Shantaram (72 page)

I rode on past the Haji Ali Mosque, accelerating into the wide avenue of afternoon traffic, and as I rode I asked myself why Abdel Khader Khan never referred to the murder of his friend and colleague Madjid. It still nagged at me and I wanted to ask him about it, but the one time that I'd mentioned his name, soon after the murder, Khader had looked so stricken with grief that I'd let the subject lapse. And as the days had passed into weeks, and the weeks had drifted into silent months, I'd found it impossible to drag the subject into our conversations. It was as if _I was the one who was keeping secrets; and no matter how thick my mind became with thoughts of the murder, I never admitted them to him. Instead, we talked business or we spoke of philosophy. And during the course of our long discussions he finally answered my big question. I remembered the excitement that had refracted in his eyes, and the pride, perhaps, when I'd proved that I understood his teaching. And as I rode from Leopold's to my meeting with Lisa on that day of Didier's confession, I remembered word-by-word and smile-by-smile the great Khan's explanation.

"And so, you understand the principle of the argument to this point?"

"Yes," I answered him. I'd come to his Dongri mansion that night, a week before, to give him a report on the changes I'd recommended and initiated in the passport factory run by Abdel Ghani. With Ghani's approval and support, we'd expanded the operation to include a full package of identity documents- driver's licences, bank accounts, credit cards, even memberships of sports clubs. Khader was delighted with the progress of those innovations, but he soon changed the subject to talk of his favourite themes: good and evil, and the purpose of life. "Perhaps you can tell it back to me," he nodded, looking into the playful fling and splash of the fountain's plumes of water. His elbows rested on the arms of the white cane armchair, and the temple of his fingertips peaked at his lips and the neat, silver grey moustache.

"Ah... sure. You were saying that the whole universe is moving toward some ultimate complexity. This has been going on since the universe began, and physicists call it the tendency toward complexity. And... anything that kicks this along and helps it is good, and anything that hinders it is evil."

"Very good," Khader said, raising one eyebrow in the smile he offered me. As was so often the case, I wasn't sure if he was expressing approval or mockery or both. It seemed, with Khader, that he never felt or expressed any one emotion without feeling something of its opposite. That might be true for all of us, to some extent. But with him, with lord Abdel Khader Khan, it wasn't possible to know what he really thought or felt about you. The one and only time that I saw the whole of the truth in his eyes- on a snow-covered mountain called Sorrow's Reward-it was already too late, and I never saw it again.

"And this final complexity," he added, "it can be called God, or the Universal Spirit, or the Ultimate Complexity, as you please.

For myself, there is no problem in calling it God. The whole universe is moving toward God, in a tendency toward the ultimate complexity that God is."

"That still leaves me with the question I asked you last time.

How do you decide how any one thing is good or evil?"

"That is true. I promised you an answer to this very good question then, young Mr. Lin, and you will have it. But, first, you must answer a question for me. Why is killing wrong?"

"Well, I don't think it is always wrong."

"Ah," he mused, his amber eyes glittering in the same wry smile.

"Well, I must tell you that it _is always wrong. This will become clear, later in our discussion. For now, concentrate on the type of killing that you do think is wrong, and tell me why it is wrong."

"Yeah, well, it's the unlawful taking of a life."

"By whose law?"

"Society's law. The law of the land," I offered, sensing that the philosophical ground was slipping away beneath me.

"Who makes this law?" he asked gently. "Politicians pass laws. Criminal laws are inherited from... from civilisation. The laws against unlawful killing go all the way back-maybe all the way back to the cave."

"And why was killing wrong for them?"

"You mean... well, I'd say, because there's only one life. You only get one shot at it, and to take it away is a terrible thing."

"A lightning storm is a terrible thing. Does that make it wrong, or evil?"

"No, of course not," I replied more irritably. "Look, I don't know why we need to know what's behind the laws against killing.

We have one life, and if you take a life without a good reason you do something wrong."

"Yes," he said patiently. "But why is it wrong?"

"It just _is, that's all."

"This is the point we all reach," Khader concluded, more serious in his tone. He put his hand on my wrist as it rested on the arm of my chair beside him, and he tapped out the important points with his fingers. "If you ask people why killing, or any other crime, is wrong, they will tell you that it is against the law, or that the Bible, or the Upanishads, or the Koran, or the Buddha's eight-fold path, or their parents, or some other authority tells them it is wrong. But they don't know why it is wrong. It may be true, what they say, but they don't know why it is true.

"In order to know about any act or intention or consequence, we must first ask two questions. One, what would happen if everyone did this thing? Two, would this help or hinder the movement toward complexity?"

He paused as a servant entered with Nazeer. The servant brought sweet, black suleimani chai, in long glasses, and a variety of irresistible sweets on a silver tray. Nazeer brought a questioning glance for Khaderbhai and a scowl of unmitigated contempt for me. Khader thanked him and the servant, and they left us alone once more.

"In the case of killing," Khader continued, after he'd sipped the tea through a cube of white sugar. "What would happen if everyone killed people? Would that help or hinder? Tell me."

"Obviously, if everyone killed people, we would wipe each other out. So... that wouldn't help."

"Yes. We human beings are the most complex arrangement of matter that we know of, but we are not the last achievement of the universe. We, too, will develop and change with the rest of the universe. But if we kill indiscriminately, we will not get there.

We will wipe out our species, and all the development that led to us across millions of years- billions of years-will be lost. The same can be said for stealing. What would happen if everyone stole things? Would that help us, or would it hinder us?"

"Yeah. I get the point. If everyone was stealing off everyone else we'd be so paranoid, and we'd waste so much time and money on it, that it would slow us down, and we'd never get-"

"To the ultimate complexity," he completed the thought for me.

"This is why killing and stealing are wrong-not because a book tells us they are wrong, or a law tells us they are wrong, or a spiritual guide tells us they are wrong, but because if everyone did them we would not move toward the ultimate complexity that is God, with the rest of the universe. And the opposite of these is also true. Why is love good? Well, what would happen if everyone loved everyone else? Would that help us or would it hold us back?"

"It would help," I agreed, laughing from within the trap he'd set for me.

"Yes. In fact, such universal love would greatly accelerate the movement toward God. Love is good. Friendship is good. Loyalty is good. Freedom is good. Honesty is good. We knew that these things were good before-we have always known this in our hearts, and all the great teachers have always told us this-but now, with this definition of good and evil, we can see why they are good.

Just as we can see why stealing and lying and killing are evil."

"But sometimes..." I protested, "you know, what about self defence? What about killing to defend yourself?"

"Yes, a good point, Lin. I want you to imagine a scene for me.

You are standing in a room with a desk in front of you. On the other side of the room is your mother. A vicious man holds a knife to the throat of your mother. The man will kill your mother. On the table in front of you there is a button. If you press it, the man will die. If you do not, he will kill your mother. These are the only possible outcomes. If you do nothing, your mother dies. If you press the button, the man dies and your mother is saved. What would you do?"

"The guy's history," I answered without hesitation.

"Just so," he sighed, perhaps wishing that I'd wrestled with the decision a little longer before pressing the button. "And if you did this, if you saved your mother from this vicious killer, would you be doing the wrong thing or the right thing?" "The right thing," I said just as swiftly.

"No, Lin, I'm afraid not," he frowned. "We have just seen that in the terms of this new, objective definition of good and evil, killing is always wrong because, if everyone did it, we would not move toward God, the ultimate complexity, with the rest of the universe. So it is wrong to kill. But your reasons were good. So therefore, the truth of this decision is that you did the wrong thing, for the right reasons..."

As I rode the wind, a week after Khader's little lecture on ethics, weaving the bike through ancient-modern traffic beneath a darkening, portentous tumble of clouds, those words echoed in my mind. The wrong thing, for the right reasons. I rode on and, even when I stopped thinking about Khader's lesson, those words still murmured in the little grey daydream-space where memory meets inspiration. I know now that the words were like a mantra, and that my instinct-fate's whisper in the dark-was trying to warn me of something by repeating them. The wrong thing... for the right reasons.

But on that day, an hour after Didier's confession, I let the murmured warnings fade. Right or wrong, I didn't want to think about the reasons-not my reasons for doing what I did, or Khader's, or anyone's. I enjoyed the discussions of good and evil, but only as a game, as an entertainment. I didn't really want the truth. I was sick of truth, especially my own truth, and I couldn't face it. So the thoughts and premonitions echoed and then whipped past me into the coils of humid wind. And by the time I swept into the last curve of coast near the Sea Rock Hotel, my mind was as clear as the broad horizon clamped upon the limit of a dark and tremulous sea.

The Sea Rock, which was as luxurious and opulently serviced as the other five-star hotels in Bombay, offered the special attraction that it was literally built upon the sea rocks at Juhu. From all its major restaurants, bars, and a hundred other windows, the Sea Rock scanned the endlessly shifting peaks and furrows of the Arabian Sea. The hotel also offered one of the best and most comprehensively eclectic smorgasbord lunches in the city. I was hungry, and glad to see that Lisa was waiting for me in the foyer. She wore a starched, sky-blue shirt with the collar turned up, and sky-blue culottes. Her blonde hair was wound into the praying-fingers of a French braid. She'd been clean, off heroin, for more than a year. She looked tanned and healthy and confident. "Hi, Lin," she smiled, greeting me with a kiss on the cheek.

"You're just in time."

"Great. I'm starving."

"No, I mean you're just in time to meet Kalpana. Just a minute- here she comes now."

A young woman with a fashionably western short haircut, hipster jeans, and a tight, red T-shirt approached us. She wore a stopwatch around her neck on a lanyard, and carried a clipboard.

She was about twenty-six years old.

"Hello," I said when Lisa introduced us. "Is that your rig outside? The broadcast vans, and all the cables? Are you shooting a movie?"

"Supposed to be, yaar," she replied in the exaggerated vowels of the Bombay accent that I loved and found myself unconsciously imitating. "The director has gone off somewhere with one of our dancers. It's meant to be a secret, yaar, but the whole damn set is talking about it. We've got a forty-five minute break.

Although, mind you, that's about ten times as long as our guy will need, from what all I'm told about his prowess."

"Okay," I suggested, smacking my hands together. "That gives us time for lunch."

"Fuck lunch, let's get stoned first, yaar," Kalpana demurred.

"Have you got any hash?"

"Yeah," I shrugged. "Sure."

"Did you bring a car?"

"I'm on a Bullet."

"Okay, let's use my car. It's in the car park."

We left the hotel, and sat in her new Fiat to smoke. While I prepared the joint, she told me that she was an assistant to the producer of that and several other films. One of her duties was to oversee the casting of minor roles in the films. She'd subcontracted the task to a casting agent, but he was experiencing difficulty in finding foreigners to fill the small, non-speaking, decorative roles.

"Kalpana got talking about this at dinner last week," Lisa summed up when Kalpana began to smoke. "She told me that her guys couldn't find foreigners to play the parts in the movies-you know, the people at a disco or a party scene or, like, British people, in the time of the British Raj and like that. So... I thought of you." "U-huh."

"It would be a great help if you could get the goras for me when we need them," Kalpana said, offering me what seemed to be a well-practised leer. Practised or not, it was damned effective.

"We provide a cab to bring them to the shoot and take them home again. We give them a full lunch during the break. And we pay about two thousand rupees a day, per person. We pay that to _you, plus a bonus commission per head. What you pay them, well, it's up to you. Most of them are happy to do it for nothing, and are real surprised, you know, when they find out we actually pay them to be in the movies."

"Whaddaya say?" Lisa asked me, her eyes gleaming through the rose filter of her stone.

"I'm interested."

My mind was trawling through the possible lateral benefits in the arrangement. Some of them were obvious. The moviemakers were a fairly affluent crowd of frequent flyers who might need black market dollars and documents, from time to time. It was clear to me, as well, that the casting job was important to Lisa. On its own, that was reason enough for me to get involved. I liked her, and I was glad that she wanted to like me.