Gregory David Roberts - Shantaram

"Okay," I exhaled, pulling myself together. "Okay. Go on."

"There was this guy," she continued, in a tone that made it clear how serious she considered the subject. "He was the father of one of the kids she used to baby-sit for, when she was a kid herself."

"She told me about it."

"She did? Okay, then you know. And nobody did anything about it.

And it messed her up pretty bad. And then, one day, she got herself a gun, and she went to his house when he was alone, and she shot him. Six times. Two in the chest, she said, and four in the crotch."

"Did they know it was her?"

"She's not sure. She knows she didn't leave any prints there, at the house. And nobody saw her leave. She got rid of the gun. And she scrammed out of there, right out of the country, real fast.

She's never been back, so she doesn't know if there's a sheet on her or not."

I sat back in the chair and let out a long, slow breath. Lisa watched me closely, her blue eyes narrowing slightly and reminding me of the way she'd looked at me on that night, years before, in Karla's apartment.

"Is there any more?"

"No," she answered, shaking her head slowly, but holding my eyes in the stare. "That's it."

"Okay," I sighed, running a hand over my face, and standing to leave. I went to her, and knelt on the bed beside her, with my face close to hers. "I'm glad you told me, Lisa. It makes a lot of things... clearer... I guess. But it doesn't change anything in how I feel. I'd like to help her, if I could, but I can't forget... what happened... and I can't forgive it, either. I wish I could. It'd make things a lot easier. It's bad, loving someone you can't forgive."

"It's not as bad as loving someone you can't have," she countered, and I kissed her.

I rode the elevator down to the foyer alone with the crowd of my mirror selves: beside and behind me, still and silent, not one of them was able to meet my eye. Once through the glass doors, I walked down the marble steps and across the wide forecourt of the Gateway Monument to the sea. Beneath the arched shadow I leaned on the sea wall and looked out at the boats carrying tourists back to the marina. How many of those lives, I wondered, watching the travellers pose for one another's cameras, are happy and carefree and... simply free? How many of them are sorrowing? How many are...

And then the full darkness of that long-resisted grieving closed around me. I realised that for some time I'd been gritting my teeth and that my jaw was cramped and stiff, but I couldn't unlock the muscles. I turned my head to see one of the street boys, someone I knew well, doing business with a young tourist.

The boy, Mukul, sent his eyes left and right, lizard quick, and passed a small, white packet to the tourist. The man was about twenty years old: tall and fit and handsome. I guessed him to be a German student, and I had a good eye. He hadn't been in the city long. I knew the signs. He was new blood, with money to burn and the whole world of experience open to him. And there was a spring in his step as he walked away to join his friends. But there was poison in the packet in his hand. If it didn't kill him outright, in a hotel room somewhere, it would deepen in his life, maybe, as it did once in mine, until it poisoned every breathing second.

I didn't care-not about him or me or anyone. I wanted it. I wanted the drug, just then, more than anything in the world. My skin remembered the satin-flush of ecstasy and the lichen stippled creep of fever and fear. The smell-taste was so strong that I felt myself retching it. The hunger for oblivion, painless, guiltless, and unsorrowing, swirled in me, shivering from my spine to the thick, healthy veins in my arms. And I wanted it: the golden minute in heroin's long leaden night.

Mukul caught my eye and smiled from habit, but the smile twitched and crumbled into uncertainty. And then he knew. He had a good eye, too. He lived on the street, and he knew the look. So the smile returned, but it was different. There was seduction in it- It's right here... I've got it right here... It's good stuff ... Come and get it-and the dealer's tiny, vicious, little sneer of triumph. You're no better than me... You're not much at all ... And sooner or later, you'll beg me for it...

The day was dying. Each jewelled shimmer, dazzling from the waves in the bay, turned from glittering white to pink, and weak, blood red. Sweat ran into my eyes as I stared back at Mukul. My jaws ached, and my lips quivered with the strain of it: the strain of not responding, not speaking, not nodding my head. I heard a voice or remembered it: All you have to do is nod your head, that's all you have to do, and it'll all be _over... And grieving tears boiled up in me, relentless as the gathering tide that slapped against the sea wall. But I couldn't cry them, those tears, and I felt that I was drowning in a sorrow that was bigger than the heart that tried to hold it. I pressed my hands down on the little mountain range of the faceted bluestones on the top of the sea wall, as if I could drive my fingers into the city and save myself by clinging to her.

But Mukul... Mukul smiled, promising peace. And I knew there were so many ways to find that peace-I could smoke it in a cigarette, or chase it on a piece of foil, or snort it, or puff it in a chillum, or spike it into my vein, or just eat it, just swallow it and wait for the creeping numbness to smother every pain on the planet. And Mukul, reading the sweating agony like a dirty page in a dirty book, inched his way closer to me, sliding along the wet stone wall. And he knew it. He knew everything.

A hand touched my shoulder. Mukul flinched as if he'd been kicked, and backed away from me, his dead eyes dwindling to nothing in the burning splendour of the setting sun. And I turned my head to stare into the face of a ghost. It was Abdullah, my Abdullah, my dead friend, killed in a police ambush too many suffering months before. His long hair was cut short and thick like a movie star's. His black clothes were gone. He wore a white shirt and grey trousers with a fashionable cut. And they seemed strange, those different clothes-almost as strange as seeing him standing there. But it was Abdullah Taheri, his ghost, as handsome as Omar Sharif on his thirtieth birthday, as lethal as a big cat prowling, a black panther, and with those eyes the colour of sand in the palm of your hand a half-hour before sunset. Abdullah.

"It is so good to see you, Lin brother. Shall we go inside and drink some chai?"

That was it. Just that.

"Well, I... I can't do that."

"Why not?" the ghost asked, frowning.

"Well, for starters," I mumbled, shielding my eyes from the late afternoon sun with my hand as I stared up at him, "because you're dead."

"I am not dead, Lin brother."

"Yes..."

"No. Did you speak to Salman?"

"Salman?"

"Yes. He arranged it, for me to meet with you, in the restaurant.

It was a surprise."

"Salman... told me... there was a surprise."

"And I am the surprise, Lin brother," the ghost smiled. "You were coming to meet me. He was supposed to be making it a surprise for you. But you left the restaurant. And the others, they have been waiting for you. But you didn't come back, so I went to find you.

Now the surprise is really a shocks."

"Don't say that!" I snapped, remembering something Prabaker had once said to me, and still reeling, still confused.

"Why not?"

"It doesn't matter! Fuck, Abdullah... this is... this is a fuckin' weird dream, man."

"I am back," he said calmly, a little frown of worry creasing his brow. "I am here, again. I was shot. The police. You know about it."

The tone of the conversation was matter-of-fact. The fading sky behind his head, and the passers-by on the street, were unremarkable. Nothing matched the blur and streak of a dream. Yet it had to be a dream. Then the ghost lifted his white shirt to reveal his many wounds, healed and healing into dark-skinned rings, whirls, and thumb-thick gashes.