Gregory David Roberts - Shantaram

"Thank you, Prabu," I replied, my sarcasm evaporating as it was uttered.

He needn't have concerned himself with sparing me the shock. The closer I came to my hut, the more often I was informed that a foreigner was waiting to see me. Hello, Lin baba! There's a gora in your house, waiting for you!

We arrived at my hut to find Didier sitting in the shade of the doorway on a stool, and fanning himself with a magazine.

"It's Didier," Prabaker informed me, grinning happily.

"Yes. Thank you, Prabu," I turned to Didier, who rose to shake hands. "This is a surprise. It's good to see you."

"And good to see you, my dear friend," Didier replied, smiling despite the distressing heat. "But, I must be honest, you look a little worse for wear, as Lettie would say."

"It's nothing. A misunderstanding, that's all. Give me a minute to wash up."

I stripped off my torn, bloody shirt, and poured a third of a bucket of clean water from the clay matka. Standing on the flattened pile of stones beside my hut, I washed my face, arms, and chest. Neighbours passed me as I washed, smiling when they caught my eye. There was an art to washing in that way, with no wasted drop of water and no excess of mess. I'd mastered that art, and it was one of the hundred little ways my life imitated theirs, and folded into the lotus of their loving, hoping struggle with fate.

"Would you like a chai?" I asked Didier as I slipped on a clean, white shirt in the doorway of my hut. "We can go to Kumar's."

"I just had one full cup," Prabaker interjected before Didier could reply. "But one more chai will be okay, for the friendship sake, I think so."

He sat down with us in the rickety chai shop. Five huts had been cleared to make space for a single, large room. There was a counter made from an old bedroom dresser, a patchwork plastic roof, and benches for the customers made from planks resting precariously on piles of bricks. All the materials had been looted from the building site beside the slum. Kumar, the chai shop owner, fought a running guerrilla war with his customers, who tried to pilfer his bricks and planks for their own houses.

Kumar came to take our order himself. True to the general rule of slum life that the more money one made, the more poverty-stricken one had to look, Kumar's appearance was more dishevelled and ragged than the meanest of his customers. He dragged up a stained wooden crate for us to use as a table. Appraising it with a suspicious squint, he slapped at the crate with a filthy rag and then tucked the cloth into his singlet.

"Didier, you look terrible," I observed, when Kumar left to prepare our tea. "It must be love."

He grinned back at me, shaking his head of dark curls and raising the palms of his hands.

"I am very fatigued, it is true," he said, managing a shrug of elaborate self-pity. "People do not understand the truly fantastic effort required in the corruption of a simple man. And the more simple the man, the more effort it requires. They do not realise what it takes out of me to put so much decadence into a man who is not born to it."

"You might be making a rod for your own back," I mocked.

"Each thing in its own time," he replied, smiling thoughtfully.

"But you, my friend, you look very well. Only a little, how shall I say it, lonely for information. And to that end, Didier is here. I have all the latest news and gossip for you. You know the difference between news and gossip, don't you? News tells you what people did. Gossip tells you how much they enjoyed it."

We both laughed, and Prabaker joined in, laughing so loudly that everyone in the chai shop turned to look at him.

"Well then," Didier continued, "where to start? Oh yes, Vikram's pursuit of Letitia proceeds with a certain bizarre inevitability.

She began by loathing him-"

"I think loathing is bit strong," I argued.

"Ah, yes, perhaps you're right. If she loathes me-and it is completely certain that she does, the dear and sweet English Rose - then her feeling for Vikram was indeed something less. Shall we say detest?"

"I think detest would cover it," I agreed.

"Et bien, she began by detesting him but, through the persistence of his devoted romantic attentions, he has managed to arouse in her what I can only describe as an amiable revulsion."

We laughed again, and Prabaker slapped at his thigh, hooting with such hilarity that every head turned toward him. Didier and I inspected him with quizzical looks of our own. He responded with an impish smile, but I noticed that his eyes darted away quickly to his left. Following the glance, I saw his new love, Parvati, preparing food in Kumar's kitchen. Her thick, black plait of hair was the rope by which a man might climb to heaven. Her petite figure-she was tiny, shorter even than Prabaker-was the perfect shape of his desire. Her eyes, when she turned in profile to look at us, were black fire.

Looking over Parvati's shoulder, however, was her mother, Nandita. She was a formidable woman, three times the combined width and weight of her petite daughters, Parvati and Sita, and she glowered at us, her expression managing to combine greed for our custom with contempt for our male sex. I smiled at her, and wagged my head. Her smile, in return, was remarkably similar to the fierce grimace that Maori warriors affect to intimidate their enemies.

"In his last episode," Didier continued, "the good Vikram hired a horse from the handlers on Chowpatty Beach, and rode it to Letitia's apartment on Marine Drive to serenade her outside her window."

"Did it work?"

"Unfortunately non. The horse left a package of merde on the front pathway-during an especially moving part of the song, no doubt-and the many other residents of the apartment building expressed their outrage by pelting the poor Vikram with rotting food. Letitia, it was noticed, threw more offensive missiles, and with a more deadly aim, than any of the neighbours."

"C'est l'amour," I sighed.

"Exactly-merde and bad food, c'est l'amour," Didier agreed quickly. "I do think that I must involve myself in this romance, if it is to succeed. The poor Vikram-he is a fool for love, and Lettie despises a fool above all else. But things are much more successful for Maurizio in the last time. He had some business venture with Modena, Ulla's paramour, and he is in the chips, as our dear Lettie would say. He is now a significant dealer, in Colaba."

I forced my face to remain impassive while jealous thoughts of hand- some Maurizio, flushed with success, spiked their way into my mind. The rain started again, and I glanced outside to see people running, hitching up their pants and their saris to avoid the many puddles.

"Just yesterday," Didier went on, carefully tipping his tea from the cup into the saucer, and sipping it from the saucer as most of the slum-dwellers did, "Modena arrived in a chauffeured car, at Leopold's, and Maurizio is wearing a ten-thousand-dollar Rolex watch. But..."

"But?" I prompted, when he paused to drink.

"Well, there is terrible risk in their business. Maurizio is not always... honourable... in his business dealings. If he should upset the wrong people, there will be great violence."

"And what about you?" I asked, changing the subject because I didn't want Didier to see the serpent of spite rising in me when he spoke of the trouble that might be finding its way to Maurizio. "Aren't you flirting with danger yourself? Your new... interest... is one string short of the full marionette, or so I'm told. He's got a very bad temper, Lettie says, and a hair trigger controlling it."

"Oh, him?" he sniffed dismissively, turning down the corners of his expressive mouth. "Not at all. He is not dangerous. Although he is annoying, and annoying is worse than dangerous, n'est-ce pas? It is easier to live with a dangerous man than an annoying one."