Gregory David Roberts - Shantaram

The Taj had experienced such floods in the surrounding streets many times. The hotel was built upon a tall platform of bluestone and granite blocks, with ten marble steps leading up to each wide entrance. The floodwaters were deep that year-they reached to the second step from the top-and cars were floating, drifting helplessly, and bumping together near the wall surrounding the great arch of the Gateway of India monument. We steered the boat directly to the steps of the main entrance. The foyer and doorways were crowded with people: rich businessmen, watching their limousines bubble and drift into the rain; women in expensive local and foreign designer dresses; actors and politicians; and fashionable sons and daughters.

Karla stepped forward as if she'd been expecting me. She accepted my hand, and stepped into the punt. I threw the cape around her shoulders as she sat in the centre of the boat, and handed her the cap. She slipped it on with a raffish tilt of the cap's peak, and we set off. Vinod sent us in a loop toward the Gateway Monument. As we entered its magnificent, vaulted chamber, he began to sing. The monument produced a spectacular acoustic. His love song echoed, and rang the bell in every heart that heard him.

Vinod brought us to the taxi stand at the Radio Club Hotel. I reached out to help Karla from the boat, but she jumped to the footpath beside me, and we held on to one another for a moment.

Her eyes were a darker green beneath the peak of the cap. Her black hair glistened with raindrops. Her breath was sweet with cinnamon and caraway seed.

We pulled apart, and I opened the door of a taxi. She handed me the cap and the cape, and took a seat in the back of the cab. She hadn't spoken a single word since I'd arrived with the boat. Then she simply addressed the driver.

"Mahim," she said. "Challo!" Mahim area. Let's go! She looked at me once more as the taxi drew away from the kerb.

There was a command or a demand in her eyes. I couldn't decide what it was. I watched the cab speed away. Vinod and Shantu watched it with me, and clapped their hands on my shoulders. We lifted Vinod's boat back onto the roof of the taxi. As I took my seat beside Shantu, reaching out with my left arm to hold the long boat on the roof, I glanced up to see a face in the crowd.

It was Rajan, Madame Zhou's eunuch servant. He was staring at me.

His face was a gargoyle mask of malevolence and hatred.

That face remained with me all the way back to the kholi settlement, but when we unloaded the boat, and Shantu agreed to join Vinod and me for dinner, I let the image of Rajan's malice melt into my memory. I ordered food from a local restaurant and it was delivered to us there, on the beach, steaming hot in metal containers. We spread the containers out on an old piece of canvas sail, and sat beneath a wide plastic awning to eat.

Vinod's parents, wife, and five children took their places around the edge of the canvas sheet beside Shantu and me. Rain continued to fall, but the air was warm, and a faint breeze from the bay slowly stirred the humid evening. Our shelter on the sandy beach beside the many long boats looked out to the rolling sea. We ate chicken byriani, malai kofta, vegetable korma, rice, curried vegetables, deep fried pieces of pumpkin, potato, onion, and cauliflower, hot buttered naan bread, dhal, papadams, and green mango chutney. It was a feast, and the delight that spilled from the eyes of the children, while they ate their fill, put starlight in our smiles as we watched them.

When night fell, I rode back to Colaba's tourist beat in a cab. I wanted to take a room for a few hours at the India Guest House. I wasn't worried about the C-Form at the hotel. I knew that I wouldn't have to sign the register, and Anand wouldn't include me in his list of guests. The arrangement we'd agreed on months before-the same one that applied to most of the cheaper hotels in the city-allowed me to pay an hourly rent, directly to him, so that I could use the shower or conduct private business in one of the rooms from time to time. I wanted to shave. I wanted to spend a good half hour under a shower, using too much shampoo and soap. I wanted to sit in a white-tiled bathroom where I could forget the cholera, and scrape and scrub the last few weeks off my skin.

"Oh, Lin! So glad to see you!" Anand muttered through clenched teeth as I walked into the foyer. His eyes were glittering with tension, and his long, handsome face was grim. "We have a problem here. Come quick!"

He led me to a room off the main corridor. A girl answered the door and spoke to us in Italian. She was distraught and dishevelled. Her hair was messed, and matted with lint and what looked like food. Her thin nightdress hung askew, revealing the hand-span of her ribs. She was a junkie, and she was stoned almost to sleep, but there was a numb, somnolent panic in her pleading.

On the bed there was a young man sprawled with one leg over the foot of the bed. He was naked to the waist, and his trousers were open at the front. One boot was discarded and the other was still on his left foot. He was about twenty-eight years old. He was dead.

No pulse. No heartbeat. No breathing. The overdose had thrown his body down the long black well, and his face was as blue as the sky at 5 p.m. on the darkest day of winter. I hauled his body up onto the bed, and put a roll of sheet behind his neck.

"Bad business, Lin," Anand said tersely. He stood with his back to the closed door, preventing anyone from entering.

Ignoring him, I began cardio-pulmonary resuscitation on the young man. I knew the drill too well. I'd pulled junkies out of overdoses, dozens of them, when I was a junkie myself. I'd done it fifty, eighty times in my own country, pressing and breathing life into the living dead. I pressed at the young man's heart, willing it to beat, and breathed his lungs to their capacity for him. After ten minutes of the procedure he stuttered, deep in his chest, and coughed. I rested on my knees, watching to see if he was strong enough to breathe on his own. The breathing was slow, and then slower, and then it stopped in a hollow sigh. The sound was as flat and insentient as the air escaping from a fissure in layers of geyser stone. I began the CPR again. It was exhausting work, dragging his limp body back up the whole length of the well with my arms and my lungs.

The girl went under twice while I worked on her boyfriend. Anand slapped at her, and shook her awake. Three hours after I stepped into the hotel, Anand and I left the room. We were both soaked through with sweat, our shirts as wet as if we'd been standing in the rain that drummed and rattled beyond the windows. The couple was awake and sullen and angry with us, despite the girl's earlier plea for help, because we'd disturbed the pleasure of their stone. I closed the door on them, knowing that some time soon, someone else in that city, or some other, would close a door on them forever. Every time junkies go down the well they sink a little deeper, and it's just that little bit harder to drag them out again.

Anand owed me one. I showered and shaved, and accepted the gift of a freshly washed and ironed shirt. We sat in the foyer then, and shared a chai. Some men like you less the more they owe you.

Some men only really begin to like you when they find themselves in your debt. Anand was comfortable with his obligation, and his handshake was the kind that good friends sometimes use in place of a whole conversation.

When I stepped down to the street, a taxi pulled in to the kerb beside me. Ulla was in the back seat.

"Lin! Please, can you get in for some time?"

Worry, and what might've been dread, pushed her voice almost to a whine. Her lovely, pale face was trapped in a fearful frown.

I climbed in beside her, and the taxi pulled out slowly from the kerb. The cab smelled of her perfume and the beedie cigarettes that she constantly smoked.