Gregory David Roberts - Shantaram

"What's the news of Khaderbhai?" one of the men asked.

I looked into his tough young face. His name was Amir. I knew him to be brave and reliable and devoted to the Khan. For the blink of an eye it seemed, incredibly, that he was making a joke about Khader's death, and I felt a quick, angry impulse to stiffen him.

Then I realised that he simply didn't know. How is that possible?

Why don't they know! Instinct told me not to answer his question.

I held my eyes and my mouth in a hard, impassive little smile, and brushed past him to knock at the door. A short, fat, balding man in a white singlet and dhoti opened the door and thrust out his hands at once in a double handshake. It was Rajubhai, controller of the currency collections for Abdel Khader Khan's mafia council. He pulled me into the room, and closed the door. The counting room was the core of his personal and business universe, and he spent twenty out of every twenty four hours there. The thin, faded, pink-white cord across his shoulder, under his singlet, declared that he was a devout Hindu, one of many who worked within Abdel Khader's largely Muslim empire.

"Linbaba! So good to see you!" he said with a happy grin.

"Khaderbhai kahan hain?" Where is Khaderbhai?

I struggled to keep the surprise from my face. Rajubhai was a senior man. He held a seat at the council meetings. If he didn't know that Khader was dead, then nobody in the city would know.

And if Khader's death was still a secret, then Mahmoud and Nazeer must've insisted on the suppression of the news. They hadn't said anything to me about it. I couldn't understand it. Whatever their reasons, I decided to support them and to keep my silence on the matter.

"Hum akela hain," I replied, returning his smile. I'm alone.

It wasn't an answer to his question, and his eyes narrowed on the word.

"Akela..." he repeated. Alone...

"Yes, Rajubhai, and I need some money, fast. I've got a taxi waiting."

"You need dollars, Lin?"

"Dollars nahin. Sirf rupia." Not dollars. Only rupees.

"How much you need?"

"Do-do-teen hazaar," I answered, using the slang phrase two-two three thousand, which always means three.

"Teen hazaar!" he huffed, more from habit than any real concern.

Three thousand rupees was a considerable sum to the street runners, or in the slums, but it was a trifling amount in the context of the black-market currency trade. Rajubhai's office collected a hundred times that much and more every day, and he'd often paid me sixty thousand rupees at a time as my wage and my share of commissions.

"Abi, bhai-ya, abi!" Now, brother, now!

Rajubhai turned his head and gestured, with a twitch of his eyebrows, to one of his clerks. The man handed over three thousand rupees in used but clean hundred-rupee notes. Riffling the small bundle first, from habit, as a double check, Rajubhai handed the notes across. I peeled off two notes to put in my shirt pocket, and pushed the rest inside a deeper pocket in my long vest.

"Shukria, chacha," I smiled. "Main jata hu." Thanks, uncle. I'm going.

"Lin!" he cried, stopping me by grasping at my sleeve. "Hamara beta Khaled, kaisa hain?" How is our son, Khaled?

"Khaled is not with us," I said, struggling to keep my voice and my expression neutral. "He went on a journey, a yatra, and I don't know when we'll see him."

I took the steps two at a time on the way down to the cab, feeling the shock of each jump shudder into my shins. The driver swung out into the traffic at once, and I directed him to a clothing shop that I knew on the Colaba Causeway. One of the sybaritic splendours of Bombay is the limitless variety of relatively inexpensive, well-made clothes constantly changing to reflect the newest Indian and foreign trends. In the refugee camp, Mahmoud Melbaaf had given me a long, blue-serge vest, a white shirt, and coarse brown trousers. The clothes had served for the trip from Quetta, but in Bombay they were too hot and too strange: they drew curious attention to me when I needed the camouflage of current fashion. I chose a pair of black jeans with strong, deep pockets, a new pair of joggers to replace my ruined boots, and a loose, white silk shirt to wear over the jeans. I changed in the dressing room, sliding my knife in its scabbard under the belt of my jeans and concealing it with the shirt.

While waiting at the cashier's desk, I caught sight of myself unexpectedly in an angled mirror that showed my face in three quarter profile. It was a face so hard and unfamiliar that it startled me to recognise it as my own. I remembered the photograph taken by shy Kishmishi, and looked again into the mirror. There was a cold impassiveness in my face-and a determination, perhaps-which hadn't even begun to gleam in the eyes that had stared so confidently into the lens of Khaled's camera. I snatched up my sunglasses and put them on. Have I changed so much? I hoped that a hot shower, and shaving off my thick beard, would soften some of the hard edges. But the real hardness was inside me, and I wasn't sure if it was simply tough and tenacious or if it was something much more cruel.

The cab driver followed my instructions and pulled up near the entrance to Leopold's. I paid him, and stood on the busy Causeway for a minute, staring at the wide doorway of the restaurant where my fated connection to Karla and Khaderbhai had really begun. Every door is a portal leading through time as well as space. The same doorway that leads us into and out of a room also leads us into the past of the room and its ceaselessly unfolding future. People knew that once, deep within the ur-mind, the ur-imagination. You can still find those who decorate doorways, and reverently salute them, in every culture, from Ireland to Japan. I stepped up one, two steps, and reached out with my right hand to touch the doorjamb and then touch my chest, over the heart, in a salaam to fate and a homage to the dead friends and enemies who entered with me.

Didier Levy was sitting in his usual chair, commanding a view of the patrons and of the busy street beyond. He was talking to Kavita Singh. Her eyes were averted, but he looked up and saw me as I approached the table. Our eyes met and held for a second, each of us reading the other's shifting expressions like diviners finding meanings in the magic of scattered bones.

"Lin!" he shouted, hurling himself forward, flinging his arms around me, and kissing me on both cheeks.

"It's good to see you, Didier."

"Bah!" he spat, wiping his lips with the back of his hand. "If this beard is the fashion for holy warriors, I thank whatever powers protect me that I am an atheist, and a coward!"

There was a little more grey, I thought, in the mop of dark curls that brushed the collar of his jacket. The pale blue eyes were a little more tired, a little more bloodshot. Yet the wicked, leering mischief still arched his eyebrow, and the playful sneer I knew so well, and loved, was still there, curling his upper lip. He was the same man, in the same city, and it was good to be home.

"Hello, Lin," Kavita greeted me, pushing Didier aside to give me a hug.

She was beautiful. Her thick, dark brown hair was tousled and awry. Her back was straight. Her eyes were clear. And, as she held me, the casual, friendly touch of her fingers on my neck seemed like such a tender ravishment-after the blood and snow of Afghanistan-that I can still feel it, through all the years since.

"Sit down, sit down!" Didier shouted, waving to the waiters for more drinks. "Merde, I heard that you were dead, but I didn't believe it! It is so good to see you! We shall be famously drunk tonight, non?"

"No," I replied, resisting the pressure he placed on my shoulder.

The disappointment in his eyes moderated my tone, if not my mood.

"It's a little early in the day, and I have to get going. I've got... something to do."