Gregory David Roberts - Shantaram

Prabaker went to buy three beedie cigarettes from Kumar's shop counter, and lit them with the same match, holding them in one hand and burning the ends with the other. He passed one each to Didier and me, and sat down again, smoking contentedly.

"Ah, yes, there is another piece of news-Kavita has taken a new job at a newspaper, The Noonday. She is a features writer. It is a job with much prestige, I understand, and a fast track to a sub-editor's position. She won it in a field of many talented candidates, and she is very happy."

"I like Kavita," I felt moved to say.

"You know," Didier offered, staring at the glowing end of his beedie and then looking up at me, genuinely surprised, "so do I."

We laughed again, and I deliberately included Prabaker in the joke. Parvati watched us from the corners of her smouldering eyes.

"Listen," I asked, seizing the momentary pause in our conversation, "does the name Hassaan Obikwa mean anything to you?"

Didier's mention of Maurizio's new, ten-thousand-dollar Rolex had reminded me of the Nigerian. I fished the gold-and-white business card from my shirt pocket, and handed it over.

"But, of course!" Didier replied. "This is a famous Borsalino.

They call him The Body Snatcher, in the African ghetto."

"Well, that's a good start," I muttered, a wry smile twisting my lips. Prabaker slapped at his thigh, and doubled over with near hysterical laughter. I put a hand on his shoulder to calm him down.

"They say that when Hassaan Obikwa snatches a body away, not even the devil himself can find it. They are never again seen by living men. Jamais! How do you come to know him? How did you get his card?"

"I sort of, bumped into him, earlier today," I answered, retrieving the card and slipping it into my pocket.

"Well, be careful, my dear friend," Didier sniffed, clearly hurt that I hadn't provided the details of my encounter with Hassaan.

"This Obikwa is like a king, a black king, in his own kingdom.

And you know the old saying-a king is a bad enemy, a worse friend, and a fatal family relation."

Just then a group of young men approached us. They were labourers from the construction site, and most of them lived on the legal side of the slum. They'd all passed through my small clinic during the last year, most of them wanting me to patch up wounds they'd received in work accidents. It was payday at the site, and they were flushed with the excited optimism that a full pay packet puts into young, hard-working hearts. They shook hands with me, each in turn, and paused long enough to see the new round of chai and sweet cakes they'd bought for us delivered to our table. When they left, I was grinning as widely as they were.

"This social work seems to suit you," Didier commented through an arch smile. "You look so well and so fit-underneath the bruises and scratches, that is. I think you must be a very bad man, in your heart of hearts, Lin. Only a wicked man would derive such benefit from good works. A good man, on the other hand, would simply be worn out and bad tempered."

"I'm sure you're right, Didier," I said, still grinning. "Karla said you're usually right, about the wrong you find in people."

"Please, my friend!" he protested, "You will turn my head!"

The sudden crash of many drums exploded, thumping music directly outside the chai shop. Flutes and trumpets joined the drums, and a wild, raucous music began. I knew the music and the musicians well. It was one of the jangling popular tunes that the slum musicians played whenever there was a festival or a celebration. We all went to the open front of the shop. Prabaker stood on a bench beside us to peer over the shoulders of the crowd.

"What is it? A parade?" Didier asked as we watched a large troupe slowly walk past the shop.

"It's Joseph!" Prabaker cried, pointing along the lane. "Joseph and Maria! They're coming!"

Some distance away, we could see Joseph and his wife, surrounded by relatives and friends, and approaching us with ceremonially slow steps. In front of them was a pack of capering children, dancing out their unself-conscious and near-hysterical enthusiasm. Some of them adopted poses from their favourite movie dance scenes, and copied the steps of the stars. Others leapt about like acrobats, or invented jerky, exuberant dances of their own.

Listening to the band, watching the children, and thinking of Tariq-missing the boy already-I remembered an incident from the prison. In that other world-within-a-world, back then, I moved into a new prison cell and discovered a tiny mouse there. The creature entered through a cracked air vent, and crept into the cell every night. Patience and obsessional focus are the gems we mine in the tunnels of prison solitude. Using them, and tiny morsels of food, I bribed the little mouse, over several weeks, and eventually trained it to eat from the edge of my hand. When the prison guards moved me from that cell, in a routine rotation, I told the new tenant-a prisoner I thought I knew well-about the trained mouse. On the morning after the move, he invited me to see the mouse. He'd captured the trusting creature, and crucified it, face down, on a cross made from a broken ruler. He laughed as he told me how the mouse had struggled when he'd tied it by its neck to the cross with cotton thread. He marvelled at how long it had taken to drive thumbtacks into its wriggling paws.

Are we ever justified in what we do? That question ruined my sleep for a long time after I saw the tortured little mouse. When we act, even with the best of intentions, when we interfere with the world, we always risk a new disaster that mightn't be of our making, but that wouldn't occur without our action. Some of the worst wrongs, Karla once said, were caused by people who tried to change things. I looked at the slum children dancing like a movie chorus and capering like temple monkeys. I was teaching some of those children to speak, read, and write English. Already, with just the little they'd learned in three months, a few of them were winning work from foreign tourists. Were those children, I wondered, the mice that fed from my hand? Would their trusting innocence be seized by a fate that wouldn't and couldn't have been theirs without me, without my intervention in their lives?

What wounds and torments awaited Tariq simply because I'd befriended and taught him?

"Joseph beat his wife," Prabaker explained as the couple drew near. "Now the people are a big celebration."

"If they parade like this when a man beats his wife, what parties they must throw when one is killed," Didier commented, his eyebrows arched in surprise.

"He was drunk, and he beat her terribly," I said, shouting above the din. "And a punishment was imposed on him by her family and the whole community."

"I gave to him a few good whacks with the stick my own self!"

Prabaker added, his face aglow with happy excitement.

"Over the last few months, he worked hard, stayed sober, and did a lot of jobs in the community," I continued. "It was part of his punishment, and a way of earning the respect of his neighbours again. His wife forgave him a couple of months ago. They've been working and saving money together. They've got enough, now, and they're leaving today on a holiday."

"Well, there are worse things for people to celebrate," Didier decided, permitting himself a little shoulder and hip roll in time to the throbbing drums and snake-flutes. "Oh, I almost forgot. There is a superstition, a famous superstition attached to that Hassaan Obikwa. You should know about it."

"I'm not superstitious, Didier," I called back over the thump and wail of the music.

"Don't be ridiculous!" he scoffed. "Everyone in the whole world is superstitious."

"That's one of Karla's lines," I retorted.

He frowned, pursing his lips as he strained his memory to recall.