Gregory David Roberts - Shantaram

"Lin!"

"Vikram!"

I stood just in time to receive his flying hug. Holding my shoulders with his arms straight, he looked me over, frowning at the cuts on my head and face.

"Fuck, man, what happened to you?" he asked. His clothes were still black, and still inspired by the cowboy dream, but they were much more subdued and subtle. That was Lettie's influence, I guessed. Although the new, inexcessive look suited him, I was relieved and comforted to see that his beloved hat still hung on his back from the cord at his throat.

"You should see the other guys," I answered, flicking a glance at Didier.

"So why didn't you tell me you're back, man?"

"I only got back today, and I've been kind of busy. How's Lettie?"

"She's great, yaar," he responded cheerily, taking a seat. "She's going into this business thing, this multi-fuckin-media thing, with Karla and her new boyfriend. It's going to be damn good."

I turned my head to look at Didier, who shrugged non-committally and then glared at Vikram with his teeth bared in fury.

"Shit, man!" Vikram apologised, clearly stricken. "I thought you knew. I thought Didier would've told you, yaar."

"Karla is back in Bombay," Didier explained, silencing Vikram with another stern frown. "She has a new man-a boyfriend, she calls him. His name is Ranjit, but he likes everyone to call him Jeet."

"He's not a bad guy," Vikram added, smiling hopefully. "I think you'll like him, Lin."

"Oh, really, Vikram!" Didier hissed, wincing for me.

"It's okay," I said, smiling at each of them in turn.

I caught the eye of our waiter and nodded to him, gesturing for a new round of drinks. We were silent until they arrived and the drinks were poured, and then, with the glasses in the air, I proposed a toast.

"To Karla!" I proposed. "May she have ten daughters, and may they all marry well!"

"To Karla!" the others echoed, clashing glasses and throwing back the drinks. We were sharing our third toast-to someone's pet dog, I think- when Mahmoud Melbaaf walked into the happy, noisy, chattering restaurant and looked at me with eyes that were still up there, on the frozen mountains of the war.

"What happened to you?" he asked quickly, looking at the cuts on my face and head when I rose to greet him.

"Nothing," I smiled.

"Who did this?" he asked more urgently.

"I had a run-in with Madame Zhou's guys," I answered, and he relaxed a little. "Why? What's up?"

"Nazeer told me you would be here," he whispered through a tight, anguished little frown. "I am happy to find you. Nazeer says to you, don't go anywhere. Don't do anything, for some days. There is a war now-a war of the gangs. They fight for Khader's power.

It is not safe. Stay away from the dundah places."

The word dundah, or business, was the slang term we used for all of Khader's black-market operations in Bombay. They'd become targets, somehow.

"What happened? What's it all about?"

"The traitor, Ghani, is dead," he replied. His voice was calm, but his eyes were hard and determined. "The men with him, his men in Khader's gang, will also die."

"Ghani?"

"Yes. Do you have money, Lin?"

"Sure," I muttered, thinking about Abdul Ghani. He was from Pakistan. That had to be it. The connections to the secret police, the Pakistan ISI, must've been his. Of course it was him.

Of course he was the traitor. Of course he was the one who'd tried to have us arrested and killed in Karachi. That's who Khaled had been talking about on the night before the battle: not Abdullah, but Ghani. Abdul Ghani...

"Do you have a place? A safe place?"

"What? Yes."

"Good," he said, shaking my hand warmly. "Then I will see you here, in three days' time, in the day, at one o'clock, Inshallah."

"Inshallah," I responded, and he walked out. His handsome head was high, in his brave, righteous step, and his back was straight.

I sat down again, avoiding the eyes of my friends until I could disguise the dread that I knew they would read in them.

"What is it?" Didier asked.

"Nothing," I lied, shaking my head and faking a smile. I reached for my glass and lifted it to clink against theirs. "Where were we?"

"We were just going to toast Ranjit's dog," Vikram recalled, grinning widely, "but I'd like to include his horse in that toast, if it's not too late."

"You do not know if he has a horse!" Didier objected.

"We don't know if he's got a dog, either," Vikram pointed out, "but that's not stopping us. To Ranjit's dog!"

"Ranjit's dog!" we all replied.

"And his horse!" Vikram added. "And his neighbour's horse!"

"Ranjit's horse!"

"And... horses... in general!"

"And to lovers, everywhere!" Didier proposed.

"And to lovers... everywhere..." I answered.

But somehow, in some way, for some reason, the love had died in me, and I suddenly realised it, and was suddenly sure. It wasn't completely over, my feeling for Karla. It never is completely over. But there was nothing of the jealousy I once would've felt for the stranger Ranjit. There was no rage against him, and no feeling of hurt inspired by her. I felt numbed and empty sitting there, as if the war, and the loss of Khaderbhai and Khaled, and the face-off with Madame Zhou and her twins had poured anaesthetic into my heart.

And there was, instead of pain, a sense of wonder-I could think of no other way to describe what I was feeling-at Abdul Ghani's treachery. And behind that almost spiritual awe there was a dull, throbbing, fatalistic dread. For even then the bloody future his betrayal had forced on us was unfolding and spilling into our lives, like the sudden blossom of a drought-forced rose in a red, falling rush to dry, unyielding earth.

One hour after I'd left Abdul Ghani's mansion to confront Madame Zhou, Nazeer and three of his most trusted men forced the door of the house next to Ghani's and made their way through the long basement workshop that connected the two houses. At about the time that I picked my way through the rubble of Madame Zhou's ruined Palace, Nazeer and his men, wearing black knitted masks, pushed up the trapdoor in Ghani's kitchen and entered the house.

They seized the cook, the yardman, Abdul's two servants, and the Sri Lankan counterfeiters, Villu and Krishna, and locked them in a small room in the basement. As I climbed the blackened stairs of the Palace to the attic and found Madame Zhou, Nazeer crept upstairs to Abdul's grand study and found him sitting in the wing chair, weeping and still. Then, at about the time that I uncurled the knotted fist of my revenge to pity my broken enemy, the drooling Madame, Nazeer avenged himself and Khader Khan by killing the traitor who'd betrayed us all in Pakistan.

Two men held Abdul's arms against the chair. A third man forced his head back and his eyes open. Nazeer removed his mask. Staring into Abdul's eyes, Nazeer stabbed him in the heart. Abdul must've known he had to die. He was sitting there, alone, waiting for his killers. But his scream, they say, came all the way from hell to claim him.

They rolled his body off the chair and onto the polished floor.

Then, as I struggled with Rajan and his twin in the attic across the city, Nazeer and his men used heavy cleavers to hack off Abdul's hands, his feet, and his head. They scattered the pieces of his corpse around the great house, just as Abdul Ghani had ordered the Sapna killers to do with the butchered pieces of loyal old Madjid's body. And as I left the ruined Palace, my heart free and almost at peace for the first time in too many vengeful months, Nazeer and his men released Krishna, Villu, and the servants-all deemed to have had no part in Ghani's treachery-and then left the mansion to hunt down the members of Ghani's faction, and kill them all.