Gregory David Roberts - Shantaram

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.

Somehow, that thought left me clean and clear. What I felt, instead of fear, was hope that he would live. It was over, and finished, and I never wanted to see him again; but as I watched him ride into that valley of white shadows I hoped he would live.

I prayed he would be safe. I prayed my heartbreak into him, and I loved him. I loved him.

Men wage wars for profit and principle, but they fight them for land and women. Sooner or later, the other causes and compelling reasons drown in blood and lose their meaning. Sooner or later, death and survival clog the senses. Sooner or later, surviving is the only logic, and dying is the only voice and vision. Then, when best friends die screaming, and good men maddened with pain and fury lose their minds in the bloody pit, when all the fairness and justice and beauty in the world is blown away with arms and legs and heads of brothers and sons and fathers, then, what makes men fight on, and die, and keep on dying, year after year, is the will to protect the land and the women.

You know that's true when you listen to them, in the hours before they go into battle. They talk about home, and they talk about the women they love. And you know it's true when you watch them die. If he's near the earth or on the earth in the last moments, a dying man reaches out for it, to squeeze a grasp of soil in his hand. If he can, he'll raise his head to look at the mountain, the valley, or the plain. If he's a long way from home, he'll think about it, and he'll talk about it. He'll talk about his village, or his home town, or the city where he grew up. The land matters, at the end. And at the very last, he won't scream of causes. At the very last, he'll murmur or he'll cry out the name of a sister or a daughter or a lover or a mother, even as he speaks the name of his God. The end mirrors the beginning. In the end, it's a woman, and a city.

Three days after Khaderbhai left the camp, three days after I watched him ride away from us through the soft new snow, sentries at the southern lookout on the Kandahar side of the camp shouted that men were approaching. We rushed to the southern edge to see a lumpy confusion of shapes, perhaps two or three human figures, struggling up the steep slope. Several of us reached for binoculars in the same instant and trained them on the spot. I made out one man crawling, inching his way up the slope on his knees, and dragging two prone figures. After a few moments of study I recognised the powerful shoulders, the bowed legs, and the distinctive grey-blue fatigues. I handed the binoculars to Khaled Ansari and bounded over the edge in a sliding run.