Shantaram (83 page)

"Hospital..." I repeated stupidly. "St. George Hospital. He's in the intensive care. The operation- "

"What operation?"

"He was hurt-very badly hurt, Lin. The operation was... he's still alive, but..."

"But what?"

Johnny broke down and wept, bringing himself under control only with deep breaths and a clench-jawed effort of will.

"He took two passengers, very late last night. Actually, it was about three o'clock this morning. A man and his daughter, wanting to go to the airport. There was a handcart on the highway road.

You know how these fellows take some short-cuts at night, on the main road. It's forbidden, but still they do it, yaar, to save miles of pushing those heavy carts. This cart was full of steel for building. Long steel pieces. They lost the control of that cart on a hill. It slipped from their hands, and it rolled backwards. Prabaker came around the corner in his taxi, and the whole thing went into the front of the car. Some of the steel went through the window. The man and the woman in the back were killed. Their heads came off. Completely off. Prabaker was hit in the face."

He wept again, and I reached out to comfort him. Tourists and patrons at other tables glanced at us, but quickly looked away.

When he recovered, I ordered a whisky for him. He gulped it in one tip of the glass, as Prabaker had done on the first day that I met him.

"How bad is he?"

"The doctor said it's sure he will die, Lin," Johnny sobbed. "His jaw is gone. The steel took it away completely. Everything is gone. All his teeth. There is a big hole, just a big hole, where his mouth and his jaw used to be. His neck is open. They haven't even put bandages on his face, because there are so many tubes and pipes going into that hole. To keep him alive. How he survived it, in that car like that, nobody can say. He was trapped in there for two hours. The doctors think that he will die tonight. That's why I tried to find you. He got bad wounds in the chest and stomach and head. He's going to die, Lin. He's going to die. We have to go there."

We walked into the critical-care ward, and found Kishan and Rukhmabai sitting at the side of his bed and weeping in one another's arms. Parvati, Sita, Jeetendra, and Qasim Ali were all standing in solemn silence at the foot of the bed. Prabaker was unconscious. A bank of machines monitored his vital signs. Tubes and metal pipes were taped to his face-what was left of his face. That great smile, that gorgeous, solar smile, had been ripped from his face. It was simply... gone.

In a duty room on the ground floor, I found the doctor in charge of his care. I pulled a bundle of American hundred-dollar bills from my belt and offered it to him, asking him to forward any further accounts to me. He wouldn't take it. There was no hope, he said. Prabaker had hours, perhaps only minutes, to live. That was why he'd allowed the family and friends to remain at the bedside. There was nothing to do, he said, but wait with him, and watch him die. I returned to Prabaker's room and gave Parvati the money, together with everything I'd earned on my most recent courier run.

I found a toilet in the hospital and then washed my face and neck. The cuts and wounds on my face filled my aching head with thoughts of Abdullah. I couldn't bear to think those thoughts. I couldn't hold the image of my wild, Iranian friend surrounded by cops and shooting it out until his body was torn and bloodied. I stared into the mirror, feeling the acid burn of tears. I slapped myself hard awake, and returned to Prabaker's floor.

I stood with the others, at the foot of his bed, for three hours.

Exhausted, I began to nod off, and I had to admit that I couldn't stay awake. In a relatively quiet corner, I put two chairs against the wall and went to sleep. A dream swallowed me whole, almost at once. It carried me to Sunder. I was floating on the murmuring tide of voices on that first night in the village when Prabaker's father put his hand on my shoulder, and I clenched my teeth against the stars. When I woke from the dream, Kishan was sitting there beside me with his hand on my shoulder, and when I met his eyes we both sobbed helplessly.

In the end, when it was sure that Prabaker would die, and we all knew it, and we all accepted the fact that he had to die, we went through four days and nights of watching his brave little body suffer, what was left of him, the almost-Prabaker with the amputated smile. In the end, after days and nights of watching him suffer that pain and bewilderment, I began to hope that he would die, and to wish for it with all my heart. I loved him so much that in the end I found an empty corner in a cleaner's room, where a tap dripped constantly into a concrete trough, and I fell to my knees on a place marked by two wet footprints, and I begged God to let him die. And then he did die. In the hut he'd once shared with Parvati, Prabaker's mother, Rukhmabai, unfurled her thigh-length hair. She was sitting in the doorway with her back to the world. Her black hair was night's waterfall. She cut across thickly, close to her head, with sharp shears, and the long hair fell like a shadow dying.

At first, when we truly love someone, our greatest fear is that the loved one will stop loving us. What we should fear and dread, of course, is that we won't stop loving them, even after they're dead and gone. For I still love you with the whole of my heart, Prabaker. I still love you. And sometimes, my friend, the love that I have, and can't give to you, crushes the breath from my chest. Sometimes, even now, my heart is drowning in a sorrow that has no stars without you, and no laughter, and no sleep.

____________________

CHAPTER THIRTY

Heroin is a sensory deprivation tank for the soul. Floating on the Dead Sea of the drug stone, there's no sense of pain, no regret or shame, no feelings of guilt or grief, no depression, and no desire. The sleeping universe enters and envelops every atom of existence. Insensible stillness and peace disperse fear and suffering. Thoughts drift like ocean weeds and vanish in the distant, grey somnolency, unperceived and indeterminable. The body succumbs to cryogenic slumber: the listless heart beats faintly, and breathing slowly fades to random whispers. Thick nirvanic numbness clogs the limbs, and downward, deeper, the sleeper slides and glides toward oblivion, the perfect and eternal stone.

That chemical absolution is paid for, like everything else in the universe, with light. The first light that junkies lose is the light in their eyes. A junkie's eyes are as lightless as the eyes of Greek statues, as lightless as hammered lead, as lightless as a bullet hole in a dead man's back. The next light lost is the light of desire. Junkies kill desire with the same weapon they use on hope and dream and honour: the club made from their craving. And when all the other lights of life are gone, the last light lost is the light of love. Sooner or later, when it's down to the last hit, the junkie will give up the woman he loves, rather than go without; sooner or later, every hard junkie becomes a devil in exile.

I levitated. I floated, upraised on the supernatant liquid of the smack in the spoon, and the spoon was as big as a room. The raft of opiate paralysis drifted across the little lake in the spoon, and the rafters intersecting over my head seemed to hold an answer, some kind of answer, in their symmetry. I stared at the rafters, knowing that the answer was there and that it might save me. And then I closed my eyes of hammered lead again, and lost it. And sometimes I woke. Sometimes I was wide-awake enough to want more of the deadening drug. Sometimes I was awake enough to remember it all.

There'd been no funeral for Abdullah because there was no body for them, for us, to bury. His body had disappeared during the brawling riot just as Maurizio's body had disappeared-as completely as a flared, exhausted star. I joined the others to carry Prabaker's body to the ghat, the burning place. I ran with them through the streets. I ran with them beneath the garlanded burden of his little body, chanting names of God, and then I watched his body burn. Grief roamed the lanes of the slum afterward, and I couldn't remain there with the gathering of friends and family who mourned him. They stood near the spot where Prabaker had been married only weeks before. Tattered streamers from the wedding still dangled from the roofs of some of the huts. I spoke to Qasim Ali, Johnny, Jeetendra, and Kishan Mango, but then I left them and rode to Dongri. I had questions for lord Abdel Khader Khan: questions that crawled inside me like the things in Hassaan Obikwa's pit.

The house near the Nabila Mosque was closed, locked up with heavy padlocks and utterly silent. No-one in the forecourt of the mosque or the street of shops could tell me when he'd left, or when he might return. Frustrated and angry, I rode to see Abdul Ghani. His house was open but his servants told me that he was out of the city on a holiday, and wasn't expected home again for weeks. I visited the passport factory, and found Krishna and Villu hard at work. They confirmed that Ghani had left them instructions and sufficient funds for several weeks of work, and had told them that he was taking a holiday. When I rode to Khaled Ansari's apartment, I met a watchman on duty who told me that Khaled was in Pakistan. He had no idea when the dour Palestinian would return.

The other members of Khader's mafia council were just as suddenly and conveniently absent. Farid was in Dubai. General Sobhan Mahmoud was in Kashmir. No-one answered my knock at Keki Dorabjee's house, and every window was darkened with a drawn shade. Rajubhai, who'd never been known to miss a day at his counting house in the Fort, was visiting a sick relative in Delhi. Even the second-level bosses and lieutenants were out of town or simply unavailable.

Those who remained, the gold agents and currency couriers and passport contacts all over the city, were polite and friendly.

Work for them seemed to continue at the same pace and with the same routines. My own work was just as secure. I was anticipated at every depot, exchange centre, jewellery store, and other point of contact with Khader's empire. Instructions had been left for me with gold dealers, currency men, and the touts who bought and stole passports. I wasn't sure if it was a compliment to me-that I could be relied upon to function in the absence of the council-or that they saw me as so inconsequential in their scheme of things that I didn't merit an explanation.

Whatever the reason, I felt dishearteningly alone in the city.

I'd lost Prabaker and Abdullah, my closest friends, in the same week, and with them I'd lost the mark on the psychic map that says You Are Here. Personality and personal identity are in some ways like co-ordinates on the street map drawn by our intersecting relationships. We know who we are and we define what we are by references to the people we love and our reasons for loving them. I was that point in space and time where Abdullah's wild violence intersected with Prabaker's happy gentleness.

Adrift, then, and somehow un-defined by their deaths, I realised with unease and surprise how much I'd also come to depend upon Khader and his council of bosses. My interactions with most of them had been cursory, it seemed to me, and yet I missed the reassurance of their presence in the city almost as much as I missed the company of my dead friends.

And I was angry. It took me a while to understand that anger, and to realise that Khaderbhai was its instigator and its target. I blamed him for Abdullah's death: for not protecting him and for not saving him. I couldn't bring myself to believe that Abdullah, the friend I'd loved, was the brutal madman Sapna. But I was ready to believe that Abdel Khader Khan had some connection to Sapna and to the killings. Moreover, I felt betrayed by his desertion of the city. It was as if he'd abandoned me to face... everything... alone. It was a ridiculous notion, of course, and quite self-aggrandising. The truth was that hundreds of Khader's men were still working in Bombay, and I dealt with many of them every day. But still I felt it-betrayed and forsaken. A coldness, formed from doubt and angry fear, began to spread inward toward the core of my feeling for the Khan. I still loved him, and I was still bonded to him as a son to his father, but he was no longer my revered and flawless hero.

A mujaheddin fighter once told me that fate gives all of us three teachers, three friends, three enemies, and three great loves in our lives. But these twelve are always disguised, and we can never know which one is which until we've loved them, left them, or fought them. Khader was one of my twelve, but his disguise was always the best. In those abandoned, angry days, as my grieving heart limped into numbing despair, I began to think of him as my enemy; my beloved enemy.

And deal by deal, crime by crime, day by day my will and purpose and hope staggered toward the pit. Lisa Carter pursued and won her contract with Chandra Mehta and Cliff De Souza. For her sake I sat in at the meeting that clinched the deal, and I signed on as her partner. The producers saw my involvement as important. I was their safe conduit to the black money of the Khader Khan mafia-an untapped and virtually inexhaustible resource. They didn't mention that connection, not then, but it was a key factor in their decision to sign on with Lisa. The contract specified that Lisa and I would supply foreign junior artists, as bit players were known, for three major studios. The terms of payment and commissions were set for two years.

After the meeting, Lisa walked me to my bike parked at the sea wall on Marine Drive. We sat together at the precise spot where Abdullah had put his hand on my shoulder, years before, when my mind was filled with the drowning sea. We were lonely, Lisa and I, and at first we talked to one another as lonely people do-in fragments of complaint, and corners clipped from conversations that we'd already had with ourselves, alone.

"He knew it would happen," she said after a long, silent pause.

"That's why he gave me that money in the case. We talked about it. He talked about it. He talked about being killed. You know about the war in Iran? The war with Iraq? He almost got killed there a few times. It got into his head, I'm sure of it. I think he wanted to die, for running away from the war and leaving his friends and family behind. And when it came down to it, if it ever did come down to it, he wanted to go out like that."

"Maybe," I answered her, looking at the sublime, indifferent sea.

"Karla once said we all attempt suicide several times in our lives, and sooner or later we all succeed."

Lisa laughed, because I'd surprised her with the quote, but the laugh ended in a long sigh. She tilted her head to let the wind play with her hair.

"The thing with Ulla," she said quietly, "It's been killing me, Lin. I can't get Modena out of my mind. I'm reading all the papers, every day, looking for something about him-about maybe they found him or something. It's weird... the thing with Maurizio, you know, I was sick with it for weeks after. I used to cry all the time, just walking on the street or reading a book or trying to sleep, and I couldn't eat a meal without feeling sick to my stomach. I couldn't stop thinking about his dead body... and the knife... what it must've felt like, when Ulla pushed the knife into him... But now, all that's kind of faded. It's still there, you know, in the bottom of my gut, but it doesn't freak me out any more. And even Abdullah-I don't know if I'm in shock or denial or whatever, but I don't... let myself think about him. It's like... like I accept it, or something. But Modena-that keeps getting worse. I can't stop thinking about him."

"I see him, too," I muttered. "I see his face, and I wasn't even there in that hotel room. It's not good."

"I should've hit her."

"Ulla?"

"Yes, Ulla!"

"Why?"

"That... callous... bitch! She left him there, tied up in that room. She brought you trouble, and me trouble and... Maurizio ... But when she told us about Modena, I just put my arm around her, and took her to the shower, and looked after her like she'd just told me she hadn't fed her pet goldfish. I should've slapped her or socked her one on the jaw or kicked her ass or something.

Now she's gone, and I'm still freaking out about Modena."

"Some people do that," I said, smiling at the anger in her because I felt it myself. "Some people always manage to make us feel sorry for them, no matter how stupid and angry we feel about it after. They're the canaries, kind of, in the coalmines of our hearts. If we stop feeling sorry for them, when they let us down, we're in deep trouble. And anyway, I didn't get involved to help her. I did it to help you."

"Oh, I know, I know," she sighed. "It's not Ulla's fault. Not really. The Palace messed her up. It messed with her head completely. Everyone who worked for Madame Zhou got messed up in some way. You should've seen Ulla, back then, when she started work there. She was gorgeous, I gotta tell ya. And kind of... innocent... in a way that the rest of us weren't, if you know what I mean. I went there already crazy when I first started work there. But it fucked me up, too. We all... we had to... we did some weird shit there..."

"You told me about it," I said gently.

"I told you?" "Yeah."

"I told you what?"

"You told me... a lot of it. The night I came around to get my clothes from Karla's. I went there with the kid, Tariq. You were very drunk, and very stoned."

"And I told you about that?"

"Yeah."

"Jesus! I don't remember that. I was starting to turkey. That was the first night, when I tried to get off the stuff-when I did get off the stuff. I remember the kid, though... and I remember you didn't want to have sex with me."

"Oh, I wanted it, alright."

She turned her head quickly and met my eye. Her expression smiled at the lips, but a tiny frown creased her forehead. She was wearing a red salwar kameez. The long, loose silk shirt clung to her breasts and the outline of her figure in the strong sea breeze. Her blue eyes glittered with courage and other mysteries.

She was brave and fragile and tough in the same instant. She'd dragged herself from the life that was drowning her at Madame Zhou's Palace, and she'd beaten heroin. In defence of her friend's life, and her own, she'd helped to kill a man. She'd lost her lover, Abdullah, my friend, his body torn and mutilated by bullets. And it was all there, in her eyes and her thin face, thinner than it should've been. It was all there, if you knew what to look for, and if you knew where to look.

"So, how did you end up at the Palace?" I asked, and she flinched a little as I changed the subject.

"I don't know," she sighed. "I ran away from home when I was a kid. I couldn't stand it at home. I got outta there as soon as I could. In a couple years I was a teenage junkie, working the beat in L.A. and getting beat up by that month's pimp. Then a guy came along, a nice, quiet, lonely, gentle guy, named Matt. I fell for him, hard. He was my first real love. He was a musician, and he'd been to India a couple times. He was sure we could make enough money for a new start, if we smuggled some shit from Bombay back home. He said that he'd pay for the tickets, if I agreed to carry the stuff. When we got here, he just took off with everything- all our money, and my passport, and everything. I don't know what happened. I don't know if he got cold feet or found someone else to do the job or just decided to do it himself. I don't know. The end of it was... that I got stuck in Bombay with a big, raging heroin habit, and no money, and no passport. I started working from a hotel room, turning tricks to keep going. After a couple months of that, a cop came into my room one day and told me I was busted. I was going to an Indian jail-unless I agreed to work for this friend of his."

"Madame Zhou."

"Yeah."

"Tell me, did you ever see her? Did you ever talk to her in person?"

"Nah. Almost no-one ever talks to her or sees her, except for Rajan and his brother. Karla met her in person. Karla hates her.