Gregory David Roberts - Shantaram

I knew his history well, piecing it together from stories and confidences he'd shared when we'd worked out together at Abdullah's gym. When Salman had announced that he had to leave school to work longer hours in support of his family, a teacher who knew Abdel Khader Khan asked the don to intercede on his behalf. Salman became one of Khaderbhai's scholarship children- like my adviser, in the slum clinic, Doctor Hamid-and it was decided that he should be groomed toward a career as a lawyer.

Khader enrolled Salman in a Catholic college run by Jesuit priests, and every day the boy from the slum dressed in a clean, white uniform and took his place among the sons of the rich elite. It was a good education-Salman's spoken English was eloquent, and his general knowledge roved through history and geography to literature, science, and art. But there was a wildness in the boy and a restless hunger for excitement that even the strong arms and the hard canes of the Jesuits couldn't tame.

While Salman struggled with the Jesuits, Sanjay had found a job in Khaderbhai's gang. He worked as a runner, carrying messages and contraband between mafia offices throughout the city. In the first weeks of that service, Sanjay was stabbed during a fight with men from a rival gang who'd tried to rob him. The boy fought back and evaded his attackers, delivering his contraband parcel to Khader's collection centre, but his wound was serious and he took two months to recover from it. Salman, his lifelong friend, blamed himself for not being with Sanjay, and he left school immediately. He begged the Khan for permission to join his friend and work with him as a runner. Khader agreed, and from that day the boys worked together at every crime in the council's catalogue.

They were just sixteen then, at the beginning. They both turned thirty in the weeks before our meeting in the Mocambo. The wild boys had become hard men who lavished gifts on their families, and lived with a certain gaudy, aggressive cool. Although they'd supported their sisters into prestigious marriages, both men were unmarried, in a country where that was unpatriotic at the least, and sacrilegious at worst. They'd refused to marry, Salman told me, because of a shared belief or presentiment that they would die violently and they would die young. The prospect didn't frighten or worry them. They saw it as a reasonable tradeoff: excitement and power and wealth enough to provide for their families, balanced against short lives that rushed into the dead end of a knife or a gun. And when Nazeer's group won the gangster war against Ghani's group, the two friends found themselves on the new council; young mafia dons in their own right.

"I think Ghani did try to warn Khaderbhai what was in his heart,"

Salman said thoughtfully, his voice clear and his English rounded to the nearest decibel point. "He talked about that hero curse thing for a good year or so before he decided to create Sapna."

"Fuck him, yaar," Sanjay snarled. "Who the fuck was he to be giving Khaderbhai warnings? Who the fuck was he to get us all in the shit with Patil, so he had to have his guys cut up old Madjid? And then, after everything, he went and sold everybody out to the fuckin' Pakistani cops, yaar. Fuck him. If I could dig the madachudh up and kill him again, I'd do it today. I'd do it every day. It would be my fuckin' hobby, like."

"Who was the real Sapna?" I asked. "Who actually did the killings for Abdul? I remember Khader told me once, after Abdullah was killed, that he found the real Sapna. He said he killed him. Who was he? And why did he kill him, if he was working for him in the first place?"

The two younger men turned to face Nazeer. Sanjay asked him a few questions in Urdu. It was an act of respect toward the older man: they knew the facts as well as Nazeer did, but they deferred to his recollection of them and included him in the discussion. I understood most of Nazeer's reply, but I waited for Sanjay to translate.

"His name was Jeetendra. Jeetudada, they called him. He was a gun and machete guy from Delhi-side. Ghani brought him down here, with four other guys. He actually kept them in five-star hotels, like, the whole fuckin' time-two years, man! Bahinchudh!

Complaining about Khader spending money on the mujaheddin and the war and all, and meanwhile he was keeping these psycho fuckers in five-star hotels for two fuckin years!"

"Jeetudada got drunk when Abdullah was killed," Salman added. "It really got to him, you know, that everyone was saying Sapna was dead. He'd been doing the Sapna thing for nearly two years, and it had started to twist his brain. He started to believe his own - or Ghani's-bullshit."

"Stupid fuckin' name, yaar," Sanjay cut in. "It's a girl's name, Sapna. It's a fuckin' girl's name. It's like me calling myself fuckin' Lucy, or some such. What kind of a bad fucker calls himself a girl's name, yaar?"

"The kind who kills eleven people," Salman answered, "and almost gets away with it. Anyway, he got completely drunk the night Abdullah was killed and everybody was saying that Sapna was dead.

And he started shooting his mouth off, telling anyone who would listen that he was the real Sapna. They were in a bar in the President Hotel. Then he starts shouting that he was ready to tell it all-who was behind the Sapna killings, you know, and who planned it all and paid for it all."

"Fuckin' gandu," Sanjay growled, using the slang word for arsehole. "I never met one of these psycho types who wasn't a fuckin' squealer, yaar."

"Lucky for us, there were mostly foreigners in the place that night, so they didn't know what he was talking about. One of our guys was there, in the bar, and he told Jeetu to shut the fuck up. Jeetudada said he wasn't afraid of Abdel Khader Khan because he had plans for Khader, as well. He said Khader was going to end up in pieces, just like Madjid. Then he starts waving a gun around. Our guy called Khader right away. And the Khan, he went and did that one himself. He went with Nazeer and Khaled, and Farid, and Ahmed Zadeh, and young Andrew Ferreira, and some others."

"I missed that one, fuck it!" Sanjay cursed. "I wanted to fix that maakachudh from the first day, and especially after Madjid.

But I was on a job, in Goa. Anyway, Khader fixed them up."

"They found them near the car park of the President Hotel.

Jeetudada and his guys put up a fight. There was a big shoot-out.

Two of our guys got hit. One of them was Hussein-you know, he runs the numbers in Ballard Pier now. That's how he lost his arm-he took a shotgun blast, both barrels of a crowd-pleaser, a sawn-off, and it tore his arm right off his body. If Ahmed Zadeh hadn't wrapped him up and dragged him out of there, and off to hospital, he would've bled to death, right there in the car park. All four of them who were there-Jeetudada and his three guys-got wasted.

Khaderbhai put the last bullets into their heads himself. But one of those Sapna guys wasn't in the car park, and he got away. We never tracked him down. He went back to Delhi, and he disappeared from there. We haven't heard anything since."

"I liked that Ahmed Zadeh," Sanjay said quietly, dispensing what was, for him, extravagantly high praise with a little sigh of sorrowing recollection.

"Yeah," I agreed, remembering the man who'd always looked as though he was searching for a friend in a crowd; the man who'd died with his hand clenched in mine. "He was a good guy."

Nazeer spoke again, grunting the words at us in his wrathful style as if they were threats.

"When the Pakistani cops were tipped off about Khaderbhai,"

Sanjay translated, "it was obvious that it had to be Abdul Ghani behind it."

I nodded my agreement. It was obvious. Abdul Ghani was from Pakistan. His connections there went deep, and high. He'd told me about it more than once when I'd worked for him. I wondered why I hadn't seen it at the time, when the cops raided our hotel in Pakistan. My first thought was that I'd simply liked him too much to suspect him, and that was true. More to the point, perhaps, was how flattered I'd been by his attention: Ghani had been my patron on the council, after Khader himself, and he'd invested time, energy, and affection in our friendship. And there was something else that might have distracted me in Karachi: my mind had been filled with shame and revenge-I remembered that much from the visit to the mosque when I'd sat beside Khaderbhai and Khaled to hear the Blind Singers. I remembered reading Didier's letter and deciding, in that shifting, yellow lamplight, that I would kill Madame Zhou. I remembered thinking that and then turning my head to see the love in Khader's golden eyes. Could that love and that anger have smothered something so important, something so obvious, as Ghani's treachery? And if I'd missed that, what else had I missed? "Khader wasn't supposed to make it out of Pakistan," Salman added. "Khaderbhai, Nazeer, Khaled-even you. Abdul Ghani thought it was his chance to take out the whole council in one shot-all the guys on the council who weren't with him. But Khaderbhai had his own friends in Pakistan, and they warned him, and you made it out of the trap. I think Abdul must've known he was finished from that day on. But he held his peace, and he didn't make any moves here. He was hoping, I guess, that Khader, and the whole lot of you, might be killed in the war-"