Shantaram (8 page)

He was speaking out of the corner of his mouth, like a prisoner under the eyes of the warders. It struck me as funny. In Australian prisons, that whispering technique is known as _side-

_valving. The expression spoke itself clearly in my mind and, together with Didier's mannerism, the words put me back in a prison cell. I could smell the cheap disinfectant, hear the metal hiss of the keys, and feel the sweating stone under my fingertips. Flashbacks are common to ex-prisoners, cops, soldiers, ambulance drivers, fire fighters, and others who see and experience trauma. Sometimes the flashback is so sudden, and so inappropriate to the surrounding circumstance, that the only sane reaction is foolish, uncontrollable laughter.

"You think I'm joking?" Didier puffed indignantly. "No, no, not at all."

"This is the truth, I assure you. There was a small war over this business. See, here, even now as we speak, the victors arrive.

That is Bairam, and his men. He is Iranian. He is an enforcer, and one of those who works for Abdul Ghani, who, in his turn, works for one of the great crime lords of the city, Abdel Khader Khan. They won this little war, and now it is they who control the business in passport books."

He gestured with a slight nod of his head to point out a group of young men, dressed in stylish western jeans and jackets, who'd just entered through one of the arches. They walked to the manager's desk and greeted the owners of Leopold's warmly before taking a table on the far side of the room. The leader of their group was a tall, heavy-set man in his early thirties. He lifted his plump, jovial face above the heads of his friends and swept the room from right to left, acknowledging deferential nods and friendly smiles from a number of acquaintances at other tables.

As his eyes found us, Didier waved a greeting.

"Blood," he said softly, through his bright smile. "For a time yet, these passports will be stamped in blood. For me it is nothing. In matters of food I am French, in matters of love I am Italian, and in matters of business I am Swiss. Very Swiss.

Strictly neutral. But there will be more blood on these books, of that I am sure."

He turned to me and blinked once, twice, as if severing the thread of daydream with his thick lashes.

"I must be drunk," he said with pleasurable surprise. "Let's have another drink."

"You go ahead. I'll sit on this one. How much do these passports cost?"

"Anything from one hundred to one thousand-dollars, of course.

Do you want to buy one?"

"No..."

"Ah. This is a Bombay gold dealer's no. It is a no that means maybe, and the more passionate the no, the more definite the maybe. When you want one, come to me. I will arrange it for you- for a small commission, of course."

"You make a lot of... commissions here?"

"Mmm, it goes. I cannot complain," he grinned, his blue eyes gleaming through lenses of pink, alcoholic wetness. "I make ends meet, as they say, and when they meet I get a payment from both of the ends. Just now, tonight, I made the arrangements for a sale-two kilos of Manali hashish. You see those Italian tourists, over there, by the fruits, the fellow with the long, blonde hair, and the girl in red? They wanted to buy. Someone-you see him, out there on the street, the one with a dirty shirt and no shoes, waiting for his commission-he put them to me, and then I in my turn put them to Ajay. He makes hashish business, and he is an excellent criminal.

See now, he sits with them, and all are smiling. The deal is done. My work for this night is finished. I am a free man!"

He thumped the table for another drink, but when the small bottle arrived he grasped it for a while with both hands, staring at it with a brooding, pensive expression.

"How long will you stay in Bombay?" he asked, without looking at me.

"I don't know. It's funny, everyone seems to ask me that in the last few days."

"You have already stayed longer than the usual. Most people cannot depart the city too quickly."

"There's a guide, Prabaker's his name, do you know him?"

"Prabaker Kharre? The big smile?"

"That's him. He's been showing me around for weeks now. I've seen all the temples and museums and art galleries, and a lot of the bazaars. From tomorrow morning he's promised to show me something of the other side of the city-the really city, he called it. He made it sound interesting. I'll stick around for that, and make my mind up then where I want to go next. I'm in no hurry."

"It's a very sad thing, to be in no hurry, and I would not be so free in admitting it, if I were you," he said, still staring at the bottle. When he wasn't smiling his face looked flabby, slack, and pallid grey. He was unwell, but it was the kind of unwell you have to work at. "We have a saying in Marseilles: a man in no hurry gets nowhere fast. I have been in no hurry for eight years."

Suddenly his mood changed. He poured a splash from the bottle, looked at me with a smile, and raised his glass.

"So, let's drink! To Bombay, a fine place to be in no hurry! And to civilised policemen, who will accept a bribe, in the interests of the order, if not of the law. To _baksheesh!"

"I'll drink to that," I said, clattering my glass against his in the toast. "So, tell me, Didier, what keeps you here in Bombay?"

"I am French," he replied, admiring the dew on his half-raised glass, "I am gay, I am Jewish, and I am a criminal, more or less in that order. Bombay is the only city I have ever found that allows me to be all four of those things, at the same time."

We laughed, and drank, and he turned his gaze on the wide room, his hungry eyes finally coming to rest on a group of Indian men who sat near one of the entrances. He studied them for a while, sipping slowly at his drink.

"Well, if you decide to stay, you have picked a good time for it.

This is a time of changes. Great changes. You see those men, eating foods with such strong appetite? They are Sainiks, workers for the Shiv Sena. Hatchet men, I think, is the charming English political phrase. Your guide, has he told you of the Sena?"

"No, I don't think so."

"A conscious lapse, I would say. The Shiv Sena Party is the face of the future in Bombay. Perhaps their mode and their politique is the future everywhere."

"What kind of politics?"

"Oh, regional, language-based, ethnic, us-against-them," he replied, sneering cynically as he ticked each characteristic off on the fingers of his left hand. They were very white, soft hands. His long fingernails were black with dirt under the edges.

"The politics of fear. I hate politics, and politicians even more. They make a religion of being greedy. It's unforgivable. A man's relationship to his greed is a deeply personal thing, don't you think? The Shiv Sena controls the police, because they are a Maharashtrian party, and most of the lower ranks of the police are Maharashtrians. They control a lot of the slums, too, and many of the unions, and some of the press. They have everything, in fact, except the money. Oh, they have the support of the sugar barons, and some of the merchants, but the real money-the industrial money and the black money-that is in the hands of the Parsees and the Hindus from other cities in India and, most hated of all, the Muslims. And here is the struggle, the guerre economique, the truth behind their talk of race and language and region. They are changing the city, a little less and a little more every day. Even the name has been changed, from Bombay to Mumbai. They haven't managed to change the maps, yet, but they will do it. And they will do almost anything, join with almost anyone, in their quest. There are opportunities. Fortunes. Just in the last few months some Sainiks-oh, not the public ones, not the highly placed ones- made a deal with Rafiq and his Afghans and the police. In exchange for certain cash and concessions, the police closed down all but a few of the opium dens in the city. Dozens of the finest smoking parlours, places that have served the community for generations, were closed in a single week. Closed forever!

Normally, I do not interest myself in the pigsty of politics, or in the slaughterhouse of big business, for that matter. The only force more ruthless and cynical than the business of big politics is the politics of big business. But this is big politics and big business together, in the destruction of the opium smoking, and I am incensed! I ask you, what is Bombay without its chandu-its opium-and its opium dens? What is the world coming to? It's a disgrace!"

I watched the men he'd described, as they concentrated with energetic single-mindedness on their meal. The table was heaped with platters of rice, chicken, and vegetable dishes. None of the five men spoke, nor did they so much as look at one another as they ate, bending low to their plates and scooping the food into their mouths rapidly.

"That's a pretty good line," I commented, grinning widely. "The one about the business of big politics, and the politics of big business. I like it."

"Ah, my dear friend, I cannot claim it as my own. It was Karla who said it to me the first time, and I have used it ever since.

I am guilty of many crimes-of most crimes, to say the truth-but I have never claimed a cleverness that was not my own."

"Admirable," I laughed.

"Well," he puffed, "a man has to draw the line somewhere.

Civilisation, after all, is defined by what we forbid, more than what we permit."

He paused, drumming the fingers of his right hand on the cold marble table top. After a few moments, he glanced around at me.

"That is one of mine," he said, apparently peeved that I hadn't drawn attention to the phrase. When I didn't react, he spoke again. "About the civilisation... it was one of mine."

"And damn clever," I responded quickly.

"Nothing at all," he said modestly, then he caught my eye, and we both laughed out loud.

"What was in it for Rafiq, if you don't mind my asking. That stuff about closing all the opium dens. Why did he go along with it?" "Go along with it?" Didier frowned, "Why, it was his idea. There is more money to be made from garad-brown sugar heroin-than there is from opium. And now everyone, all the poor who were chandu smokers, they have become garad smokers. Rafiq controls the garad, the brown sugar. Not all of it, of course. No one man controls all the thousands of kilos of brown sugar that come from Afghanistan, through Pakistan, into India. But a lot of it is his, a lot of the Bombay brown heroin. This is big money, my friend, big money."

"Why did the politicians go along with it?"

"Ah, it is not only brown sugar and hashish that comes from Afghanistan into India," he confided, lowering his voice and speaking from the corner of his mouth once more. "There are guns, heavy weapons, explosives. The Sikhs are using these weapons now, in Punjab, and the Muslim separatists in Kashmir. There are weapons, you see. And there is power, the power to speak for many of the poor Muslims who are the enemies of the Shiv Sena. If you control one trade, the drugs, you can influence the other, the guns. And the Sena Party is desperate to control the flow of guns into their state, their Maharashtra. Money and power. Look there, at the table next to Rafiq and his men. You see the three Africans, two men and a woman?"

"Yes. I noticed her before. She's very beautiful."

Her young face, with its prominent cheekbones, softly flared nose, and very full lips, looked as if it had been carved in volcanic stone by the rush of a river. Her hair was braided into a multitude of long, fine, beaded plaits. She laughed, sharing a joke with her friends, and her teeth gleamed large and perfectly white.

"Beautiful? I think not. Among the Africans, the men are beautiful, in my opinion, whereas the women are merely very attractive. For Europeans, the opposite is true. Karla is beautiful, and I never knew a European man who is beautiful in that way. But that is another matter. I mean only to say that they are customers of Rafiq, Nigerians, and that their business between Bombay and Lagos is one of the concessions-a
spin-off
is the term, I think-of this deal with the Sainiks. The Sena has a man at Bombay Customs. So much money is moving from hand to hand. Rafiq's little scheme is a tangle of countries, Afghanistan and India, Pakistan and Nigeria, and of powers-police and customs and politicians. All of it is a part of the struggle for control here in our cursed and beloved Bombay. And all of it, all this intrigue, grows from the closing down of my dear old opium dens. A tragedy."

"This Rafiq," I muttered, perhaps sounding more flippant than I'd intended, "is quite a guy."

"He is Afghan, and his country is at war, my friend. That gives him an edge, as the Americans say. And he works for the Walidlalla mafia council-one of the most powerful. His closest associate is Chuha, one of the most dangerous men in Bombay. But the real power here, in this part of the city, is the great don, lord Abdel Khader Khan. He is a poet, a philosopher, and a lord of crime. They call him Khaderbhai. Khader-_Elder-_Brother. There are others, with more money and more guns than Khaderbhai-he is a man of rigid principles, you see, and there are many lucrative things that he will not do. But those same principles give him-I am not sure how to say it in English-the immoral high ground, perhaps, and there is no-one, in this part of Bombay, who has more real power than he does. Many people believe that he is a saint, with supernatural capabilities. I know him, and I can tell you that Khaderbhai is the most fascinating man I ever met. If you will allow me the small immodesty, this makes him a truly remarkable individual, for I have met a great many interesting men in my life."

He left the words to swirl for a moment in the eye contact between us.

"Come, you are not drinking! I hate it when people take so long to drink a single glass. It is like putting on a condom to masturbate."

"No really," I laughed. "I, er, I'm waiting for Karla to come back. She's due any minute now."

"Ah, Karla..." He said her name with a long, purring roll. "And just what are your intentions with our inscrutable Karla?"

"Come again?"

"Perhaps it is more useful to wonder what intentions she has for _you, no?"

He poured the last of the one-litre bottle into his glass and topped it up with the last of the soda. He'd been drinking steadily for more than an hour. His eyes were as veined and bloodshot as the back of a boxer's fist, but the gaze that stared from them was unwavering, and his hands were precise in their movements.