Shantaram (98 page)

I wasn't listening. My mind was all angry arrows, whistling backward to a much earlier time and place. I was searching for Karla-for the Karla I knew and loved-but every moment with her began to give up its secret and its lie. I remembered the first time I'd met her, the first second, how she'd reached out to stop me from walking in front of the bus. It was on Arthur Bunder Road, on the corner near the Causeway, not far from the India Guest House. It was the heart of the tourist beat. Was she waiting there, hunting for foreigners like me, looking for useful recruits who could work for Khader when he needed them? Of course she was. I'd done it myself, in a way, when I'd lived in the slum. I'd loitered there, in the same place, looking for foreigners just off the plane who wanted to change money or buy some charras.

Nazeer walked up to join us. Ahmed Zadeh was a few paces behind him. They stood together with Khaderbhai and Khaled, facing me.

Nazeer screwed his face into a scowl, and scanned the sky from south to north, calculating the minutes before the snowstorm hit us. The packing for the return journey was complete and double-checked, and he was anxious to leave.

"And the help you gave me with the clinic?" I asked, feeling sick, and knowing that if I unlocked my knees and let my legs relax, they would crumple and fold beneath me. When Khader didn't speak, I repeated the question. "What about the clinic? Why did you help me with the clinic? Was that part of your plan? Of _this plan?"

A freezing wind blew into the broad plateau, and we all shuddered, unsteadied, as the force of it whipped at our clothes and faces. The sky darkened swiftly as a dirty, grey tide of cloud crossed the mountains and tumbled on toward the distant plain and the shimmering, dying city.

"You did good work there," he replied.

"That's not what I asked you."

"I don't think this is the right time to talk of such things, Lin."

"Yes, it is," I insisted.

"There are things you will not understand," he stated, as if he'd thought it through many times.

"Just tell me."

"Very well. All of the medicine that we brought here to this camp, all of the antibiotics and penicillin for the war, was supplied to us by Ranjit's lepers. I had to know if it was safe to use here."

"Ah, Jesus..." I moaned.

"So I used the opportunity, the strange fact that you, a foreigner, with no connection to a family or an embassy, set up a clinic in my own slum-I took that chance to test the supplies on the people in the zhopadpatti. I had to be sure, you understand, before I brought the medicines into the war."

"For God's sake, Khader!" I snarled.

"I had to be-"

"Only a fuckin' maniac would do that!"

"Take it easy, Lin!" Khaled snapped back at me. The other men tensed on either side of Khader, as if they feared that I might attack him. "You're way outta line, man!"

"I'm out of line!" I spluttered, feeling my teeth chatter, and struggling to make my numb limbs obey my mind. "I'm out of fuckin' line! He uses the people in the slum as guinea pigs or lab rats or whatever the fuck, to test his antibiotics-using me to trick them into doing it, because they believed in me-and I'm the one who's out of line!"

"No-one got hurt," Khaled shouted back at me. "The medicines were all good, and the work you did there was good. People got well."

"We should get out of the cold, now, and talk about it," Ahmed Zadeh put in quickly, hoping to conciliate. "Khader, you'll have to wait for this snow to clear before you leave. Let's get inside."

"You must understand," Khader said firmly, ignoring him. "It was a decision of war-twenty lives risked against the saving of a thousand, and a thousand risked to save a million. And you must believe me, we knew that the medicines were good. The chance of Ranjit's lepers supplying impure medicines was very low. We were almost completely sure that the medicine was safe when we gave it to you."

"Tell me about Sapna." There it was, out in the open, my deepest secret fear about him, and about my closeness to him. "Was that your work, too?"

"I was not Sapna. But the responsibility for his killings does come back to me. Sapna killed for me-for this cause. And if you want me to tell you the whole of the truth, I did make a great benefit from Sapna's bloody work. Because of Sapna, because he existed, and because of their fear of him, and because I made a commitment to find him and stop him, the politicians and the police allowed me to bring guns and other weapons through Bombay to Karachi and Quetta, and to this war. The blood Sapna spilled- it did oil the wheels for us. And I would do this again. I would use Sapna's killings, and I would do more killings, with my own hands, if it would help our cause. We have a cause, Lin, all of us here. And we fight and we live and perhaps we will also die for that cause. If we win this fight, we will change the whole of history, forever, from this time, and in this place, and with these battles. That is our cause-to change the whole world. What is your cause? What is your cause, Lin?"

I was so cold, as the first flakes whirled about us, that I shivered and shook and couldn't stop my jaw from shuddering.

"What about... what about Madame Zhou... when Karla got me to pretend I was an American. Was that your idea? Was that your plan?"

"No. Karla has her own war with Zhou, and she had her own reasons. But I approved of her plan to use you, to get her friend out of the Palace. I wanted to see if you could do it. I had the thought, even then, that you would one day be my American in Afghanistan. And you did well, Lin. Not many people do so well against Zhou in her own Palace."

"One last thing, Khader," I stammered. "When I was in jail... did you have anything to do with that?"

There was a hard silence, the kind of deadly, breathing silence that insinuates itself into the memory more deeply than the sharpest sound.

"No," he replied at last. "But the truth is that I could have taken you out of there, even after the first week, if I chose to do it. I knew about it almost at once. And I had the power to help you, but I did not. Not when I could have done it."

I looked at Nazeer and Ahmed Zadeh. They stared back evenly. My eyes shifted to Khaled Ansari. He returned my stare with an anguished and angrily defiant grimace that pulled his whole face into the jagged lash of the scar that divided his features.

They all knew. They all knew that Khader had left me in there.

But it was okay. Khader didn't owe me anything. He wasn't the one who put me there. He didn't have to get me out. And he did, in the end: he did get me out of jail in the end, and he did save my life. It was just that I'd taken so many beatings, and other men had taken beatings for me, trying to get a message out to him... and even if we'd succeeded, even if we'd managed to get a message to him, Khader would've ignored it, and left me there, until he was ready to act. It was just that all the hope had been so empty, so meaningless. And if you prove to a man how vain his hope is, how vain his hoping was, you kill the bright, believing part of him that wants to be loved.

"You wanted to be sure that... that I'd be... so grateful to you. So you... you left me there. Was that it?"

"No, Lin. It was just unfortunate, just your kismet at that time.

I had an arrangement with Madame Zhou. She was helping us to meet with the politicians, and get favours from one of the generals from Pakistan. He was a... contact... of hers. He was, in truth, Karla's special client. She was the one who first brought him, that Pakistani general, to Madame Zhou. And it was a critical connection. He was critically important to my plans. And she was so very angry with you, Madame Zhou, that nothing less than prison would satisfy her. She wanted to have you killed in there. As soon as my work was done, at the earliest day, I sent your friend Vikram for you. You must believe me when I tell you that I never wanted to hurt you. I like you. I-" He stopped suddenly because I put my hand on the holster at my hip. Khaled, Ahmed, and Nazeer tensed at once and raised their hands, but they were too far away to reach me in a single springing leap, and they knew it.

"If you don't turn around and walk away now, Khader, I swear to God, I swear to God, I'll do something that'll finish us both. I don't care what happens to me, just so long as I don't have to look at you, or speak to you, or listen to you, ever again."

Nazeer took a slow, almost casual step, and stood in front of Khader, shielding him with his body.

"I swear to God, Khader. Right now, I don't care much if I live or die."

"But, we're leaving now, for Chaman, when the snow clears,"

Khader replied, and it was the only time I ever heard his voice waver and falter.

"I mean it. I'm not going with you. I'm staying here. I'll go on my own. Or I'll stay here. It doesn't matter. Just... get... the fuck... out of my sight. It's making me sick to my stomach to _look at you!"

He stood his ground a moment more, and I could feel the urge to take the gun out and shoot him: an urge that was drowning me in cold, shivering waves of revulsion and rage.

"You must know this," he said at last, "whatever wrong I have done, I did for the right reasons. I never did more to you than I thought you could bear. And you should know, you must know, that I always felt for you as if you were my friend, and my beloved son."

"And you should know this," I answered him, the snow thickening on my hair and shoulders. "I hate you with the whole of my heart, Khader. All your wisdom, that's just what it comes down to, isn't it? Putting hate in people. You asked me what my cause is. The only cause I've got is my own freedom. And right now that means being free of you, forever."

His face was stiff with cold. Snow had settled on his moustache and beard, and it was impossible to read his expression. But his golden eyes gleamed through the grey-white mist, and the old love was in them still. Then he turned, and he was gone. The others turned with him, and I was alone in the storm with my hand frozen and trembling on the holster. I snapped the safety clip off, pulled the Stechkin out, and cocked it quickly and expertly, just as he'd taught me. I held it at my side, pointed at the ground.

The minutes passed-the killing minutes, when I might've gone after him and killed him, and myself. And I tried to drop the gun then, but it wouldn't fall from my numbed and icy fingers. I tried to prise the gun free with my left hand, but all my fingers were so cramped that I gave it up. And in the whirling white snow-dome that my world had become I lifted my arms to the white rain, as I once had done beneath the warm rain in Prabaker's village. And I was alone.

When I'd climbed the wall of the prison all those years before, it was as if I'd climbed a wall on the rim of the world. When I slid down to freedom I lost the whole world that I knew, and all the love it held. In Bombay I'd tried, without realising it, to make a new world of loving that could resemble the lost one, and even replace it. Khader was my father. Prabaker and Abdullah were my brothers. Karla was my lover. And then, one by one, they were all lost. Another whole world was lost.

A clear thought came to me, unbidden, and surging in my mind like the spoken words of a poem. I knew why Khaled Ansari was so determined to help Habib. I suddenly knew with perfect understanding what Khaled was really trying to do. He's trying to save himself, I said, more than once, feeling my numb lips tremble with the words, but hearing them in my head. And I knew, as I said the words and thought them, that I didn't hate Khader or Karla: that I couldn't hate them.

I don't know why my heart changed so suddenly and so completely.

It might've been the gun in my hand-the power it gave me to take life, or let it be-and the instincts, from my deepest nature, that had prevented me from using it. It might've been the fact of losing Khaderbhai. For, as he walked away from me, I knew in my blood-the blood I could smell in the thick, white air, the blood I could taste in my mouth-that it was over. Whatever the reason, the change moved through me like monsoon rain in the steel bazaar, and left no trace of the swirling, murderous hate I'd felt only moments before.

I was still angry that I'd put so much of a son's love into Khader, and that my soul, against the wishes of my conscious mind, had begged for his love. I was angry that he'd considered me expendable, to be used as a means to achieve his ends. And I was enraged that he'd taken away the one thing in my whole life- my work as the slum doctor-that might've redeemed me, in my own mind if nowhere else, and might've gone some way to balance all the wrong I'd done. Even that little good had been polluted and defiled. The anger in me was as hard and heavy as a basalt hearthstone, and I knew it would take years to wear down, but I couldn't hate them.

They'd lied to me and betrayed me, leaving jagged edges where all my trust had been, and I didn't like or respect or admire them any more, but still I loved them. I had no choice. I understood that, perfectly, standing in the white wilderness of snow. You can't kill love. You can't even kill it with hate. You can kill _in-love, and loving, and even loveliness. You can kill them all, or numb them into dense, leaden regret, but you can't kill love itself. Love is the passionate search for a truth other than your own; and once you feel it, honestly and completely, love is forever. Every act of love, every moment of the heart reaching out, is a part of the universal good: it's a part of God, or what we call God, and it can never die.

Afterwards, when the snow cleared, I stood a little apart from Khaled to watch Khaderbhai and Nazeer and their men leave the camp with the horses. The great Khan, the mafia don, my father, sat straight-backed in his saddle. He held his standard, furled about the lance in his hand. And he never once looked back.

My decision to separate myself from Khaderbhai and to stay with Khaled and the others in the camp had increased the danger for me. I was far more vulnerable without the Khan than I was in his company. It was reasonable to assume, watching him leave, that I wouldn't make it back to Pakistan. I even said those words to myself: I'm not gonna make it... I'm not gonna make it...

But it wasn't fear that I felt as lord Abdel Khader Khan rode into the light-consuming snow. I accepted my fate, and even welcomed it. At last, I thought, I'm gonna get what I deserve.