Shantaram (75 page)

It was a dangerous mission. At that time, Zaire was a neutral no man's-land between the bloody proxy wars that raged in Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, Sudan, Uganda, and the Congo. It was the personal fiefdom of the conspicuously insane dictator Mobutu, and a percentage of the profit from every crime in the kingdom slithered into his pocket. Mobutu was a darling of the western powers because he bought every costly killing weapon they offered to sell him. If it mattered to them that Mobutu turned the weapons on trade unionists and other social reformers in his own country, they never expressed the concern publicly. Those governments hosted the dictator in lavish style at royal and presidential receptions while hundreds of men and women were being tortured to death in his prisons. The same governments were hunting me through the international police agency, Interpol, and there was no doubt in my mind that their ally would've taken great pleasure in finishing me off for them-as a bonus, so to speak-if the passport mission had gone wrong and I'd found myself arrested in his capital city.

Still, I liked the wildness of Kinshasa, a city that thrived as an open market-place for the trade in every kind of contraband, from gold and drugs to rocket launchers. The city was full of mercenaries, fugitives, criminals, black-market profiteers, and wild-eyed, bare-knuckled opportunists from all over Africa. I felt at home there, and I would've stayed longer, but within seventy-two hours I'd delivered the books and accepted one hundred and twenty thousand dollars in payment. It was Khaderbhai's money. I was anxious to hand it over. I jumped the first flight back to Bombay, and reported to Abdul Ghani.

What I gained from the mission was ten thousand American dollars, field experience, and an introduction to the African branch of Ghani's network. The network and the experience were worth the risk, it seemed to me then. The money was unimportant. I would've done the job for half the wage or less. I knew that most of the human lives in Bombay came and went much cheaper.

More than that, there was the danger. For some people, danger's a kind of drug or even an aphrodisiac. For me, living as a fugitive, living every day and every night of my life with the fear of being killed or captured, danger was something else.

Danger was one of the lances I used to kill the dragon of stress.

It helped me to sleep. When I went to dangerous places and I did dangerous things, a rush of new and different fear swept over me.

That new fear covered the dread that too often worried me awake.

When the job was done, and the new fear subsided and passed away, I drowned in an exhausted peace.

And I wasn't alone in that hunger for dangerous work. In the course of the job I met other agents, smugglers, and mercenaries whose excited eyes and adrenaline-fired reflexes matched my own.

Like me, they were all running from something: they were all afraid of something that they couldn't really forget or confront.

And only danger money, earned with reckless risk, helped them to escape for a few hours and to sleep.

A second, third, and fourth trip to Africa followed without incident. I used three different passports, departing and arriving from different Indian international airports each time and then taking domestic flights back to Bombay. The double shuffle flights between Delhi and Bombay continued. The specialist tasks that I performed with Khaled's currency dealers and some of the gold traders kept me busy-busy enough, most of the time, not to think too long and too hard of Karla.

Toward the end of the monsoon I visited the slum, and joined Qasim Ali on his daily tour of inspection. As he checked the drainage channels and ordered the repair of damaged huts, I recalled how much I'd admired and depended upon him when I'd lived there in the slum. Walking beside Qasim Ali in my new boots and black jeans, I watched the strong young men in bare feet and lungis dig and scrape with their hands, as I'd once done. I watched them shore up the retaining walls and clear the clogged drains, ensuring that the slum would remain dry to the end of the rains. And I envied them. I envied the importance of the work and their earnest devotion to it. I'd known it once, so well-that fervent and unquestioning dedication. I'd earned the smiles of pride and gratitude from the slum-dwellers when the dirty work was done. But that life was gone for me. Its virtues and its solaces beyond price were as remote and irrecoverable as the life I'd known and lost in Australia.

Perhaps sensing my sombre mood, Qasim directed us toward the open area where Prabaker and Johnny were making the first preparations for their weddings. Johnny and a dozen or so of his neighbours were erecting the frame for a shamiana, or great tent, where the wedding ceremonies would take place. Some distance away, other men were building a small stage where the couples would sit after the ceremonies and receive gifts from family members and friends.

Johnny greeted me warmly and explained that Prabaker was working in his rented taxi, and would return after sunset. Together we walked around the framed structure, examining the construction and discussing the relative merits and costs of a plastic or a cotton covering.

Inviting me to drink tea, Johnny led us to the team of stage builders. My former neighbour Jeetendra was the supervisor for the project. He seemed to have recovered from the grief that had enfeebled him for many months after his wife's death in the cholera epidemic. He wasn't so robust-the once-familiar paunch had shrunk to a tight little mound beneath his T-shirt-but his eyes were bright with hope again, and his smile wasn't forced.

His son, Satish, had grown in a rapid burst since his mother's death. When I shook hands with him, I passed a hundred-rupee note in the press of hands. He accepted it just as secretively, and slid it into the pocket of his shorts. The smile he gave me was warm, but he was still wounded by his mother's death. There was a hollowness in his eyes: a black hole of shocked grieving that swallowed all the questions and released no answers. When he returned to his work, cutting lengths of coconut-fibre rope for the men to tie around bamboo bracing poles, his young face assumed a numb expression. I knew that expression. I sometimes caught it, by chance, in the mirror: the way we look when the part of happiness that's trusting and innocent is ripped away, and we blame ourselves, rightly or wrongly, for its loss.

"You know where I got my name?" Johnny asked me as we sipped hot, delicious slum chai.

"No," I answered, smiling to match the laughter in his eyes. "You never told me."

"I was born on the footpath, near Crawford Market. My mother had a little place there, a little hut made with plastic and two poles. The plastic was tied to a wall, underneath a sign. The sign was all broken, you know, and only two bits of two different posters were still on the wall. On one side was a little bit of a movie poster with the name Johnny written on it. Beside that one, and sticking out a bit, was a poster advertising cigars with-yes, you guessed it - only the word Cigar sticking out."

"And she liked it," I continued for him, "and she-"

"Called me Johnny Cigar. Her parents, you know, they had thrown her out. And the man who was my father had dumped her, so she absolutely refused to use either of those family names for me.

And all the way through the labour, when she gave birth to me, on that footpath, she stared at those words, Johnny Cigar, and she took it as a sign, if you'll forgive the joke. She was a very, very stubborn woman."

He looked at the little stage, watching as Jeetendra, Satish, and others lifted flat pieces of plywood onto the frame to make the floor.

"It's a good name, Johnny," I said, after a while. "I like it.

And it brought you good luck."

He smiled at me, and the smile became a laugh.

"I'm just glad it wasn't an advert for laxatives or some such!" he spluttered, causing me to laugh and spray tea at him in return.

"It's taking you guys quite a while to tie the knot," I observed when we could talk again. "What's the delay?"

"Kumar, you know, he wants to play the successful businessman, and put a dowry with each of his daughters. Prabaker and I, we told him we don't believe in all that. We don't want a dowry, you know. It's kind of old fashioned, all that stuff. Mind you, Prabaker's dad is not quite of the same opinion. He sent down a list, from the village-a list of dowry gifts he has in mind. He wants a gold watch-a Seiko automatic-and a new bicycle, among other stuff. The model of bicycle he wants, the one he picked out for himself, we told him it's too big. We told him that his legs are too damn short to reach the pedals, let alone the ground, yaar, but he's crazy for that bicycle. Anyway, we're waiting for Kumar to collect all his dowry and such. The weddings are set for the last week in October, before all the Diwali and all that."

"That'll be quite a week. My friend Vikram gets married that week, too."

"You're coming to the weddings, Lin?" he asked with a small, tight frown. Johnny was a man who granted favours to others with selfless generosity. As is often the case with such men, he couldn't ask for them, or express his wishes, with anything like the same ease.

"I wouldn't miss it for the world," I replied, laughing. "I'll be there with bells on. I mean that literally-when you hear the bells ringing, you'll know I'm on my way."

When I left him, he was talking to Satish. The boy listened intently and stared into his face, his eyes as expressionless as a gravestone, and I remembered how he'd clutched at my leg on the day that Karla visited me in the slum; how he'd favoured her with a shy, sincere smile. The memory sliced into my dead heart. It's said that you can never go home again, and it's true enough, of course. But the opposite is also true. You must go back, and you always go back, and you can never stop going back, no matter how hard you try.

Needing distraction, I rode my bike out to the R.K. film studios, gunning the engine and swerving too often and too fast between the cars. I'd hired eight foreigners the day before, and had sent them to Lisa. It wasn't difficult for me to find and convince foreigners to fill non-speaking roles in the Bollywood films. The same German, Swiss, Swedish, or American tourists who would've reacted with mistrust and hostility to Indian casting agents responded enthusiastically when I approached them. In the years that I'd lived in the slum and worked as a tour guide, I'd met every kind of foreign tourist. I'd developed a style in dealing with them that won their trust quickly. That style was two parts showman, two parts flatterer, and one part philanderer, combined with a hint of mischief, a sniff of condescension, and a pinch of contempt.

The work as a tour guide had also given me friendships in several key Colaba restaurants. For years I'd steered my tour parties into the Cafe Mondegar, the Picadilly, Dipty's Juice Bar, Edward the Eighth, Mezban Restaurant, Apsara Cafe, the Strand Coffee House, the Ideal, and others in the tourist beat, and encouraged them to spend their money. When I needed foreigners to fill bit parts in the Bollywood films, I trawled those cafes and restaurants. The owners, managers, and waiters always greeted me warmly. Whenever I saw a suitable group of young men and women, I approached them with the offer of a chance to work in an Indian movie. With the restaurant staff vouching for me, I usually secured their confidence and agreement within a few minutes. I then phoned Lisa Carter to arrange transport for the following day. The system worked well. In the few months since we'd started working together, Lisa was drawing casting work from the major studios and producers. Finding the most recent group-the foreigners I'd hired the day before-was our first job for the famous R.K. studio.

I was curious to see the large, prestigious studio complex, and as I rode through the entrance gates my spirits lifted to the tall grey sails of the corrugated gable roofs. For Lisa Carter, and others like her, the dream world of movies inspired an almost reverential awe. I wasn't awed by the movie world, but I wasn't immune to it either. Every time I entered the fantasy-land of a film studio, a little of the magic that makes a movie caught in my heart and lifted me, bright with surprise, from the gloomy sea that, too much and too often, my life had become.

The guards directed me to a sound stage where Lisa and her group of Germans were waiting. I'd arrived during a break in the shooting, and found Lisa serving coffee and tea to the young foreigners. They were seated at two tables-two of several that were arranged around a stage, on a set that was designed to replicate a modern nightclub. I greeted them, exchanging a few pleasantries, and then Lisa took me aside.

"How are they?" I asked her when we were alone.

"They're great," she answered happily. "They're patient and relaxed and having a good time, I think. This'll be a good shoot.

You've sent some pretty good people in the last couple weeks, Lin. The studios are real pleased. We could... you know, we could really work this into something, you and me."

"You like this, don't you?"

"Sure I do," she said, giving me a smile I could feel on the back of my head. Then her expression shifted into something more solemn, something determined-the kind of determination you find in people who do it all the hard way, without hope. She was beautiful: a California beach beauty in the carnal jungle of Bombay; a pom-pom girl who'd pulled herself out of the death-by leeches of heroin and the sybaritic suffocation of Madame Zhou's Palace. Her skin was clear and tanned. Her sky-blue eyes were radiant with resolve. Her long, curly blonde hair was pulled back from her face, and held in an elegant coiffure that complemented the decorousness of her modest, ivory-coloured pantsuit. She beat heroin, I found myself thinking, as I met her stare. She beat it.

She got off the stuff. I was suddenly aware of how brave she was, and that the courage in her- when you knew it was there, and you knew how to look for it-was as palpable and riveting as the fierce, impersonal menace in a tiger's eye.

"I like this gig," she said. "I like the people, and the work. I like the life. I think _you should like it, too."

"I like you," I smiled.

She laughed, and slipped an arm through mine, leading us in a stroll around the set.