Gregory David Roberts - Shantaram

"And what's our slogan? Khader's slogan?"

They looked at one another, and smiled.

"Saatch aur Himmat." I spoke it aloud for them. "Truth and Courage. I know a lot of guys who'd like Chuha's slogan. They'd think it was clever and funny. And it sounds ruthless, so they'd think it was tough. But I don't like it. I like Khader's."

At the sound of an Enfield engine, I looked up to see Abdullah park his bike outside the chai shop and wave to me. It was time for me to go.

I'd spoken the truth, as I saw it, and I meant every word, but in my own heart of hearts I knew that Sanjay's argument, although not better, would turn out to be stronger than mine. The Walidlalla gang under Chuha was the future of all the mafia councils, in a sense, and we all knew it. Walid was still the head of the council that bore his name, but he was old and he was ill. He'd ceded so much power to Chuha that it was the younger don who ruled. Chuha was aggressive and successful, and he gained new ground by conquest or coercion every few months. Sooner or later, if Salman didn't agree to merge with Chuha, that expansion would come to open conflict, and there would be a war.

I hoped, of course, that Khader's council, under Salman, would win. But I knew that, if we did win, it would be impossible to claim Chuha's territory without also absorbing his trade in heroin, women, and porn. It was the future, and it was inevitable. There was simply too much money in it. And money, if the pile gets high enough, is something like a big political party: it does as much harm as it does good, it puts too much power in too few hands, and the closer you come to it the dirtier you get. In the long run, Salman could walk away from the fight with Chuha, or he could defeat him and become him. Fate always gives you two choices, Scorpio George once said: the one you should take, and the one you do.

"But hey," I said, standing to leave, "it's got nothing to do with me. And frankly, I don't really give a damn one way or the other. My ride is here. I'll see you guys later."

I walked out, with Sanjay's protests and his friends' laughter rattling above the clatter of cups and glasses.

"Bahinchudh! Gandu!" Sanjay shouted. "You can't fuck up my rave like that and then walk out, yaar! Come back here!"

As I approached him, Abdullah kick-started the bike and straightened it from the side stand, ready to ride.

"You're in a hurry for your workout," I said, settling myself onto the saddle of the bike behind him. "Relax. No matter how fast we get there, I'm still going to beat you, brother."

For nine months, we'd trained together at a small, dark, sweaty, and very serious gym near the Elephant Gate section of Ballard Pier. It was a goonda's gym set up by Hussein, the one-armed survivor of Khader's battle with the Sapna assassins. There were weights and benches, a judo mat, and a boxing ring. The smell of man-sweat, both fresh and fouled into the stitching of leather gloves and belts and turnbuckles, was so eye-wateringly rancid that the gym was the only building in the city block that rats and cockroaches spurned. There were bloodstains on the walls and the wooden floor, and the young gangsters who trained there accumulated more wounds and injuries in a workout week than the emergency ward of a city hospital on a hot Saturday night.

"Not today," Abdullah laughed over his shoulder, pulling the bike into a faster lane of traffic. "No fighting today, Lin. I am taking you for a surprise. A good surprise!" "Now I'm worried," I called back. "What kind of surprise?"

"You remember when I took you to see Doctor Hamid? You remember that surprise?"

"Yeah, I remember."

"Well, it is better than that. Much better."

"U-huh. Well, I'm still not very relaxed about it. Gimme another hint."

"You remember when I sent you the bear, for hugging?"

"Kano, sure, I remember."

"Well, it is much better than that!"

"A doctor and a bear," I called out above the growl of the engine. "There's a lot of space between them, brother. One more hint."

"Ha!" he laughed, coming to a stop at a set of traffic lights. "I will say to you this-the surprise is so good that you will forgive me for all that you suffered when you thought I was dead."

"I do forgive you, Abdullah."

"No, Lin brother. I know you do not forgive me. I have too many bruises, and I am too much sore from our boxing and karate."

It wasn't true: I never hit him as hard as he hit me. Although he was healing well, and he was very fit, he'd never fully recovered the uncanny strength and charismatic vitality he'd known before the police shooting. And when he removed his shirt to box with me, the sight of his scarred body-it was as if he'd been savaged by the claws of wild animals and burned with hot iron brands- always made me pull my punches. Still, I never admitted that to _him.

"Okay," I laughed. "If that's the way you're gonna play it, I don't forgive you!"

"But when you see this surprise," he called out, laughing with me, "you will forgive me completely, with a full heart. Now, come on! Stop asking me about it, and tell me, what did Salman say to Sanjay about that pig-that Chuha?"

"How did you know that's what we were talking about?"

"I can see the look in Salman's face," he shouted back. "And Sanjay, he told me, this morning, that he wants to ask Salman- again-to make business with Chuha. So, what did Salman say?"

"You know the answer to that one," I replied a little more quietly as we stopped in traffic.

"Good! Nushkur'Allah." Thanks be to God. "You really hate Chuha, don't you?"

"I don't hate him," he clarified, moving off with the flow of cars. "I just want to kill him."

We were silent for a while, breathing the warm wind and watching the black business unfold on the streets we'd both roamed so often. There were a hundred large and small scams and deals going down around us every minute, and we knew them all.

When we found ourselves twisted into a knot of traffic behind a stalled bus, I looked along the footpath and noticed Taj Raj, a pickpocket who usually worked the Gateway area near the Taj Mahal Hotel. He'd survived a machete attack years before that had all but severed his neck. The wound caused him to speak in a rattling whisper, and his head was set at such an ill-balanced angle that when he wagged it to agree with someone he almost fell over. He was working the stumble-fall-pilfer game with his friend Indra serving as the stumbler. Indra, known as the Poet, spoke almost all of his sentences in rhyming couplets. They were deeply moving in their beauty, for the first few stanzas, but always found their way into sexual descriptions and allusions so perverse and abhorrent that strong, wicked men winced to hear them. Legend had it that Indra had once recited his poetry through a microphone during a street festival, and had cleared the entire Colaba Market of shoppers and traders alike. Even the police, it was said, had shrunk back in horror until exhaustion overcame the Poet, and then they'd rushed him as he paused for breath. I knew both men, and liked them, though I never let them get closer than an arm's stretch from my pockets. And sure enough, as the bus finally grumbled to life and the traffic began to ease forward, I watched Indra pretending to be blind-not his best performance, but good enough-and stumbling into a foreigner. And Taj Raj, the helpful passer-by, assisted both of them to their feet, and relieved the foreigner of his burdensome wallet.

"Why?" I asked, when we were moving through free space again.

"Why what?"

"Why do you want to kill Chuha?"

"I know he had a meeting... with the men from Iran," Abdullah shouted over his shoulder. "People say it was just business- Sanjay, he says it was just business. But I think more than business. I think he work with them, against Khader Khan. Against us. For that reason, Lin."