she is not Indian. I have learned it, beyond any doubt. She is a foreigner who lives here, in Bombay."

"There's nothing else?"

"No. I regret, there is nothing more. Not at this time. But I will not rest until I know all."

"Thanks, Didier."

"It's nothing. You are looking well, by the way. Perhaps even better than before you went to the prison."

"Thanks. I'm a little heavier, and a little fitter."

"And a little... crazier... perhaps?"

I laughed, avoiding his eye, because it was true. The taxi pulled up at Marine Lines Station. Marine Lines was the first railway station after the central city terminus, at Churchgate Depot. We climbed the pedestrian ramp and found Vikram, with several of his friends, waiting for us on the station platform.

"Oh, fuck! Thank God you're here, man!" he said, pumping my hand in a frantic, two-handed shake. "I thought you weren't coming."