Shantaram (82 page)

"Arrey baap!" Chandra Mehta puffed. Holy father! "You sound like Cliff. He's a fuckin' communist. That's one of his raves, yaar."

"I'm not a communist, or a capitalist," I said, smiling. "I'm more of a
leave-me-the-hell-alone-ist.
"

"Don't believe him," Lisa interjected. "When you're in trouble, he's the right man to call."

I looked at her. Our eyes held just long enough to feel good and guilty at the same time.

"Fanaticism is the opposite of love," I said, recalling one of Khaderbhai's lectures. "A wise man once told me-he's a Muslim, by the way-that he has more in common with a rational, reasonable-minded Jew than he does with a fanatic from his own religion. He has more in common with a rational, reasonable-minded Christian or Buddhist or Hindu than he does with a fanatic from his own religion. In fact, he has more in common with a rational, reasonable-minded atheist than he does with a fanatic from his own religion. I agree with him, and I feel the same way. I also agree with Winston Churchill, who once defined a fanatic as someone who won't change his mind and can't change the subject."

"And on that note," Lisa laughed, "let's change the subject. Come on, Cliff, I'm relying on you to give me all the gossip about the romance on the set of Kanoon. What's really going on there?"

"Yes! Yes!" Reeta cried out excitedly. "And all about the new girl. There's so much of scandal about her that I can't even say her name out loud, yaar. And everything, anything at all about Anil Kapoor! I just love him to pieces!"

"And Sanjay Dutt!" Geeta added, trembling dramatically at the mention of his name. "Is it true that you actually went to his party in Versova? Oh, my God! How I would love to be there! Tell us all about it!"

Encouraged by that febrile curiosity, Cliff De Souza spun out yarns about the Bollywood stars, and Chandra Mehta added titillating ruffles of gossip throughout. It became clear during the lunch that Cliff had an eye for Reeta, and Chandra Mehta directed much of his attention to Geeta. The long lunch was the beginning of a long day and night they'd planned to spend together. Warming to their themes, and with half their minds on the pleasures of the night to come, the movie men gradually shifted their gossip and anecdotes into the area of sex and sexual scandals. They were funny stories, sometimes straying into the bizarre. We were all laughing hard when Kavita Singh entered the restaurant. The laughter was still rippling through us as I introduced Kavita around the table.

"Excuse me," she said, with the kind of frown that climbs out of deep trouble and refuses to leave. "I have to speak to you, Lin."

"You can talk about the case here, Kavita," I offered, still bright with the laughter of a minute before. "They'll find it interesting."

"It's not about the case," she insisted firmly. "It's about Abdullah Taheri."

I stood at once and excused myself, nodding to Lisa that she should stay and wait for me to return. Kavita and I walked to the foyer of the restaurant. When we were alone, she spoke.

"Your friend Taheri is in deep shit." "What do you mean?"

"I mean that I heard a whisper from the crime staffer at the Times. He said that Abdullah is on a police hit list. Shoot on sight, he said."

"What?"

"The cops' orders are to take him alive, if they can, but to take no chances with him. They're sure he's armed, and they're sure he'll shoot, if they try to arrest him. At the slightest hesitation from him, they're ordered to shoot him down like a dog."

"Why? What's it all about?"

"They think he's this Sapna guy. They've had a solid tip-off, with solid evidence. They're sure it's him, and they're going to get him. Today. It might have happened already. You can't fuck with the cops in Bombay-not with something this serious. I've been looking for you for two hours."

"Sapna? It doesn't make sense," I said. But it did make sense. It made perfect sense, somehow, and I couldn't understand why. There were too many pieces missing; too many questions that I hadn't asked, and should've asked, long before.

"Sensible or not, it's now a reality," she said, her voice trembling in the shudder of a resigned and pitying shrug. "I've been looking for you everywhere. Didier told me you were here. I know Taheri's a good friend of yours."

"Yeah. He's a friend," I said, suddenly remembering that I was talking to a journalist. I stared at the dark carpet, and tried to find sense or direction in the sandstorm of my thoughts. Then I looked up and met her eyes. "Thanks, Kavita. I really appreciate it. Thanks a lot. I'll have to go."

"Listen," she said more softly. "I filed the story. I phoned it in as soon as I heard it. If it makes the evening news, it might make the cops a little more careful. For the record, I don't think he did it. I can't believe it. I always liked him. I had a little crush on him for a while, right after you brought him to Leopold's the first time. Maybe I've still got a crush on him, yaar. Anyway, I don't think he's Sapna, and I don't think he did those... terrible things."

She left, smiling for me and crying for him at the same time. At the table, I apologised for breaking up the lunch and offered a vague excuse for leaving. Without asking her if she wanted to come, I pulled back Lisa's chair for her and lifted her handbag from the chair's high back.

"Oh, Lin, do you really have to go?" Chandra complained. "We haven't even talked about the casting-agency deal."

"Do you really know Abdullah Taheri?" Cliff asked, the faintest hint of accusation in his curiosity.

I glared at him.

"Yes."

"And you're taking the lovely Lisa with you," Chandra pouted.

"That's a double disappointment."

"I've heard so much about him, yaar," Cliff persisted. "How did you meet him?"

"He saved my life, Cliff," I said, a little more harshly than I'd intended. "The first time I met him, he saved my life, at the hash den run by the Standing Babas."

I held open the door of the brasserie for Lisa, and looked back at the table. Cliff and Chandra had their heads close together, their whispers excluding the bewildered girls.

On the bike, outside the hotel, I told Lisa everything that I knew. Her healthy tan faded suddenly and her face was pale, but she pulled herself together quickly. She agreed with me that a trip to Leopold's was logical, as a first step. Abdullah might be there, or he might've left a message with someone. She was afraid, and I felt that fear twisting in the muscles of her arms as she clung to my back. We hurtled through the ponderously slow traffic, riding on luck and instinct just as Abdullah might've done. At Leopold's we found Didier drinking himself into the liquid abyss.

"It's over," he slurred, pouring himself another whisky from a large bottle. "It's all over. They shot him dead almost an hour ago. Everyone is talking about it. The mosques in Dongri are calling the prayers for the dead."

"How do you know?" I demanded. "Who told you?"

"The prayers for the dead," he mumbled, his head lolling forward.

"What a ridiculous and redundant phrase! There are no other kinds of prayers. Every prayer is a prayer for the dead."

I grabbed the front of his shirt and shook him. The waiters, who all liked Didier as much as I did, watched me and calculated how far they would let me go.

"Didier! Listen to me! How do you know? Who told you about it?

Where did it happen?"

"The police were here," he said, suddenly lucid. His pale blue eyes looked into mine as if he was looking for something at the bottom of a pond. "They were boasting about it to Mehmet, one of the owners.

You know Mehmet. He's also Iranian, like Abdullah. Some of the police from the Colaba station, across the road, were in the ambush. They said that he was surrounded in a little street near Crawford Market. They called on him to surrender himself to them.

They said he stood perfectly still. They said his long hair was streaming behind him in the wind, and his black clothes. They talked about that for quite some time. It is strange, don't you think, Lin, that they were talking about his clothes... and his hair? What does it mean? Then they... they said he took two guns from his jacket, and began to shoot at them. They all returned the fire at once. He was shot so many times that his body was mutilated, they said. It was torn apart by the fusillade."

Lisa began to cry. She sat down next to Didier, and he wrapped an arm around her in the automatism of grief and shock. He didn't look at her or acknowledge her. He patted at her shoulder and rocked from side to side, but his sorrow-struck expression would've been the same if he were alone and wrapping his arms about himself.

"There was a big crowd," he continued. "They were very upset. The police were nervous. They wanted to take his body to the hospital in one of their vans, but the people in the crowd attacked the van, and forced it off the road. The police took the body to the Crawford Market police station. The crowd followed them there, shouting and screaming abuse. They are still there, I think."

Crawford Market police station. I had to go there. I had to see the body. I had to see him. Maybe he was alive...

"Wait here," I told Lisa. "Wait with Didier, or get a cab home.

I'll be back."

A spear rammed into my side, up beside my heart, and out through the top of my chest. The spear of Abdullah's death, the spear of thinking about his dead, dead body. I rode to Crawford Market, and every breath pushed the rough spear up against my heart.

Near the market police station I was forced to abandon the bike because a milling crowd mobbed the road. Striking out on foot, I soon found myself in a wild, aimlessly rambling frenzy of people.

Most of them were Muslims. What I could make out from the many chants and shouted slogans indicated that they weren't simply mourners. Abdullah's death had touched off a prairie fire of discontent and long-nursed grievances in the neglected acres of the poor around the market area. Men were shouting a confusing collection of complaints, and clamouring for their own causes. I could hear prayers ringing out from several places.

Inside the legions of screaming men it was chaos, and every step toward the police station was won with a wrestling, shoving effort of force and will. Men came in waves that swept me sideways and then forward and then back. They pushed and punched and kicked out with their legs. More than once I almost went under those trampling feet, reaching out at the last moment to save myself by grappling my fingers into a shirt or a beard or a shawl. I finally caught sight of the police station and the police. Wearing helmets and carrying shields, they were three or four deep across the whole width of the building.

A man beside me in the crowd seized my shirt and began to punch me about the head and face. I had no idea why he'd attacked me- maybe he didn't understand it himself-but it didn't matter. The blows were struck, and I was in it. I covered myself with my hands and tried to wrench myself free. His hand was locked onto the shirt, and I couldn't shake him off. I stepped in closer, jabbed my fingers into his eyes, and crashed my fist into his head just ahead of the ear. His hand released me and he fell back, but others began to punch at me. The crowd opened out around me and I shaped up, punching out at random and hitting anything within range.

It was a bad situation. I knew that sooner or later I would lose the energy and the surprise that kept the posse of men at bay.

Men rushed at me, but only one at a time and with no technique.

They took solid hits and drew back. I danced around, hammering anyone who came near me, but I was surrounded and I couldn't win.

It was only the crowd's fascination with the fighting that kept them from surging forward in a strangling crush of bodies.

A determined phalanx of eight or ten men broke through the circle, and I was face to face with Khaled Ansari. I was running on instinct, and I almost punched him. He held out both hands, waving for me to stop. His men ploughed their way back into the crowd, and Khaled pushed me in behind them. Someone punched my head from behind, and I turned and ran at the mob again, wanting to fight every man in the city; wanting to fight until they punched me numb; until I couldn't feel that spear, dead Abdullah's spear, in my chest. Khaled and two of his friends wrapped their arms around me and dragged me out of the writhing, lunatic hell that the street had become. "His body's not there," Khaled told me when we found my bike. He wiped the blood from my face with a handkerchief. My eye was swelling up quickly, and blood dripped from my nose and a cut on my lower lip. I hadn't felt the blows at all. There was no pain.

The pain was all in my chest, right next to my heart, and I breathed it in, and out, and in.

"The crowd stormed the place. Hundreds of them. That was before we got here. When the cops pushed them out again, they went to the cell where they'd put his body, and it was empty. The crowd let all the prisoners out, and they got his body."

"Ah, Jesus," I moaned. "Ah, fuck. Ah, God."

"We'll get people on it," Khaled said, quiet and confident.

"We'll find out what happened. We'll find... it... him. We'll find his body."

I rode back to Leopold's, and found Johnny Cigar sitting at Didier's table. Didier and Lisa were gone. I collapsed in a chair beside Johnny, much as Lisa had done beside Didier a few hours before. Leaning my elbows on the table, I rubbed my eyes with the heels of my hands.

"A terrible thing," Johnny said.

"Yeah."

"It shouldn't have happened."

"No."

"And it didn't need to happen. Not like this."

"Yeah."

"He didn't need to take that fare. It was the last one for the night, but he didn't need it. He made plenty yesterday."

"What?" I asked, looking at him with a frown that was angry in its bewilderment.

"Prabaker's accident," he said.

"What?"

"The accident," he repeated.

"What... accident?"

"Oh, my God, Lin, I thought you knew about it," he said, the blood in his face an ebb tide that receded to his tightening throat. His voice cracked, and his eyes filled with tears. "I thought you knew. When I saw your face just now, the way you look, I thought you knew about it. I've been waiting for you nearly for one hour. I came to find you as soon as I left the hospital."