Gregory David Roberts - Shantaram

"No. She is alive. And she is still there, so they say. But her power is destroyed. She has nothing. She is nothing. She is a beggar. Her servants are searching the streets for scraps of food to bring to her while she waits for the building to come down.

She is finished, Lin."

"Not quite. Not yet."

I moved to the door of his apartment, and he ran to join me. It was the fastest I'd ever seen him move, and I smiled at the strangeness of it.

"Please, Lin, will you not reconsider this action? We can sit here, together, and drink a bottle or two, non? You will calm down."

"I'm calm enough now," I replied, smiling at his concern for me.

"I don't know... what I'm going to do. But I have to close the door on this, Didier. I can't just... let it go. I wish I could.

But there's too much that's-I don't know-tied up in it, I guess."

I couldn't explain it to him. It was more than just revenge-I knew that-but the web of connections between Zhou, Khaderbhai, Karla, and me was so sticky with shame and secrets and betrayals that I couldn't bring myself to face it clearly or talk about it to my friend. "Bien," he sighed, reading the determination in my face. "If you must go to her, then I will come with you."

"No way-" I began, but he cut me off with a furious gesture of his hand.

"Lin! I am the one who told you of this... this horrible thing she did to you. Now I must go with you, or I will be responsible for all that happens. And you know, my friend, that I hate responsibility almost as much as I hate the police."

Didier Levy was the worst pillion passenger I've ever known. He held on to me so tightly, and with such rigid tensity, that it was difficult to steer the bike. He howled as we approached cars, and shrieked when we sped up to pass them. On critical, sweeping turns he wriggled in terror, trying to straighten the bike from its necessary lean into the curve. Every time I stopped the bike at a traffic signal, he put both feet down to the ground to stretch his legs and moan about the cramps in his hips. Every time I accelerated away, he dragged his feet on the road and fidgeted for several seconds until he found the footrests. And when taxis or other cars ventured too close to us, he kicked out at them or waved his fist in frantic outrage. By the time we reached our destination, I calculated that the danger faced during a thirty-minute ride in fast traffic with Didier was roughly equivalent to a month under fire in Afghanistan.

I pulled up outside the factory run by my Sri Lankan friends Villu and Krishna. Something was wrong. The signs outside had changed, and the double front doors were wide open. I went up the steps and leaned inside to see that the passport workshop was gone, replaced by an assembly line producing garlands of flowers.

"There is something wrong?" Didier asked as I climbed back on the bike and kicked the starter.

"Yeah. We have to make another stop. They've moved it. I'll have to see Abdul to find out where the new workshop is."

"Alors," he whined, squeezing me as tightly as if we were sharing a parachute. "The nightmare, it goes on!"

Minutes later I left him with the bike near the entrance to Abdul Ghani's mansion. The watchman at the street door recognised me, and snapped his hand up in a theatrical salute. I put a twenty rupee note in his other hand as he opened the door, and I stepped into the cool, shadowed foyer to be greeted by two servants. They knew me well, and led me upstairs with wide, friendly smiles and a little mime-show of comments on the length of my hair and the weight I'd lost. One of the men knocked on the door of Abdul Ghani's large study, and waited with his ear to the door.

"Ao!" Ghani called from within. Come!

The servant entered, closing the door behind him, and returned a few moments later. He wagged his head at me and opened the door wide. I walked inside, and the door closed. Brilliant sunshine blazed at the high, arched windows. Shadows reached in spikes and claws across the polished floor. Abdul was sitting in a wing chair that faced the window, and only his plump hands were visible, steepled together like sausages in a butcher's window.

"So it's true."

"What's true?" I asked, walking around the chair to look at him.

I was shocked to see how the months, the nine months since I'd seen him, had aged Khader's old friend. The thick hair was grey to white, and his eyebrows were frosted with silver. The fine nose was pinched by deep lines that swept past the curve of his mouth to a sagging jaw. His lips, once the most sumptuously sensual I'd seen in Bombay, were as split and cracked as Nazeer's had been in the snow mountains. The pouches beneath his eyes drooped past the peak of his cheekbones and reminded me, with a shiver, of those that had dragged down the eyes of the madman Habib. And the eyes-the laughing, golden, amber eyes-were dull, and drained of the soaring joys and vain deceits that once had shone in his passionate life.

"You are here," he replied in the familiar Oxford accent, without looking at me. "And that is the truth. Where is Khader?"

"Abdul, I'm sorry-he's dead." I answered at once. "He... he was killed by the Russians. He was trying to reach his village, on the way back to Chaman, to deliver some horses."

Abdul clutched at his chest and sobbed like a child, mewling and moaning incoherently as the tears rolled fat and freely from his large eyes. After a few moments he recovered, and looked up at me.

"Who survived with you?" he asked, his mouth agape.

"Nazeer... and Mahmoud. And a boy named Ala-ud-Din. Only four of us." "Not Khaled? Where is Khaled?"

"He... he went out into the snow on the last night, and he never came back. The men said they heard shooting, later, from a long way off. I don't know if it was Khaled they were shooting at. I ... I don't know what happened to him."

"Then it will be Nazeer..." he muttered.

The sobbing spilled over again, and he plunged his face into his fleshy hands. I watched him uncomfortably, not knowing what to do or say. Since the moment that I'd cradled Khader's body in my arms on the snowy slope of the mountain, I'd refused to face the fact of his death. And I was still angry with Khader Khan. So long as I held that anger before me like a shield, loving Khader and grieving for him were deep and distant wonders of my heart.

So long as I was angry, I could fight off the tears and miserable longing that made Ghani so wretched. So long as I was angry, I could concentrate on the job at hand-information about Krishna, Villu, and the passport workshop. I was on the point of asking him about them when he spoke again.

"Do you know what it cost us-apart from his... his unique life - Khader's hero curse? Millions. It cost us millions to fight his war. We've been supporting it, in one way and another, for years.

You might think we could afford it. The sum is not so great, after all. But you're wrong. There is no organisation that can support such an insane hero curse as Khader's. And I couldn't change his mind. I couldn't save him. The money didn't mean anything to him, don't you see? You can't reason with a man who has no sense of money and its... its value. It's the one thing all civilised men have in common, don't you agree? If money doesn't mean anything, there is no civilisation. There is nothing."

He trailed off into indecipherable mumbles. Tears rolled into the little rivers they found on his cheeks, and dropped through the yellow light into his lap.

"Abdulbhai," I said, after a time.

"What? When? Is it now?" he asked, terror suddenly bright in his eyes. His lower lip stiffened in a cruel curve of malice I'd never seen or even imagined in him before that moment.