Gregory David Roberts - Shantaram

And it kept me busy, breaking laws for a living: so busy that I managed to hide most of what I felt from the heart that was feeling it. Everything moved quickly after that meeting at the Mocambo. Farid found new premises within a week. The two-story building, only a short walk from the floating mosque, Haji Ali, had been a records office for a branch of the Bombay Municipal Corporation. When the BMC had moved to larger, more modern offices, they'd left most of the old benches, desks, storage cupboards, and shelves behind as stock fittings. They were well suited to our needs, and I spent a week supervising a team of cleaners and labourers, who dusted and polished every surface while moving the furniture around to make way for the machinery and light-tables from Ghani's basement.

Our men loaded that specialist equipment onto a large, covered truck and delivered it to the new premises late at night. The street was unusually quiet as the heavy truck backed up to the double folding doors of our new factory. But alarm bells and the heavier clang of fire-engine bells jangled in the distance. Standing beside our truck, I looked along the deserted street in the direction of the frantic sound.

"It must be a big fire," I muttered to Sanjay, and he laughed out loud.

"Farid started a fire," Salman said, answering for his friend.

"We told him we didn't want anyone watching us move this stuff into the new place, so he started the fire as a diversion. That's why the street is so empty. Everybody who is awake has gone to the fire."

"He burned down a rival company," Sanjay laughed. "Now we are officially in the real estate business because our biggest rivals have just closed down, due to fire damage. We start our new real estate office not far from here tomorrow. And tonight, no curious fuckers are here to see us move our stuff into your new workshop.

Farid killed two birds with one match, na?"

So, while fire and smoke singed the midnight sky, and bells and sirens railed about a kilometre away, we directed our men as they moved the heavy equipment into the new factory. And Krishna and Villu went to work almost at once.

In the months that I'd been away, Ghani had followed my suggestion to push the focus of the operation laterally into the production of permits, certificates, diplomas, licences, letters of credit, security passes, and other documents. It was a booming trade in the booming economy of Bombay, and we often worked through the dawn to satisfy the demand. And the business was generational: as licensing authorities and other bodies modified their documents in response to our forgeries, we dutifully copied and then counterfeited them again, at additional cost.

"It's a kind of Red Queen contest," I said to Salman Mustaan when the new passport factory had been running for six diligent months.

"Lai ka Rani?" he asked. A Red Queen?

"Yeah. It's a biology thing. It's about hosts, like human bodies, and parasites, like viruses and such. I studied it when I was running my clinic in the zhopadpatti. The hosts-our bodies-and the viruses-any bug that makes us sick-are locked in a competition with each other. When the parasite attacks, the host develops a defence. Then the virus changes to beat that defence, so the host gets a new defence. And that keeps on going. They call it a Red Queen contest. It's from the story, you know, Alice in Wonderland." "I know it," Salman answered. "We did it at school. But I never understood it."

"That's okay-nobody does. Anyway, the little girl, Alice, she meets this Red Queen, who runs incredibly fast but never seems to get anywhere. She tells Alice that, in her country, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. And that's like us with the passport authorities, and the licensing boards, and the banks all over the world. They keep changing the passports and other documents to make it harder for us. And we keep finding new ways to fake them. And they keep changing the way they make them, and we keep finding new ways to fake them and forge them and adapt them for ourselves. It's a Red Queen contest, and we all have to run real fast just to stand still."

"I think you're doing better than standing still," he asserted.

His tone was quiet but adamant. "You've done a damn fine job, Lin. The ID stuff is deadly-it's a real big market. They can't get enough. And it's good work. So far, all our guys who've used your books have gone through without any problems, yaar. As a matter of fact, that's why I've called you to have lunch with us today. I've got a surprise for you-kind of a present, like, and I'm sure you're going to like it. It's a way of saying thanks, yaar, for the great job you've been doing."

I didn't look at him. We were walking quickly, side by side, along Mahatma Gandhi Road toward the Regal Circle roundabout on a hot, cloudless afternoon. Where the footpath was dogged with shoppers halting at the tabletop street stalls, we walked on the road with a slow, unceasing stream of traffic behind and beside us. I didn't look at Salman because I'd come to know him well enough during those six months to be sure he was embarrassed by the praise he'd felt moved to lavish on me. Salman was a natural leader but, like many men who have the gift of command and the instinct to rule, he was deeply troubled by every expression of the leadership art. He was, at heart, a humble man, and that humility made him an honourable man.

Lettie had once said that she found it strange and incongruous to hear me describe criminals, killers, and mafiosi as men of honour. The confusion, I think, was hers, not mine. She'd confused honour with virtue. Virtue is concerned with what we do, and honour is concerned with how we do it. You can fight a war in an honourable way-the Geneva Convention exists for that very reason-and you can enforce the peace without any honour at all. In its essence, honour is the art of being humble. And gangsters, just like cops, politicians, soldiers, and holy men, are only ever good at what they do if they stay humble.

"You know," he remarked, as we moved to the wider footpath opposite the cloisters of the university buildings, "I'm glad it didn't work out with your friends-the ones you wanted to help you with the passports, right at the start."

I frowned, and remained silent, keeping pace with his rapid step.

Johnny Cigar and Kishore had refused to join me in the passport factory, and it had shocked and disappointed me. I'd assumed that they would jump at the chance to make money-to make more money with me than either of them had ever dreamed of making alone. I'd never anticipated the saddened and offended expressions that closed their smiles when they understood, at last, that I was offering them nothing more than the golden opportunity to commit crimes with me. It had never occurred to me that they wouldn't want to do it. It had never occurred to me that they would refuse to work with criminals, and for criminals.

I remembered turning away from their stony, closed, embarrassed smiles that day. I remembered the question that had knotted into a fist in my mind, right behind the eyes: Was I so far out of touch with the thoughts and feelings of decent men? The question still rankled six months later. The answer still stared back at me from the mirrored windows of the shops we passed as we walked.

"If those guys of yours had worked out," Salman continued, "I wouldn't have put Farid with you. And I'm damn glad that I did put him with you. He's a much happier guy now. He's a much more relaxed kind of guy. He likes you, Lin."

"I like him, too," I replied quickly, smiling through my frown.

And it was true. I did like Farid, and I was glad that we'd become close friends.

Farid, the shy but capable youngster I'd met on my first visit to Khader's mafia council more than three years before, had toughened up to a hard, fearless, angry man whose sense of loyalty assumed the full measure of his young life. When Johnny Cigar and Kishore rejected my offers of work, Salman had put Farid and the Goan, Andrew Ferreira, to work with me. Andrew had been genial and talkative, but he'd moved only reluctantly from the company of his young gangster friends, and we hadn't become close. Farid, however, had spent most days and many nights with me, and we liked and understood one another.