Gregory David Roberts - Shantaram

Tomorrow. We were going to fight our way out. No-one had said it, but I knew that all the others were thinking we would die. They were too cheerful, too relaxed. All the tension and dread of the last weeks had drained from them once we'd made the decision to fight. It wasn't the joyful relief of men who know they're saved.

It was something else-something I'd seen in the mirror, in my cell, on the night before my desperate escape from prison, and something I'd seen in the eyes of the man who'd escaped with me. It was the exhilaration of men who were risking everything, risking life and death, on one throw of the dice. Some time on the next day we would be free, or we would be dead. The same resolution that had sent me over the front wall of a prison was sending us over the ridge, and into the enemy guns: it's better to die fighting than to die like a rat in a trap. I'd escaped from prison, and crossed the world, and crossed the years, to find myself in the company of men who felt exactly as I did about freedom and death.

And still I was afraid: afraid of being wounded, afraid of being shot in the spine and paralysed, afraid of being captured alive and tortured in another prison by yet another prison guard. It occurred to me that Karla and Khaderbhai would've had something clever to say to me about fear. And in thinking that, I realised how remote they were from the moment, and the mountain, and me. I realised that I didn't need their brilliance any more: it couldn't help me. All the cleverness in all the world couldn't stop my stomach from knotting around its prowling fear. When you know you're going to die, there's no comfort in cleverness.

Genius is vain, and cleverness is hollow, at the end. The comfort that does come, if it comes at all, is that strangely marbled mix of time and place and feeling that we usually call wisdom. For me, on that last night before the battle, it was the sound of my mother's voice, and it was the life and death of my friend Prabaker... God give you rest, Prabaker. I still love you, and the grieving, when I think of you, is pinned to my heart and my eyes with bright and burning stars... My comfort, on that freezing ridge, was the memory of Prabaker's smiling face, and the sound of my mother's voice: Whatever you do in life, do it with courage, and you won't go far wrong...

"Here, take one," Khaled said, sliding down beside me to squat on his heels, and offering me one of two half-cigarettes that he held in his bare hand.

"Jesus!" I gawked. "Where'd you get those? I thought we all ran out last week."

"We did," he said, lighting the cigarettes with a small gas lighter. "Except for these. I kept them for a special occasion. I think this is it. I got a bad feeling, Lin. A real bad feeling.

It's inside me, and I can't shake it tonight."

It was the first time that we'd spoken more than the essential word or two since the night that Khader had left. We'd worked and slept side by side, every day and night, but I almost never met his eye, and I'd avoided conversation with him so coldly that he, too, had been silent with me.

"Look... Khaled... about Khader, and Karla... don't feel... I mean, I'm not-"

"No," he interrupted. "You had plenty of reason to be mad. I can see it from your side. I always could. You got a raw deal, and I told Khader that, too, on the night he left. He should've trusted you. It's a funny thing-the guy he trusted most, the only guy in the whole world he really trusted all the way, turned out to be a crazy killer, and the one who sold us all out."

The New York accent, with its Arabic swell, rolled over me like a warm, frothy wave, and I almost reached out to hug him. I'd missed the assurances I'd always found in the sound of that voice, and the honest suffering I saw in the scarred face. I was so glad to have his friendship again that I confused what he'd said about Khaderbhai. I thought, without really thinking at all, that he was talking about Abdullah. He wasn't, and that, too, like a hundred other chances to know all the truth in the one conversation, was lost.

"How well did you know Abdullah?" I asked him.

"Pretty well," he answered, his little smile becoming an asking frown: Where is this going?

"Did you like him?"

"Not really."

"Why not?"

"Abdullah didn't believe in anything. He was a rebel without a cause, in a world that doesn't have enough rebels for the real causes. I don't like-and I don't really trust-people who don't believe in anything."

"Does that include me?"

"No," he laughed. "You believe in a lot of things. That's why I like you. That's why Khader loved you. He did love you, you know.

He told me so, a couple different times."

"What do I believe in?" I scoffed.

"You believe in people," he replied quickly. "That stuff with the slum clinic and all. The story you told the guys tonight, that about the village. You'd forget that shit if you didn't believe in people. That work in the slum, when the cholera went through the place-Khader loved that, what you did then, and so did I.

Shit, for a while there, I think you even had Karla believing, too. You gotta understand, Lin. If Khader had a choice, if there was a better way to do what he had to do, he would've taken it. It all played out the way it had to. Nobody wanted to fuck you over."

"Not even Karla?" I smiled, savouring the last puff of the cigarette and then stubbing it out on the ground.

"Well, maybe Karla," he conceded, laughing the small, sad laugh.

"But that's Karla. I think the only guy she never fucked over was Abdullah."

"Were they together?" I asked, so surprised that I couldn't help the pinch of jealousy that pulled my brows together in a hard, little frown.

"Well, you couldn't say together," he answered evenly, staring into my eyes. "But I was, once. I used to live with her."

"You what?"

"I lived with her-for six months."

"What happened?" I asked, gritting my teeth and feeling stupid for it. I had no right to be angry or jealous. I'd never asked Karla about her lovers, and she'd never asked me about mine.

"You don't know, do you?"

"I wouldn't ask, if I knew."

"She dumped me," he said slowly, "just about the time you came along."

"Ah, fuck, man..."

"It's okay," he smiled.

We were silent for a moment, both of us reeling back through the years. I remembered Abdullah, at the sea wall near the Haji Ali Mosque, on the night that I met him with Khaderbhai. I remembered him saying that a woman had taught him the clever phrase he'd used in English. It must've been Karla. Of course it was Karla.

And I remembered the stiffness that was in Khaled's manner when I first met him, and I realised, suddenly, that he must've been hurting then, and maybe blaming me for it. I saw clearly what it must've taken for him to be as friendly and kind to me as he was at the beginning.

"You know," he added after a while, "you really got to go careful with Karla, Lin. She's... angry... you know? And she's hurt.

She's hurt bad, in all the places that count. They really fucked her up when she was a kid. She's a bit crazy. She did something, in the States, before she came to India. And that fucked her up, too."

"What did she do?"

"I don't know. Something pretty serious. She never told me what it was. We talked around it, if you get my meaning. I think Khaderbhai knew about it because, you know, he was the first one to meet her."

"No, I didn't know that," I answered him, frowning with the thought of how little I knew about the woman I'd loved for so long. "Why... why do you think she never told me about Khaderbhai? I knew her a long time-when we were both working for him-and she didn't say a word. I talked about him, but she never said a word. She didn't mention his name once."

"I think she's just loyal to him, you know? I don't think there's anything against you, Lin. She's just incredibly loyal-well, she was incredibly loyal to him. She thought of him like a father, I think. Her own father died when she was a kid. And her stepfather died when she was still pretty young. Khader came along just in time to save her, so he got to be her father."