Gregory David Roberts - Shantaram

"It was Lisa," I said, glancing unconsciously over my shoulder at the bedroom window on the first floor of the Taj. "Do you... want to see her?"

"No," he smiled. "I did meet someone-Farid's cousin, Ameena. She has been looking after me for more than a year. She is a good girl. We want to be married."

"Get the fuck outta here!" I spluttered, more shocked by his intention to marry than I was by his survival of the killing fusillade.

"Yes," he grinned, reaching out to give me an impulsive hug. "But come on, the others are waiting. Challo."

"You go ahead," I answered him, smiling to match his happy grin.

"I'll be with you soon."

"No, come, Lin," he urged. "Come now."

"I need a minute," I insisted. "I'll be there... in a minute."

He hesitated a moment more but then smiled, nodded his head, and walked back through the domed arch toward the Taj Hotel.

Evening dimmed the afternoon's bright halo. A haze of dusty smoke and vapour misted the horizon, sizzling soundlessly, as if the sky at the distant wall of the world was dissolving into the waters of the bay. Most of the boats and ferries were safely tied to their mooring posts at the dock beneath me. Others rose and fell and rose again, swaying on the secure tethers of their sea anchors. High tide pushed the swollen waves against the long stone wall where I stood. Here and there along the boulevard, frothy plumes, like gasps of effort, slapped up, over, and onto the white footpaths. Strollers walked around the intermittent fountains, or ran laughing through the sudden boom and spray. In the little seas of my eyes, those tiny blue-grey oceans, waves of tears pushed hard against the wall of my will.

Did you send him? I whispered to the dead Khan, my father.

Assassin grief had pushed me to that wall where the street boys sold heroin. And then, when it was almost too late, Abdullah had appeared. Did you send him to save me?

The setting sun, that funeral fire in the sky, seared my eyes, and I looked away to follow the last flares of cerise and magenta streaming out and fading in the ocean-mirrored sapphire of the evening. And staring out across the rile and ruffle of the bay, I tried to fit my feelings within a frame of thought and fact.

Strangely, weirdly, I'd re-found Abdullah and re-lost Khaderbhai on the same day, in the same hour. And the experience of it, the fact of it, the inescapably fated imperative of it, helped me to understand. The sorrowing I'd shunned had taken so long to find me because I couldn't let him go. In my heart, I still held him as tightly as I'd hugged Abdullah only minutes before. In my heart, I was still there on the mountain, kneeling in the snow and cradling the handsome head in my arms.

As the stars slowly reappeared in the silent endlessness of sky, I cut the last mooring rope of grief, and surrendered to the all sustaining tide of destiny. I let him go. I said the words, the sacred words: I forgive you...

And it was good. And it was right. I let the tears fall. I let my heart break on my father's love, like the tall waves beside me that hurled their chests against the wall, and bled onto the wide, white path.

The word mafia comes from the Sicilian word for bragging. And if you ask any serious man who commits serious crimes for a living, he'll tell you it's just that-the boasting, the pride-that gets most of us in the end. But we never learn. Maybe it's not possible to break laws without boasting about it to someone.

Maybe it's not possible to be an outlaw without being proud in some way. Certainly, in those last months of the old mafia, the brotherhood that Khaderbhai had designed, steered, and ruled, there was plenty of boasting and no less pride. But it was the last time that any of us in that corner of Bombay's underworlds of crime could've said, with complete honesty, that we were proud to be gangsters.

Khader Khan had been dead for almost two years, but his precepts and principles still dominated the day-to-day operations of the mafia council he'd founded. Khader had hated heroin, and he'd refused to deal in the drug or permit anyone else but desperately addicted street junkies to trade in it within the areas he'd controlled. Prostitution had also appalled him. He'd seen it as a business that injured women, degraded men, and blighted the community where it occurred. The hemisphere of his influence had extended to all the streets, parks, and buildings across several square kilometres. Within that little kingdom, any man or woman who hadn't kept their involvement with prostitution and pornography to very low, very discreet, levels of activity had risked his condign punishment. And that situation prevailed under the new council headed by Salman Mustaan.

Old Sobhan Mahmoud, still the nominal head of the council, was gravely ill. In the years since Khader died, he'd suffered two strokes that had left his speech and much of his movement severely impaired. The council moved him into Khader's beach house in Versova-the same house where I'd gone through cold turkey with Nazeer. They ensured that the aged don had access to the best medical treatments, and arranged for his family and his servants to attend him.

Nazeer slowly groomed Khader's nephew, young Tariq, for what most on the council assumed would be a leading role. Despite the boy's pedigree, his maturity, and his unusually solemn demeanour-there was no-one, man or boy, whose dour, fervent intensity reminded me so much of Khaled-Tariq was deemed to be too young to claim a council position or even to attend the council meetings. Instead, Nazeer gave him duties and responsibilities that more gradually acquainted him with the world he might one day command. In all practical senses, Salman Mustaan was the don, the new Khan, the leader of the council and the ruler of Khaderbhai's mafia. And Salman, as everyone who knew him testified, was Khaderbhai's man, body and soul. He governed the actions of the clan as if the grey-haired lord was still there, still alive, advising and cautioning him in private sessions every night.

Most of the men supported Salman unquestioningly. They understood the principles involved, and agreed that they were worth upholding. In our area of the city, the words goonda and gangster weren't an insult. Local people knew that our branch of the mafia did a better job than the police at keeping heroin and salacious crimes from their streets. The police, after all, were susceptible to bribes. Indeed, Salman's mafia clan found itself in the unique position of bribing the police-the same cops who'd just been paid off by pimps and pushers-to look away whenever they had to run a recalcitrant heroin dealer into a brick wall, or take a mash hammer to a pornographer's hands.

Old men in the district nodded to one another, and compared the relative calm on their streets with the chaos that tumbled and trawled through the streets of other districts. Children looked up to the young gangsters, sometimes adopting one as a local hero. Restaurants, bars, and other businesses welcomed Salman's men as preservers of peace and comparatively high moral standards. And the informing rate in the areas of his control, the amount of unsolicited information supplied to the police-a sure indicator of public popularity or displeasure-was lower than in any other area across the whole seething sprawl of Bombay. We had pride, and we had principle, and we were almost the men of honour that we believed ourselves to be. Still, there were a few grumbles of complaint within the clan, and some council meetings hosted fierce, unresolved arguments about the future of the group. The heroin trade was making other mafia councils rich. New smack millionaires flaunted their imported cars, designer clothes, and state-of-the-art electronic gadgets at the most exclusive and expensive venues in the city.