Shantaram (116 page)

And then, as I entered the bright, bartering bustle of the market, I did: I did accept that blame, and I felt my heart expand and unfold as it released its burdens of fear, resentment, and self-doubt. I walked back between the busy stalls and, by the time I joined Abdullah, Vikram, and the Georges, I was smiling. I answered their questions about Modena, and I thanked Abdullah for his surprise. He was right-I did forgive him everything, after that. And although I couldn't find the words to tell him of the change that had happened to me, he sensed, I think, that the difference in the smile I shared with him came from a new peace that was born in me that day, and slowly began to grow.

The cloak of the past is cut from patches of feeling, and sewn with rebus threads. Most of the time, the best we can do is wrap it around ourselves for comfort or drag it behind us as we struggle to go on. But everything has its cause and its meaning.

Every life, every love, every action and feeling and thought has its reason and significance: its beginning, and the part it plays in the end. Sometimes, we do see. Sometimes, we see the past so clearly, and read the legend of its parts with such acuity, that every stitch of time reveals its purpose, and a kind of message is enfolded in it. Nothing in any life, no matter how well or poorly lived, is wiser than failure or clearer than sorrow. And in the tiny, precious wisdom that they give to us, even those dread and hated enemies, suffering and failure, have their reason and their right to be.

____________________

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

Money stinks. A stack of new money smells of ink and acid and bleach like the fingerprinting room in a city police station. Old money, vexed with hope and coveting, smells stale like dead flowers kept too long between the pages of a cheap novel. When you put a lot of money, new and old, into one room-millions of rupees counted twice and snapped into bundles with rubber bands- it stinks. _I love money, Didier once said to me, but I hate the smell of it. The more happiness I get from it, the more thoroughly I have to wash my hands afterwards. I knew exactly what he meant. In the counting-room for the mafia money-change racket, an airless cavern in the Fort area where the hot lights were bright enough to search through the best counterfeit, and the overhead fans never turned fast enough to lift a stray note from the counting tables, the smell of money was like the sweat and the dirt on a gravedigger's boots.

Some weeks after the meeting with Modena, I pushed my way out through the door of Rajubhai's counting room, shoving the goondas aside with the kind of childish rough play we all enjoyed, and gasped at the fresher air in the stairway. A voice called my name, and I stopped on the third step, my hand on the wooden rail. I looked up to see Rajubhai leaning out of the doorway. The short, fat, bald currency-controller for Khader's-no, Salman's- mafia council was dressed, as always, in a dhoti and a white singlet. He leaned out of the doorway, I knew, because he never actually left the room until he sealed it, at close to midnight, every night. When he needed to relieve himself, he used a private facility that was fitted with a one-way mirror so that he could watch the room. He was a dedicated accountant-the mafia's best- but it wasn't just the duty of his profession that held Rajubhai to the activity on his counting tables. Away from the busy room he was a grumpy, suspicious, and strangely wizened man. In the counting room he was plumper, somehow, and expansively self-assured. It was as if the physical attachment linked him to a psychic force: so long as a part of his body was still in the room, he was still connected to the energy, the power, the money.

"Linbaba!" he shouted down at me, with the lower part of his body hidden by the door frame. "Don't forget the wedding! You are coming, isn't it?"

"Sure," I smiled back at him. "I'll be there!"

I did the quick walk-fall down three flights of the stairway, teasing and shoving the goondas on duty at every level, and bumped past the men at the street door. At the end of the street I acknowledged the smiles of two more men watching the door.

There were some exceptions, but for the most part the young mafia gangsters liked me. I wasn't the only foreigner working with the Bombay mafia-there was an Irish gangster in the Bandra council, an American freelancer making a name in major drug deals, a Dutchman working with a gang in Khar, and there were other men across the city-but I was the only gora in the Salman council. I was their foreigner. And those years, as Indian pride was rising like new green, white, and orange vines from the scorched post colonial earth, were the last years when being foreign, being British, or looking and sounding British was enough to win hearts and intrigue minds.

Rajubhai's invitation to his daughter's wedding was significant: it meant that I was accepted as one of them. For months I'd worked side by side with Salman, Sanjay, Farid, Rajubhai, and others on the council. My work in the passport section was bringing in almost as much money as the entire currency operation. My own contacts on the streets threw large sums into the gold, goods, and money-change pots. I worked out in the boxing gym with Salman Mustaan and Abdullah Taheri every other day. Using my friendship with Hassaan Obikwa, I'd forged a new alliance with his men in the black ghetto. It was a useful connection which had brought us new men, money, and markets. At Nazeer's request, I'd joined the delegation that had struck an arms agreement with Afghan exiles in the city-a deal that had ensured a steady supply of weapons to the Salman council from the semi-autonomous tribal regions on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. I had friendship and respect and more money than I cared to spend, but it wasn't until Rajubhai invited me to his daughter's wedding that I knew I was truly accepted. He was a senior man on the Salman council. His invitation was the endorsement that welcomed me into the inner circle of trust and affection. You can work with the mafia, and for the mafia, and do the kind of job that earns high esteem, but you're not really one of them until they invite you home to kiss the babies.

I walked out through the invisible boundaries of the Fort area and approached Flora Fountain. A roving taxi slowed beside me, the driver gesturing aggressively for my fare. I waved him away.

Not realising that I could speak Hindi, he drove up beside me at a crawling pace and leaned from the window to talk.

"Hey, white sisterfucker, can't you see the taxi's empty? What are you doing? Walking in the hot afternoon like somebody's lost white goat?"

"Kai paijey tum?" I asked in rude Marathi. Whaddaya want?

"Kai paijey?" he repeated, stunned to hear the Marathi phrase.

"What's your problem?" I asked, speaking in the rough Marathi dialect of Bombay's back streets. "You don't understand Marathi?

This is our Bombay, and Bombay is ours. If you can't speak Marathi, what are you doing in Bombay? Have you got a goat's brain inside your sisterfucking head?"

"Arrey!" he grinned, switching to English. "You speak Marathi, baba?"

"Gora chierra, kala maan," I said in answer, making circling gestures over my face and my heart. White face, black heart. I moved into Hindi, using the most polite form of the word you to put him at ease. "I'm white on the outside, brother, but full Hindustani on the inside. I'm just taking a walk, passing time.

Why don't you look for some real tourists, and leave poor Indian fuckers like me alone, na?"

He laughed aloud and passed his hand across the window of his cab to shake mine gently, and then sped away.

I walked on, avoiding the crowded footpaths to join the swifter lines on the road beside the passing cars. Deep breaths of the city finally drove the smell of the currency-room from my nostrils. I was heading back toward Colaba, to Leopold's, to meet Didier. I wanted to walk because I was glad to be back in the part of the city I loved most. Work for Salman's mafia council took me to every distant suburb of the great city, and there were many favoured places: from Mahalaxmi to Malad; from Cotton Green to Thana; from Santa Cruz and Andheri to the Lakes District on the Film City Road. But the real seat of his council's power was in the long peninsula that began in the sweeping curve of Marine Drive and followed the scimitar shore all the way to the World Trade Centre. And it was there in those thriving streets, never more than a few bus stops from the sea, that I'd lost my heart to the city and learned to love her.

It was hot on the street, hot enough to burn all but the deepest thoughts from troubled minds. Like every other Bombayite, every other Mumbaiker, I'd made that walk from Flora Fountain to the Causeway a thousand times, and like them I knew where to find the cool breezes and refreshing shades on the way. My scalp, my face, and my shirt were wet with sweat in any few seconds of bare sunlight-the baptism in every daylight walk-and then cooled all the way to dry again in a minute of shaded wind.

My thoughts, as I moved between the traffic and the browsing shoppers, were on the future. Paradoxically, even perversely, just as I was being accepted into the secret heart of Bombay, I also felt the strongest urge to leave. I understood the two forces, contradictory as they seemed. So much of what I'd loved about Bombay had been in the hearts and minds and words of human beings-Karla, Prabaker, Khaderbhai, and Khaled Ansari. They were all gone, in one way or another, yet there was a constant, melancholy sense of them in every street, shrine, and strip of sea-coast that I loved in the city. Still, there were new sources of love and inspiration-new beginnings rising from the fallow fields of loss and disillusion. My position with Salman's mafia council was secure. Business opportunities were opening up in the Bollywood film industry and the newer fields of television and multi-media: I received offers of work every other week. I had a good apartment, with a view of the Haji Ali Mosque, and plenty of money. And night by night I grew a little closer in loving affection for Lisa Carter.

A sadness that lingered in all my favourite places was pressing me to leave the city, just as new love and acceptance pulled me closer to her heart. And I couldn't decide, as I walked that long, baptismal stretch from Flora to the Causeway, which way to jump. No matter how often or deeply I thought about the struggled past or the sorrow and promise of the present, I couldn't make that leap of confidence or trust or faith into the future. There was something missing: some calculation, some piece of evidence or parallax view of my life that would make it all clear to me, I was sure, but I didn't know what it was. So I moved between the frantic flow of cars, bikes, buses, trucks, and push-carts, and the meandering progress of tourists and shoppers, and let my thoughts drift into the heat and the street.

"Lin!" Didier shouted as I stepped through the wide arch and up to his long raft of joined tables. "Direct from your training, non?"

"No, I've been walking. Thinking. More of a workout for the mind - and maybe the soul."

"Do not fear!" he commanded, signalling for the waiter. "I cure this sickness every day of every week. Or every night, at the least. Make a place for him, Arturo. Move down a little, and let him sit next to me."

Arturo, a young Italian hiding in Bombay from an undisclosed problem with the police in Naples, was Didier's new infatuation.

He was a short, slight man with a doll-like face that many a girl might've envied. He spoke very little English and reacted to every approach, no matter how friendly, with the same petulantly surly shudder of irritation. Consequently, Didier's many friends ignored him and set the alarms in their mental clocks to give the relationship from a few months, at most, to a few weeks, before it collapsed.

"You just missed Karla," Didier told me more quietly when I shook his hand. "She will be upset. She wanted to-"

"I know," I smiled. "She wanted to see me."

The drinks arrived, and Didier clattered his glass against mine.

I took a sip from it and put it down on the table next to him.

Several people from the movie crowd that worked with Lisa Carter were at the long table, joining in a party with some of Kavita Singh's press group. Sitting next to Didier were Vikram and Lettie. They were both happier and healthier than I'd ever known them to be. They'd bought the new apartment in the heart of Colaba near the market only months before. While the commitment had exhausted their savings and forced them to borrow from Vikram's parents, it was proof of their faith in one another and the future of their burgeoning movie business, and they were still excited with the change.

Vikram greeted me warmly, rising from his chair to give me a hug.

His gunslinger's clothes had disappeared, item by item, under Lettie's persuasion and his own maturing taste. All that remained of the Clint Eastwood costume were the silver belt and the black cowboy boots. His beloved hat, surrendered with no little reluctance when he'd found himself more frequently in the boardrooms of major companies than in the stuntmen's corral, was hanging from a hook in my apartment.

It was one of my most treasured possessions.

When I leaned over to kiss Lettie, she seized the shoulder of my shirt and pulled me closer to whisper in my ear.

"Keep your cool, lad," she murmured inscrutably. "Keep your cool."

Sitting next to Lettie were the movie producers Cliff De Souza and Chandra Mehta. As sometimes happens with close friends, Cliff and Chandra seemed to exchange the substance of their bodies between them over time, so that Cliff had become slightly thinner and more angular, while Chandra had gained weight in almost perfect proportion. The more they differed physically, however, the more they resembled one another in other ways. In fact, the close colleagues, who often worked and played together for forty hours at a stretch, used so many of the same gestures, facial expressions, and phrases that they were known on the sets of the movies they produced as Fat Uncle and Skinny Uncle.

They raised their arms in identically enthusiastic greeting when I approached them, although each was pleased to see me for his own reasons. Cliff De Souza had developed a passionate affection for Kavita Singh since I'd introduced them, and he'd hoped I might influence her in his favour. Having a far longer acquaintance with her, I knew that no power could influence Kavita toward anything not fully consonant with her will and her wish. Still, she seemed to like him well enough, and they had much in common. They were both almost thirty and unmarried-a status so unusual in the Indian upper middle class, in those years, that their families anguished over it at every feast and festival in the crowded calendar. They were both media professionals who prided themselves on their independence and artistic flair. They were also driven by the same instinctive tolerance to seek out, and fairly examine, each point of view in any apparent conflict of interests. And they were attractive people. Kavita's shapely figure and perilously seductive eye seemed the perfect complement to Cliff's rangy angularity and the boyishness of his artless, lopsided grin.

For my part, liking them both, I saw no reason to resist the matchmaker's urge to meddle. In public I made it clear that I liked Cliff De Souza, and in private I praised him discreetly to her whenever the natural opportunity arose. They had a chance-a good chance, it seemed to me-and my heart put a wishing star in my eyes for them.

Chandra Mehta, on the other hand, was pleased to see me because I was his closest link to the black money in Salman's mafia council, and the only link he could describe as amicable. Like Khader before him, Salman Mustaan saw great advantage in the access to Bombay's film world that Chandra Mehta provided. New regulations at federal and state levels had tightened restrictions on the flow of capital, making it ever more difficult to launder black money. For many reasons-not least because of the irresistible glamour attached to the industry- politicians had exempted the movie business from many of those monetary and investment controls. They were boom economy years, and Bollywood films were going through a renaissance in style and confidence. The films got bigger and better, and had begun to reach out to a wider world market. As the budgets for successful films soared, however, producers exhausted the traditional sources of revenue. That convergence of interests drove more than a few producers and production houses into strange syzygies with gangsters: films about mafia goondas were financed by the mafia, and the profits from hit movies about hit men went into new crimes and real hits on real people, which in turn became the subjects for screenplays and new films financed by more mafia money.