Shantaram (9 page)

"I saw her on the street, just hours after I landed in Bombay," I found myself saying. "There was something about her that... I think she's one of the reasons why I've stayed here this long.

Her and Prabaker. I like them-I liked them both on sight. I'm a people person, if you know what I mean. If the people in it were interesting, I'd prefer a tin shed to the Taj Mahal-not that I've seen the Taj Mahal yet."

"It leaks," Didier sniffed, dismissing the architectural wonder with two words. "But did you say interesting! Karla is interesting?"

He laughed out loud again. It was a peculiarly high-pitched laugh, harsh and almost hysterical. He slapped me hard on the back, spilling a little of his drink.

"Ha! You know, Lin, I approve of you, even if a commendation from me is a very fragile endorsement."

He drained his glass, thumped it on the table, and wiped his closely trimmed moustache with the back of his hand. When he saw my puzzled expression, he leaned close until our faces were only a few centimetres apart.

"Let me explain something to you. Look around here. How many people do you count?"

"Well, maybe, sixty, eighty."

"Eighty people. Greeks, Germans, Italians, French, Americans.

Tourists from everywhere. Eating, drinking, talking, laughing.

And from Bombay-Indians and Iranians and Afghans and Arabs and Africans. But how many of these people have real power, real destiny, real dynamique for their place, and their time, and the lives of thousands of people? I will tell you-four. Four people in this room with power, and the rest are like the rest of the people everywhere: powerless, sleepers in the dream, anonyme.

When Karla comes back, there will be five people in this room with power. That is Karla, the one you call interesting. I see by your expression, my young friend, you do not understand what I am saying. Let me put it this way: Karla is reasonably good at being a friend, but she is stupendously good at being an enemy. When you judge the power that is in a person, you must judge their capacities as both friend and as enemy. And there is no-one in this city that makes a worse or more dangerous enemy than Karla."

He stared into my eyes, looking for something, moving from one eye to the other and back again.

"You know the kind of power I'm talking about, don't you? Real power. The power to make men shine like the stars, or crush them to dust. The power of secrets. Terrible, terrible secrets. The power to live without remorse or regret. Is there something in your life, Lin, that you regret? Is there anything you have done, that you regret it?"

"Yes, I guess I-"

"Of course you do! And so do I, regret... things I have done... and not done. But not Karla. And that is why she is like the others, the few others in this room, who have real power. She has a heart like theirs, and you and I do not. Ah, forgive me, I am almost drunk, and I see that my Italians are leaving. Ajay will not wait for much longer. I must go, now, and collect my little commission, before I can allow myself to be completely drunk."

He sat back in his chair, and then pushed himself to his feet by leaning heavily on the table with both of his soft, white hands.

Without another word or look he left, and I watched him walk toward the kitchen, threading his way through the tables with the rolling, spongy step of the practised drinker. His sports coat was creased and wrinkled at the back, where he'd been leaning against the chair, and the seat of his trousers hung in baggy folds. Before I knew him well enough, before I realised how much it meant that he'd lived by crime and passion for eight years in Bombay without making a single enemy and without borrowing a single dollar, I tended to dismiss Didier as little more than an amusing but hopeless drunkard. It was an easy mistake to make, and one that he himself encouraged.

The first rule of black business everywhere is: never let anyone know what you're thinking. Didier's corollary to the rule was: always know what the other thinks of you. The shabby clothes, the matted, curly hair, pressed flat in places where it had rested on the pillow the night before, even his fondness for alcohol, exaggerated into what seemed to be a debilitating addiction-they were all expressions of an image he cultivated, and were as carefully nuanced as a professional actor's. He made people think that he was harmless and helpless, because that was the precise opposite of the truth.

I had little time to think about Didier and the puzzling remarks he'd made, however, because Karla soon returned, and we left the restaurant almost at once. We took the long way to her small house, walking beside the sea wall that runs from the Gateway of India to the Radio Club Hotel. The long, wide street was empty.

On our right, behind a row of plane trees, were hotels and apartment buildings. A few lights, here and there, showed windowgraphs of the lives being lived in those rooms: a sculpture displayed on one wall, a shelf of books on another, a poster of some Indian deity, framed in wood, surrounded by flowers and smoky streamers of incense and, just visible in the corner of a street-level window, two slender hands pressed together in prayer.

On our left was a vast segment of the world's largest harbour, the dark water starred by the moorage lights of a hundred ships at anchor. Beyond them, the horizon quivered with fires flung from the towers of offshore refineries. There was no moon. It was nearly midnight, but the air was still as warm as it had been in the early afternoon. High tide on the Arabian Sea brought occasional sprays over the waist-high stone wall: mists that swirled, on the Simoom, all the way from the coast of Africa.

We walked slowly. I looked up often at the sky, so heavy with stars that the black net of night was bulging, overflowing with its glittering haul. Imprisonment meant years without a sunrise, a sunset, or a night sky, locked in a cell for sixteen hours each day, from early afternoon to late morning. Imprisonment meant that they took away the sun and the moon and the stars. Prison wasn't hell, but there was no heaven in it, either. In its own way, that was just as bad.

"You can take this good-listener business a little too far, you know."

"What? Oh, sorry. I was thinking." I apologised, and shook myself into the moment. "Hey, before I forget, here's that money Ulla gave me."

She accepted the roll of notes from me and shoved it into her handbag without looking at it.

"It's strange, you know. Ulla went with Modena to break away from someone else who was controlling her like a slave. Now she's Modena's slave, in a way. But she loves him, and that makes her ashamed that she has to lie to him, to keep a little money for herself."

"Some people need the master-slave thing."

"Not just some people," she responded, with sudden and disconcerting bitterness. "When you were talking to Didier about freedom, when he asked you the freedom to do what?-you said, the freedom to say no. It's funny, but I was thinking it's more important to have the freedom to say yes."

"Speaking of Didier," I said lightly, trying to change the subject and lift her spirits, "I had a long talk with him tonight, while I was waiting for you." "I think Didier would've done most of the talking," she guessed.

"Well, yes, he did, but it was interesting. I enjoyed it. It's the first time we've ever talked like that."

"What did he tell you?"

"Tell me?" The phrase struck me as peculiar; it carried the hint that there were things he shouldn't tell. "He was giving me some background on some of the people at Leopold's. The Afghans, and the Iranians, and the Shiv Sainiks-or whatever they're called- and the local mafia dons."

She gave a wry little smile.

"I wouldn't take too much notice of what Didier says. He can be very superficial, especially when he's being serious. He's the kind of guy who gets right down to the skin of things, if you know what I mean. I told him once he's so shallow that the best he can manage is a single entendre. The funny thing is, he liked it. I'll say this for Didier, you can't insult him."

"I thought you two were friends," I remarked, deciding not to repeat what Didier had said about her.

"Friends... well, sometimes, I'm not really sure what friendship is. We've known each other for years. We used to live together once-did he tell you?"

"No, he didn't."

"Yeah. For a year, when I first came to Bombay. We shared a crazy, fractured little apartment in the Fort area. The building was crumbling around us. Every morning we used to wake with plaster on our faces from the pregnant ceiling, and there were always new chunks of stone and wood and other stuff in the hallway. The whole building collapsed in the monsoon a couple of years ago, and a few people were killed. I walk that way sometimes, and look up at the hole in the sky where my bedroom used to be. I suppose you could say that we're close, Didier and I. But friends? Friendship is something that gets harder to understand, every damn year of my life. Friendship is like a kind of algebra test that nobody passes. In my worst moods, I think the best you can say is that a friend is anyone you don't despise."

Her tone was serious, but I allowed myself a gentle laugh.

"That's a bit strong, I think."

She looked at me, frowning hard, but then she, too, laughed.

"Maybe it is. I'm tired. I haven't had enough sleep for the last few nights. I don't mean to be hard on Didier. It's just that he can be very annoying sometimes, you know? Did he say anything about me?"

"He... he said that he thinks you're beautiful."

"He said that?"

"Yes. He was talking about beauty in white people and black people, and he said Karla is beautiful."

She raised her eyebrows, in mild and pleased surprise.

"Well, I'll take that as a significant compliment, even if he is an outrageous liar."

"I like Didier."

"Why?" she asked quickly.

"Oh, I don't know. It's his professionalism, I think. I like people who are expert at what they do. And there's a sadness in him that... kind of makes sense to me. He reminds me of a few guys I know. Friends."

"At least he makes no secret of his decadence," she declared, and I was suddenly reminded of something Didier had told me about Karla, and the power of secrets. "Perhaps that's what we really have in common, Didier and I-we both hate hypocrites. Hypocrisy is just another kind of cruelty. And Didier's not cruel. He's wild, but he's not cruel. He's been quiet, in the last while, but there were times when his passionate affairs were the scandal of the city, or at least of the foreigners who live here. A jealous lover, a young Moroccan boy, chased him down the Causeway with a sword one night. They were both stark naked-quite a shocking event in Bombay, and in the case of Didier, something of a spectacle, I can report. He ran into the Colaba police station, and they rescued him. They are very conservative about such things in India, but Didier has one rule-he never has any sex- involvement with Indians-and I think they respect that. A lot of foreigners come here just for the sex with very young Indian boys. Didier despises them, and he restricts himself to affairs with foreigners. I wouldn't be surprised if that's why he told you so much of other people's business tonight. He was trying to seduce you, perhaps, by impressing you with his knowledge of dark business and dark people. Oh, hello! Katzeli! Hey, where did _you come from?"

We'd come upon a cat that was squatting on the sea wall to eat from a parcel someone had discarded there. The thin, grey animal hunkered down and scowled, growling and whining at the same time, but it allowed Karla to stroke its back as it lowered its head to the food once more. It was a wizened and scabrous specimen with one ear chewed to the shape of a rosebud, and bare patches on its sides and back where unhealed sores were exposed. I found it amazing that such a feral, emaciated creature should permit itself to be petted by a stranger, and that Karla would want to do such a thing. Even more astounding, it seemed to me then, was that the cat had such a keen appetite for vegetables and rice, cooked in a sauce of whole, very hot chillies.

"Oh, look at him," she cooed. "Isn't he beautiful?"

"Well..."

"Don't you admire his courage, his determination to survive?"

"I'm afraid I don't like cats very much. I don't mind dogs, but cats..."

"But you must love cats! In a perfect world, all the people would be like cats are, at two o'clock in the afternoon."

I laughed.

"Did anyone ever tell you you've got a very peculiar way of putting things?"

"What do you mean?" she asked, turning to me quickly.

Even in the streetlight I could see that her face was flushed, almost angry. I didn't know then that the English language was a gentle obsession with her: that she studied and wrote and worked hard to compose those clever fragments of her conversation.

"Just that you have a unique way of expressing yourself. Don't get me wrong, I like it. I like it very much. It's like... well ... take yesterday, for instance, when we were all talking about truth. Capital T Truth. Absolute truth. Ultimate truth. And _is _there any truth, is anything true? Everybody had something to say about it-Didier, Ulla, Maurizio, even Modena. Then you said, The truth is a bully we all pretend to like. I was knocked out by it. Did you read that in a book, or hear it in a play, or a movie?"

"No. I made it up myself."

"Well, that's what I mean. I don't think I could repeat anything that the others said, and be sure of getting it exactly right.

But that line of yours-I'll never forget it."

"Do you agree with it?"

"What-that the truth is a bully we all pretend to like?"

"Yes."

"No, I don't, not at all. But I love the idea, and the way you put it."

Her half-smile held my stare. We were silent for a few moments, and just as she began to look away I spoke again to hold her attention. "Why do you like Biarritz?"

"What?"

"The other day, the day before yesterday, you said that Biarritz is one of your favourite places. I've never been there, so I don't know, one way or the other. But I'd like to know why you like it so much."

She smiled, wrinkling her nose in a quizzical expression that might've been scornful or pleased.